Does the Amazon provide 20% of our oxygen?

http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/blog/does-the-amazon-provide-20-of-our-oxygen

by mchouza • 7 years ago

313 205 7 years ago

yadvindermalhi.org

crb002• 7 years ago

Guessing a lot is ocean based, and plants are more efficient at getting it with higher concentrations.

wcunning2• 7 years ago

The basic gist of the article is found about 1/2 way in:

"First, the phytoplankton in the oceans also photosynthesise [...] Therefore in terms of TOTAL global photosynthesis, photosynthesis in the Amazon contributes around 9%. [...] Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces."

This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information. Per Gell-Mann, I only see this in tech and science reporting, but that makes me really unreasonably suspicious of political reporting, too.

amelius• 7 years ago

a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces.

Especially when on fire ...

molteanu• 7 years ago

This is just another political play to oust Bolsonaro, the Brazil's president, from power. There have already been EU voices pushing for sanctions against Brazil and the Amazon fires are on the G7 agenda which brings a lot of negative press against the political body in Brazil. All the while central Africa is also ravaged by fires but you don't hear that in the news.

Like most of what you hear in the big press, it comes with an agenda. It's not the case that a 'zero' was mispelled or enough info was not available, thus the erroneous reporting. You won't win the argument that way. The piece simply has another purpose from the one it is claiming to have, in this case, that future generations will say that the fires wiped out the entire human civilization in all it's glory at the hand of the Brazilian president. Ergo, he has to go until it's not too late.

ctrl-j• 7 years ago

I mean.. I get your point.. but 9% is still a lot, and even if it's net-zero, the carbon sequestration going into that process can't be negligible.

It may be a click-bait factoid, but it's not like that factoid isn't an important one.

Misdicorl4• 7 years ago

There is no active sequestration for a static forest. Only if the forest is expanding in size will sequestration occur. Obviously reducing the size via burning has the opposite effect

Misdicorl4• 7 years ago

As a follow up to my above, it's the weight of the forest that matters. Older forests typically fit bigger and denser and heavier trees, so the age of a forest still matters a lot. But a fairly established forest like the Amazon is not changing the amount of oxygen out carbon dioxide in the air unless it's expanding or contracting

bad_user2• 7 years ago

Netflix has a pretty cool series called "One Strange Rock". You should watch it, they explain the Amazon's role well in one episode.

First of all oxygen is constant. Oxygen is currently not the problem. And it's a good thing that it's constant because we don't want more of it either.

The problem with Amazon is that on Earth it's all interconnected and while there's plenty of room for failure, there is a tipping point, scientists have only disagreed on where that tipping point is. Once we are there however we will no longer be able to stop the chain reaction.

Retric2• 7 years ago

There is no single tipping point. There are a vast number of different tipping points with different outcomes.

dmix• 7 years ago

So you see it being like the singularity that people predicted in tech/AI but for natural disasters?

majos2• 7 years ago

I don't quite get the claim behind the Gell-Mann effect. It assumes that because journalism about physics is inaccurate and oversimplified, journalism about everything else is too.

But why should this be? Physics, and similar hard sciences, are deep and complex fields. There's plenty of math, jargon, and a long literature. Of course inaccurate simplifications happen when writing about it for a popular audience. Add in the weird incentives of mass media and the lack of scientific expertise among most journalists, and it makes sense that popular physics news is not so accurate.

In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do. I'm not saying any of these areas is necessarily simple, but they are at the root level about human actors, not abstract quantities that most people have 0 intuition for. So I expect that it's actually easier to do good reporting on those topics.

liability• 7 years ago

In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do.

I was once in a local paper for my participation in a sports team. Well, my picture was. The name given to me in the article and caption was fabricated. Such a name didn't even belong to anybody else in my school, let alone on the same team!

I assume the 'reporter' was too drunk to remember my name and too embarassed to ask somebody, so he just made one up.

xmprt• 7 years ago

Your comment illustrates the point even more in my opinion. You understand more about physics than politics, sports, and business, and so you're able to see how journalists can get it wrong. However, if you actually dived into the world of sports and similar fields about "human actors" there's a lot of interpersonal relations and complexity that can't be described in a 500 word article. If journalists were just reporting about the "what" then physics would be just like reporting sports scores if you just copy the result. When you try to explain the "how" and "why" then all the complexity that you described about physics applies to sports.

twic• 7 years ago

If someone asked me what i thought the main problem with comments on Hacker News was, i would direct them to this comment.

icelancer• 7 years ago

> In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do

This comment should be preserved for all time and cited in the Gell-Mann Effect entry. Do you really think physics is infinitely more complicated than finance or politics?

kirsebaer• 7 years ago

When you read news from something that you personally have been involved in, you will notice journalists simplify and often get things a bit confused.

