The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fire-earth-has-plenty-oxygen/596923/

by mpweiher • 7 years ago

139 140 7 years ago

Not least because lungs take in oxygen and output carbon dioxide. I guess while the Amazon is on fire it acts a bit like lungs.

bestouff• 7 years ago

Well from the point of view of your body, your lungs bring oxygen in and take carbon dioxide out.

abainbridge2• 7 years ago

Ha, nice one! So if the Amazon is like lungs in this sense, where is it bringing the oxygen in from?

JadeNB• 7 years ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20928439 ? (I don't know which one should stay.)

amflare• 7 years ago

The above link is a paragraph and a click-through link. This is the actual article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-f...

dang• 7 years ago

Changed from https://blog.longnow.org/02019/09/01/the-amazon-is-not-the-e.... Thanks.

imvetri• 7 years ago

Please refrain promoting deforestation

slackfan• 7 years ago

Did you actually read the article, or are you just kneejerking to the title? Because it's quite-anti-deforestation in there.

jdashg2• 7 years ago

Titles are important, and titles can be irresponsible.

keawade• 7 years ago

The article does not promote deforestation.

Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible.

It discusses a misconception that has been propogated lately.

The Amazon is a vast, ineffable, vital, living wonder. It does not, however, supply the planet with 20 percent of its oxygen.
As the biochemist Nick Lane wrote in his 2003 book Oxygen, “Even the most foolhardy destruction of world forests could hardly dint our oxygen supply, though in other respects such short-sighted idiocy is an unspeakable tragedy.”

CodeWriter232• 7 years ago

Characterizing 6% of the oxygen supply as “more or less zero” (as the author does) seems to signal approval of deforestation to me.

js2• 7 years ago

“Does the Amazon provide 20% of our oxygen?” discussion from a couple weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20789771

chisleu• 7 years ago

This is a great point. An important aspect of this is that most of the Amazon's deforestation is land owners developing their land and adding to the agricultural sectors of South America.

If we want to stop them, we need to stop the excessive consumption of these goods. This doesn't just mean stopping over eating, it means changing what you eat and paying more for goods sourced locally.

Unfortunately, that means from countries with higher labor costs and higher taxes because of higher subsidies.

It's a hard sell for most consumers. How do we accomplish that?

ajmurmann• 7 years ago

From what I've read most of the agricultural production in Brazil goes directly or indirectly towards beef and biofuel. So cutting down on beef consumption seems like a great step. I personally have cut down my meat consumption dramatically, but how can we move that further as not only a society, but a species? If I stop eating beef, but nobody else does, nothing is won. If the US cuts down on beef consumption, other countries will be happy to buy the now cheaper beef.

Collective action problems are a problem...

input_sh3• 7 years ago

...but how can we move that further as not only a society, but a species?

The answer is simple, the execution is hard and will piss a lot of people off: start treating red meat as a luxury item, and slowly introduce taxes on top of its price, like we do for alcohol and tobacco. Nothing drastic of course, just a few cents extra every half a year or so to make people reconsider their eating habits again and again.

But if we're talking about the US specifically, that's not even necessary. Just removing subsidies that are already handed out to the meat industry will achieve the same result.

sampo• 7 years ago

The main export destinations of Brazilian beef are Hong Kong, China, Egypt, Russia, Iran and Chile.

https://www.datamyne.com/blog/markets/brazilian-beef-exports...

icebraining2• 7 years ago

Stupid idea: tax meat and use the money to purchase tracts of farmland in the Amazon and such places, preventing them from being explored. That would reduce the drop in prices, by increasing the cost of productive land.

sp332• 7 years ago

America banned beef imports from Brazil a couple of years ago. Leather could still come from Brazilian cattle though.

jdashg2• 7 years ago

"If the US cuts down on beef consumption, other countries will be happy to buy the now cheaper beef." This only results in no change if there's an infinite demand for beef at the current market price. If the US reduces beef intake, world beef intake clearly goes down.

otikik• 7 years ago

If we increased the cost of transportation from far away producers, it seems that we kill two birds with one shot. I'm not an economist and I don't know what ramifications this would have, and not exactly what form this "increase in cost" would take.

nwah1• 7 years ago

A lot of the deforestation is caused not by landowners who are engaged in agriculture, but as a result of land speculators letting good land sit idle, and forcing impoverished homesteaders into the rainforest where they engage in clearcutting out of desperation.

