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Oceans Suffocating as Huge Dead Zones Quadruple Since 1950, Scientists Warn (theguardian.com)
Ocean dead zones with zero oxygen have quadrupled in size since 1950, scientists have warned, while the number of very low oxygen sites near coasts have multiplied tenfold. From a report: Most sea creatures cannot survive in these zones and current trends would lead to mass extinction in the long run, risking dire consequences for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on the sea. Climate change caused by fossil fuel burning is the cause of the large-scale deoxygenation, as warmer waters hold less oxygen. The coastal dead zones result from fertiliser and sewage running off the land and into the seas. The analysis, published in the journal Science, is the first comprehensive analysis of the areas and states: "Major extinction events in Earth's history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans." Denise Breitburg, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in the US and who led the analysis, said: "Under the current trajectory that is where we would be headed. But the consequences to humans of staying on that trajectory are so dire that it is hard to imagine we would go quite that far down that path." "This is a problem we can solve," Breitburg said. "Halting climate change requires a global effort, but even local actions can help with nutrient-driven oxygen decline." She pointed to recoveries in Chesapeake Bay in the US and the Thames river in the UK, where better farm and sewage practices led to dead zones disappearing.
. . . and one that we might be able to solve by better managing our watersheds. It would be expensive, but peanuts compared so some of the issues that get all the press, and would probably have more side benefits. Unfortunately, no one has found a way to use this issue to push their unrelated political agenda, so you don't hear much about it.
dissolved oxygen in the water is what the sea critters consume. basically warm water + ag runoff = algae which use up all this dissolved oxygen, leaving the dead zones.
The molecular bonds in water take quite a bit of energy to crack
Fish aren't breathing H2O with those gills, they're breathing O2 just like you. Only the gills work in water where your lungs work in air.
Maybe that's an exaggeration, but note that nowhere in the article do they state the actual number of square km affected, only saying that it has increased by millions of sq km. That sounds like a lot, but the earth has 360 million sq km of ocean. "Millions" could be less than 1% of the total ocean by surface area. The piece does indeed read like propaganda, and I think I would count myself as a supporter of efforts to minimize greenhouse gas emissions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The article directly states that it is dead zones near shore and describes that as happening from run off and pollutants. But then they bring climate change in, which is an entirely different thing. Solving the run off and pollution problems is a demonstrably doable project. Solving warming, would do little or nothing for these coastal dead zones and is not demonstrably doable. But politics...
I much prefer drinking H2O2.
Ah, yes . . . this must be that "raw water" that is all the rage now.
But isn't "raw water" difficult to swallow, with all those rough edges, and all . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
You are assuming a linear projection of something that is highly unlikely to scale linearly with either time or population growth. Even if you only look at current data, it is appears that we have already passed an inflection point (the second derivative is now negative).
The major cause of "dead zones" is agricultural fertilizer run off. Fertilizer running off the land is inherently wasteful, so farmers already have a financial incentive to fix this problem ... and they are doing so. Modern "no-till" farming can dramatically reduce run off. Data driven systems can also optimize fertilizer application with soil condition and weather. In the future, robotic application of fertilizer directly to either foliage or crop root zones will dramatically reduce fertilizer volume by delivering the nutrients only to the crop and not to weeds and bare soil.
The solution to "dead zones" is already in the pipeline, and within a decade the zones will be in decline.
1% of total area of the ocean by surface area would actually be A LOT.
Killing of 1% of humans would mean to kill 75 million people.
Get a sense of scale.
Fertilizer creates zones near the shore. Warmer water is being tagged as the cause for low oxygen zones further out in the ocean (and larger than the shore zones).
..." She pointed to recoveries in Chesapeake Bay in the US and the Thames river in the UK, where better farm and sewage practices led to dead zones disappearing."
So not really CLIMATE related, is it?
Oh, there's a SUPPOSED climate connection, but that's guessing.
It's the same with the Great Barrier Reef - the cataclysmic, sky-is-falling whinging is about ocean warming and coral death (never mind that corals are one of the oldest life forms on the planet, having thrived in both warmer and cooler climes as well as faster-rate-of-change situations) when in fact local changes to farming practices in Australia had an IMMEDIATE impact on the improvement of the reef.
Climate change caused by fossil fuel burning is the cause of the large-scale deoxygenation, as warmer waters hold less oxygen.
The coastal dead zones result from fertiliser and sewage running off the land and into the seas.
So there are two causes for two different, but related, effects. You didn't even have to RTFA, it was in the summary.