Like, when a journalist quotes you in print, it is often not a real direct quote, but rather the journalists interpretation of what you said (which can be way off). Always insist to "check quotes" or you could get a surprise when you read your interview.

karmakaze• 7 years ago

Any decent news report will of course have coverage of the literal facts, this will also be overshadowed by interpretation of the meaning of those facts. Any dry reporting which only present the facts without a hint as to how the reader should be reacting to those facts is unpopular and will be read by negligible few. It starts right from the headline that takes a view one way or the other. A number isn't presented without an adjective.

rayiner• 7 years ago

Politics and business are incredibly complicated as well. In many ways it’s even harder to do reporting in those areas because there is no expert consensus you can consult. Is lowering corporate taxes better for the economy? There is little consensus. Even reporting “what people did” can be fraught with peril. (E.g. reporting that a company “paid no taxes” without addressing loss carry forwards.) Political and business systems, and in particular complex regulatory regimes like tax policy, are the product of many decades of refinement. Because journalists for the most part are ignorant of that history, they present every policy issue in this sort of context free way, leaning heavily on narrative and emotion to make up for their shallow understanding of the actual mechanics of what they’re writing about.

jchallis• 7 years ago

In the initial formulation of the Gell-Mann effect, Michael Crichton noted that the coverage of show business was equally simplified.

From discussions with my wife, who is board certified in infectious diseases, newspaper coverage of the following topics are simplified to the point of losing the main point: antimicrobial resistance, any tropical disease from malaria to Ebola, organ rejection.

I think the problem is universal not specific.

mycall• 7 years ago

O2/CO2 aside, the Amazon rainforest's biodiversity is unique and has been a source for medical resource. There is more at stake than just breathing.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 7 years ago

I hear this brought up a lot. Can you name a drug that has actually passed all the safety and efficacy trials that has been developed from something in the Amazon?

ngold• 7 years ago

So yes or no does the amazon provide 20% or not?

shkkmo17• 7 years ago

TLDR: The amazon produces 9% and consumes 9%. We have ~500x more oxygen than CO2 so any disparities will be seen in global CO2 levels WAY before global O2 levels.

badrabbit• 7 years ago

"...consumes about as much oxygen as it produces."

If it burns,there will be leftover life that will no longer be supported by the amazon. Causing a significant increase in net Oxygen consumption.

1% uncomoemsated consumption doesn't sound like much but it will remain that way or worse whic means total O2 will continue to deplete.

empath75• 7 years ago

Not for very long.

strainer9• 7 years ago

The blogged claim that Amazon "consumes about as much oxygen as it produces" is not sourced and the piece seems to fly in the face of professional work on the subject. eg: "The global oxygen budget and its future projection" [1]

Fig. 4 summarizes the annual averaged global O2 budget from year 1990 to 2005, with the mass of O2 in gigatonnes (Gt) listed in each sink and for each process mentioned above (see Section 2.5). The inputs of O2 to the atmosphere by land and outgassing from oceans are quantified as 16.01 and 1.74 Gt/a, respectively. ....

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731...

BurningFrog6• 7 years ago

Let's demystify how plants "produce oxygen".

They do it by splitting CO₂ molecules. The oxygen part (O₂) goes into the air, and the carbon (C) part becomes the plant.

So for the Amazon to continually produce surplus oxygen to the atmosphere, it must also continually produce an ever expanding amount of plant material ("wood") that would form an ever growing pile there.

This is not happening. Because forests don't produce surplus oxygen. Our atmosphere doesn't work that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis

james_s_tayler• 7 years ago

One Strange Rock documentary on Netflix makes the same claim.

mirimir4• 7 years ago

The paper that you cite is talking about small changes.

Under the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) RCP8.5 scenario, approximately 100Gt (gigatonnes) of O2 would be removed from the atmosphere per year until 2100, and the O2 concentration will decrease from its current level of 20.946% to 20.825%.

    2018  209460 ppm
    2100  208250 ppm

That's 15 ppm per year.

From Stolper et al. (2016) A Pleistocene ice core record of atmospheric O2 concentrations:[0]

We present a record of Po2 reconstructed using O2/N2 ratios from ancient air trapped in ice. This record indicates that Po2 declined by 7 per mil (0.7%) over the past 800,000 years, requiring that O2 sinks were ~2% larger than sources.

That's 7000 ppm decrease over 800000 years, or 0.009 ppm per year. And so yes, atmospheric oxygen concentration is dropping lots faster now. But TFA's point that it's slow, and regulated by long-term processes, is still valid.

0) https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6306/1427

shkkmo17• 7 years ago

the piece seems to fly in the face of professional work on the subject.

The blogger does professional work on the subject. The article makes it pretty clear that the net positive production of oxygen the the Amazon is so close to zero that it is only relevant on the time scale of millions of years.

smadge2• 7 years ago

I think the charitable interpretation of the use of the “20% of the earths oxygen” statistic (as the article states this is probably more like 9% of earths photosynthesis) is not about an imagined fear of oxygen depletion, but drawing attention to how massive and important an ecosystem the Amazon is.

luckylion2• 7 years ago

That's likely, but we could pretend it's 80% with the same reasoning - and it has an even larger effect with regard to drawing attention to the importance.

wodenokoto• 7 years ago

Consumes as much as it produces ... does that mean the animal life in the amazon consumes all the O2 produces by the plants, or does it mean that the life-cycle of any one tree consumes as much O2 when decomposing, as it produces during its time photosynthesizing?