There is likely an "environmental kuznets curve" where developing countries cause an environmental burden as they develop up until a certain point, after which further gains in general wealth begin to improve the environment. It is only when people are wealthy that they start to be willing to do things like reduce pollution.

Wealth in general is the key to solving our environmental issues. It encourages sustainable fertility rates, and makes people rich enough so that they don't have to resort to desperate measures like using fire for clear-cutting.

childintime• 7 years ago

Related: the fires in the Congo, Africa, this week resulted in bad air-quality in the northeast of Brazil. That made the national news.

Sadly it's not only the Amazon that is cutting down on trees. Besides the fires in Africa, Canada was also in the news some time ago. Apparently that prompted the Canadian government to put up a page to deal with the issue: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/forests-forest...

JonCox• 7 years ago

Not anymore it isn't.

alexcroox• 7 years ago

One Strange Rock, a nature documentary hosted by Will Smith (stay with me) actually goes into this in some detail and I would definitely recommend a watch. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7651892/

lelima• 7 years ago

I saw it, a bit skeptic about Will Smith but the production is high Quality, I suppose with Will the show is pointing younger generations.

cheez2• 7 years ago

Isn't he 50 years old?

mc32• 7 years ago

Haven’t watched it myself but often times these kinds of documentaries use voice actors to read the script and lend a good voice to their content. James Earl Jones, Leonard Nimoy, etc.

vfc1• 7 years ago

It might be that burning down every living tree would not make a dent in the oxygen supply, but having the earth temperature go up 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton, and that would end the oxygen supply (eventually).

This type of articles is the last thing we need right now, it all piles up on the narrative that the consequences of climate change are really not that bad and there is no real urgency in doing anything about it.

Especially if that implies a change of behaviors like eating less meat. Nobody wants to give away their cheeseburgers as Elizabeth Warren factitiously says, this how you make headlines and get elected for office, tell people what they want to hear, stay away from the truth.

partialrecall7• 7 years ago

Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Promoting a good cause by allowing falsehoods to spread may seem helpful in the short term, but in doing so you're building a house on a foundation of sand. When you promote trivial falsehoods instead of calling them out, you allow your opposition to be the one who calls out those falsehoods, and thus undermine your cause.

When somebody on your side says something well-meaning but wrong, you should be the one to call them out. In doing so, you deny your enemy the opportunity to do so.

ineedasername3• 7 years ago

If a true fact is playing in to a false narrative, there is a problem with how it's being presented. Calling that out is just as important as calling out falsehoods.

djsumdog• 7 years ago

Yea, you shouldn't deny a reality because you believe in the noble lie.

And to be fair, climate change is turned into a crazy red hearing of a political issue. There are lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China, insane amounts of plastic particulates in the oceans, tons and tons of textile waste. There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2, and when you focus on just CO2, you get carbon laws like those enacted in Australia briefly that caused more fuel expenditure in moving ore to China for processing instead of processing it domestically.

There needs to be a huge change in consumption. We need cell phones that last 10 years, not 2~3. We need to end the constant replacement cycle. Intel's shareholders should be glad when sales are below projections because the old chips are lasting longer.

But this is not how our economy or industry works. It's all based about infinite growth, selling you new things, sending your e-waste to Africa to be harvested by kids and be smeltered in recycling shops without OSHA requirements or respirators, sending textile waste to Africa to be sold (but mostly burned), etc. etc.

Until there is a major collapse globally and people recognize the scale of our folly of consumerism and over-consumption, people will not recognize the real changes needed to build a more sustainable world. And reducing overall consumption will also reduce CO2 emissions ... along with all types of other emissions. But it will take reduction. We cannot spend and buy our way out of environmental damage.

wutbrodo8• 7 years ago

It's been really interesting to me to see how the concept that lying in support of your preferred narrative is the correct way to engage publicly with a problem has evolved over the last few years. It seems like only a few years ago that people who admitted to this strategy were roundly condemned. Now, it's a completely normal view to go out of your way to openly endorse lying about eg science as a moral course of action (this is far from the first time I've seen this expressed, and it extends to journalists and other figures with reputations to think about). I wonder if in a few years, we'll have tipped fully over to condemning those who publish or report science that doesn't fit a preferred narrative (though this already happens to some degree, as with Case and Deaton's study on white working class mortality).

