51–60 of 150 posts
> imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood Nature always win in the end! Hopefully the plunge in human population can be handled mostly by attrition.
It's sad to me that this is not the top post. It seems that fact is a reflection of the problem at hand. We don't care about the oceans as much as we care about Twitter. :(
The article does not link to any peer review studies to prove it's point, which to me means it's probably bunk, taking a know issue and enlarging it to sensationalise.
And it's sad people fall for this.
The short-term scenario is not good, but from the little I know about aquatic biology/chemistry, it might not be as catastrophical as the article pictures it. Increased CO2 levels should just cause algae/cyanobacteria blooms, which will balance CO2/O2 levels back again and foster primary consumers (solving over-fishing as a bonus). Also, H2CO3 gets buffered by all the Ca/Mg content in the ocean, so I don't think it's…
An interesting corollary to this is the idea that the natural environment is itself unsustainable. For billions of years it has been using up the planets supply of carbon and trapping it in what is now called fossil fuels. If this continues unchecked, we will run out of available carbon and life on this planet will die off. Thankfully, we humans have averted this catastrophe by finding a way to recycle the formerly lost carbon and return it to the environment. If only we had a large number of planets at varying stages of having life (including being long dead).
I hope you like jellyfish.
They talk about the oxygen content falling by 7% by 2100. This makes me wonder: let's assume the worst and earth is headed for a mass extinction event. How long do these events usually take? Are they slow processes, or does everything just die one day?
What would happen is that the rate of biodiversity drops drastically, and organisms that are simple and adaptable (like cockroaches, algae, jellyfich, certain classes of bacteria, small mammals, urban birds) adapt and thrive and consume the rest of the flora and fauna, and permanently adapt their environments making the situation extremely fragile for more complex and delicate birds and larger vertebrates. Also, the…
I would be careful with the word simple. Adaptable is the important component, and that seems to be related more to being small and not particularly specialized. Simple sounds like a description of the amount of genetic data the species contains. It has been a while since I took biology, but if I recall correctly, even small and adaptable species have a lot of genetic data. When a mass extinction event happens, once the environment stabilizes, the doors are open for large animals again, and the small ones already have the genetic complexity needed to fill those niches relatively quickly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not without a significant energy expenditure. But most of our energy sources of course produce CO2 and other products.
I guess the Scifi question is can you build a nuclear ship with some apparatus that pulls the CO2 out of the ocean and breaks it into C (stored on ship) and O (released into atmosphere)?
While I recognise this question might be abrasive, I feel compelled to ask it. Why does this belong on Hacker News? This isn't technology. This isn't legal news (i.e. software patents). This is in no way related to Hacker News. I have no problem with interesting articles being upvoted, but I feel we need a place to put these or a tagging system similar to lobsters.
While I recognise this question might be abrasive, I feel compelled to ask it. Why does this belong on Hacker News? This isn't technology. This isn't legal news (i.e. software patents). This is in no way related to Hacker News. I have no problem with interesting articles being upvoted, but I feel we need a place to put these or a tagging system similar to lobsters.
You may want to re-read the guidelines.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> I have no problem with interesting articles being upvoted
What topics do you think should be on HN?