If it is the latter, then we will see decreased oxygen levels as the forest decreases is size.

Merovius• 7 years ago

This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information

FTR, this article is doing exactly that. Like, they a) divert your attention with the CO₂<->O₂ conversion (which doesn't change relative numbers in percentages of photosynthesis at all - you multiply both sides of the equation). And b) then proceeds to pretend that the Amazon eats up most of the Oxygen it produces, but the rest of the world apparently doesn't. Like, if a tree re-metabolizes 40% of the O₂ it produces, then that's also true for the 91% of O₂ produced outside the Amazon, so we still end up with the same 9% figure of all O₂ produced in the Amazon.

The article ends with the "CO₂ emission is more important". Which, again, fair. But Photosynthesis is presumably a pretty important mechanism by which CO₂ is removed from the air. So a reduction of O₂ production is equivalent to a reduction of CO₂ absorption (though you have to multiply with 2.67, don't forget!), which seems to… be a bad thing for CO₂ concentration in the air.

The gist of the article is pretty much "if you don't round and take into account maritime photosynthesis, the Amazon only produces 9% of all O₂". Which is fair. The rest is noise. It doesn't add to the argument and is just fueling the "MSM is bad!" cries…

jefftk• 7 years ago

The article is making a much stronger claim:

the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero

If this is correct, then the entire Amazon could vanish without having any effect on CO₂ levels.

MuffinFlavored• 7 years ago

Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces."

Does this mean that if the Amazon rainforest fell off of the map tomorrow, life as we know it would pretty much stay the same/be ok?

bendbro• 7 years ago

This whole "RAINFOREST IS ON FIRE" meme reminds me a lot of Kony 2012.

thepangolino• 7 years ago

Exactly. It’s highlights a real issue but completely misplaces mobilisation.

RandomBacon• 7 years ago

But then you get the people that say, "At least they're doing something."

tcgv• 7 years ago

This subject has been treated so irresponsibly these past few days that not only people are making inaccurate statements such as "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", but also high profile people such as Emmanuel Macron (France's President) and Cristiano Ronaldo (World famous soccer player) are sharing false information and photos[1]

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pt&tl=en&u=http...

dev_dull• 7 years ago

It’s almost like these people are more interested in pushing a narrative and not the facts?

seppin• 7 years ago

It's almost as if these specific details are wrong but the greater trend is happening, so why fixate on it?

jgeerts• 7 years ago

In present days it's really hard to get factual, correct, unbiased news.

m0zg4• 7 years ago

All of US presidential candidates, democratic and republican alike, routinely and knowingly push blatant lies as a part of their platform and nobody blinks an eye. If you went through what they say with a fine toothed comb and removed all the lies, there'd be hardly anything left. People don't care about facts. They care about how a narrative makes them feel. Sad but true.

ignoramous• 7 years ago

Agree. There's purposefully lying to achieve targets, and ignorantly spreading lies that help someone in addition to lending them credibility and exposure. The latter hurts more than the former: For instance, Cristiano Ronaldo is a much bigger influencer than most Senators or even Hollywood personalities can ever hope to be. I think, people like them need to exercise great caution, if they intend to mean well and not cause harm.

Dumblydorr• 7 years ago

While it's true most politicians lie or bend facts or report them wrongly, you can not create a false equivalence between them all. Trump lies egregiously and far more than basically any non dictatorial politician. Your stance reminds me of those who said both 2016 candidates were bad, so they didn't vote or voted for the two clown third party candidates.

antpls• 7 years ago

Regarding the pictures, many pictures of burning forests were shared on social networks those past few days (eg. Instagram stories).

Those are images of fires to illustrate people's message, they convey the greater concept that we should be aware of the Earth as a global shared system. No one is saying 'look at this picture of the Amazon burning right now' (not even in the Macron's tweet).

Regarding "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", I guess it could be debated, and the biodiversity would probably have been a better argument.

shkkmo17• 7 years ago

Regarding "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", I guess it could be debated,

I think it is flat out wrong and not really debatable. Also, focusing on oxygen is not the right thing to talk about because we have so much more oxygen than carbon dioxide.

Before we manage to consume significant amounts of our oxygen, we will have released so much carbon dioxide that a slight dip in O2 will not be a concern.

palisade• 7 years ago

More importantly as the planet's "lungs" the Amazon filters a great quantity of carbon dioxide from the air.

m0zg4• 7 years ago

I googled some and it looks like Amazon rainforest alone removes about a quarter of fossil fuel CO2 from the atmosphere. That's more than I thought it'd be. And it looks like it could sequester much more if there was more phosphorus in the soil.

sp3323• 7 years ago

Where did you see that figure?

jamesdmiller• 7 years ago

Where do they put it? Wouldn't this require the total biomass of the rainforest to be continually increasing?

gus_massa2• 7 years ago

No, with some minor simplifications, the plants amount of CO2 that the pants absorb is proportional to the amount of O2 they produce. So