It's of a piece with the general decline in liberalism of the last 10 years (as another example, take the reputation of free speech as a concept), but I guess what I'm describing is how grotesquely fascinating it is to see a society and its institutions so rapidly lose their connection to basic decency and honesty. I'm not naive enough to think this was some hyperstable equilibrium, but it's fascinating to see how rapidly it happens.

jstummbillig• 7 years ago

This is incredibly naive in a reality, where the POTUS can contradict himself on social media – with traceable evidence dating back often not more than a week – and absolutely nothing coming of it.

Right now, when it comes to public opinion and action, volume clearly beats a good signal/noise ratio. This is not an isolated issue, this happens all around the globe. Populism is on the rise. Simple beats true.

Yes, you can argue this is not the way it is supposed to be, but it is how it is. But if you really care about making a change for the better, then this is most definitely not the time for deliberate narratives.

You might have the peoples attention, but not their patience. If you want change, do not squander it.

strainer2• 7 years ago

But its not a falsehood to call the Amazon "lungs of the Earth" - its an illustration of the fact that the Amazon, until perhaps recently has been the "largest residual terrestrial carbon sink on the planet"[1]

The article opens with this headline which is false: "Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply."

If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes. It would take millennia to complete but its not an outcome which is valid to describe in an educational or truth straightening context as "not a dent".

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 "Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink"

blablabla123• 7 years ago

Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative.

Yeah but some narratives of the truth can become absurd. And so is this article. The problem right now is not an undersupply of O2 but an oversupply of CO2. In that sense the Amazon is actually part of the earth's lung. Unfortunately the article leaves out the information to which proportion forest contributes as CO2 sink. And also that alternative uses of the area might turn it actually into a CO2 source. That's maybe not intentional but not exactly relevant and therefore misleading.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

This type of articles is the last thing we need right now

We always need the truth.

If your agenda can't handle the truth, it's maybe not that great to begin with.

dao-• 7 years ago

The problem seems to be that there's quite a bit of nuance in the article, but most people won't remember that if they even manage to read through it. They might however remember and pass on the clickbaity headline as it conveniently fits their climate change denial agenda.

michaelmior• 7 years ago

Not the parent, but one reading of that comment is that the concern is not that the truth shouldn't be shared. I think being truthful is important, but the spin of the article minimizes the impact of climate change.

throwaway57523• 7 years ago

It might make you feel good to write that, but there are much bigger lies being told. For example, tons of people believe that CO2 released by human activity does not cause global warming, and tons of people are promoting that idea. Arguing over just how much photosynthesis the Amazon is responsible for seems like a stupid article in light of that. Perhaps we can be selective over what we argue about and what we pay attention to. On the net, the claim "the Amazon is the Earth's lungs" being true or not is not really meaningful. We still shouldn't burn it down, and climate change is still bad and getting worse. Creating debate over trivialities is usually the aim of these types of pieces, and it's best not to allow ourselves to be manipulated so easily.

minikites• 7 years ago

People already don't believe the truth and I struggle to think of a time in history when they did.

flmontpetit• 7 years ago

Truth is an abstract concept. We only ever get an interpretation, and this interpretation needs to be properly apprehensive of how information is disseminated and interpreted. Proper editorializing is far more important than you realize.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the contents of this article. It does not undermine the climate change (read: scientific) "agenda" in the slightest. However, considering the sheer amount of people who only read article titles and form rigid opinions nonetheless, this article's title specifically is potentially harmful.

leetcrew4• 7 years ago

posts like this decrease the credibility of climate change activism.

criley2• 7 years ago

If average temps go up 5°C (the current fear is that 2°C is the deadline, and at 3°C we're experiencing CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE including major loss of breadbasket regions, mass famine leading to mass revolt (think Arab Spring x 100)) then we are long, long past the current idea of modern civilization, billions of humans etc. At 5°C I bet 75% of world population has died to either lack of resources or wars over scarce resources.

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/

I'd link more to IPCC but their website appears down, so sorry.

I will say that the 5 degree scenario is called the "RCP 8.5" and is basically the worst disaster scenario published here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0149-y

basch• 7 years ago

it all piles up on the narrative that the consequences of climate change are really not that bad

Does it? I read the article to be saying "you should be much much more concerned with the burning of fossil fuels than a forest." I read the article to be an attack on sensational journalism distracting people from the crux of the discussion. Its further point is that being concerned about oxygen and not temperatures rising is a logical error.

ajross• 7 years ago

having the earth temperature go up 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton

See... but this is the kind of thing that leads to this kind of both-sides-ist article in the first place. In fact there are innumerable species of phytoplankton and other primary photosynthesizers, lots of which would be very happy to migrate toward the poles as the oceans warm. The planet may be warming rapidly, but it's been warmer in the geologic past and the microbial ecosystems did just fine.

Obviously bigger organisms are going to be terribly disrupted (and for bigger fauna the beginning of a mass extinction already seems to be under way). This is, y'know, outrageously bad.

But predictions of the end of life on earth are just feeding the right wing meme that liberals are irrational and opening the door for journalists to push this kind of "It's not so bad"[1] article as "balance". We need to be serious with our criticism. Urgency doesn't require sensationalism.

[1] To be fair, not having read the complete thing yet: the text of the article seems really quite good. It's not whitewashing anything I can see. But the theme and headline are still a variation on "environmentalists are idiots".

unholythree• 7 years ago

I don't think the article is a critique of environmentalists so much as lazy pop science news that inacuratly simplfies and conflates issues. "Lungs of the Earth" stories distract from the very real problems with a inaccurate bumper sticker slogan.

pdonis3• 7 years ago

having the earth temperature go up 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton, and that would end the oxygen supply (eventually)

The global average temperature has been higher than that in the past, and there was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere.

orwin• 7 years ago

The global average temperature has been higher than that in the past Yes there was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. Well, citation needed.

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

Agreed, that seems like the sensationalism he’s willing to ignore. Which as everyone else pointed out is harmful.

Can GP explain if these plankton did not exist in these times of higher temperatures? Because I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t, but we’ve had whales and plankton separately for millions and millions of years over drastically different climates. So I’m curious how they are making such absolute statements.

I don’t know nearly enough about plankton, maybe someone could explain?

gambiting2• 7 years ago

Yes, but the temperature rose to those levels over millenia, not just hundreds of years. Ultimately, life on Earth will adapt - it's just that we might not survive long enough to witness the adaptation.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

Um, the oxygen component is a red herring and distraction to the climate debate. It took many millennia of a tiny oxygen excess to get us the atmospheric mix we know.

It's CO2 (and species and habitat loss) that matters, and the Amazon is hugely important for those, and for the climate of the region.

Which the article seems pretty clear on. So how is it presenting an impression climate change isn't that bad, or there's no urgency?

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

I don't think HN User "vfc1" read the article.

That happens with troubling frequency on HN.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

It took many millennia of a tiny oxygen excess to get us the atmospheric mix we know

It actually took a few billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

partiallypro• 7 years ago

This type of articles is the last thing we need right now, it all piles up on the narrative that the consequences of climate change are really not that bad and there is no real urgency in doing anything about it.

Actually it does the opposite. The climate change deniers have for so long hinged on the fact that people openly lie about the climate to push an agenda. You can't fault them for that...and having people who are proponents of doing something calling out the nonsense/lies that their allies say, actually emboldens the climate change position. If you can't even hold your own viewpoint accountable how are you going to hold deniers accountable or change their minds? People have focused so much on shoving a viewpoint down people's throats that they have completely forgotten how persuasion works and that you need a social movement to have a political one.

mistermann3• 7 years ago

Actually it does the opposite. The climate change deniers have for so long hinged on the fact that people openly lie about the climate to push an agenda.

Actually, you're both right.

The title and the facts upon which it are based, will to some degree reinforce those who are resistant to or skeptical of the climate change message, in that it once again demonstrates the fact that the messages broadcast in the "leftist" media contains factual inaccuracies, also known as fake news or lies. Of course, if they actually read and properly integrated the entire contents of the article into their worldview, this type of article "should" make the world a better place, since it is informative and ~truthful. But that's not how human minds work, as we all know when we're specifically discussing an article about human psychology and cognition, but so easily forget (or under-appreciate) while having discussions on other topics.

You're right that telling the truth should be the correct path, but considering the complexities of reality, I reckon the grandparent is probably more strategically correct. It seems logical that the more truthful message should win out in the end, but if you're not willing to be truthful all/most of the time (how would this even be coordinated?), then it may be a sub-optimal strategy.

wilg• 7 years ago

but having the earth temperature go up 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton, and that would end the oxygen supply (eventually)

Isn't the point of the article that you could kill every living thing besides humans (including plankton) and not disrupt the oxygen supply?

Also, another point of the article is that burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of oxygen decline, which seems urgent.

not_a_cop75• 7 years ago

Breathing too hard would also end the oxygen supply eventually, but trying to make any one factor the cause for the end seems to be a waste. You might as well be trying to find which one reason is responsible for the collapse of Rome. Or maybe you find that one thing about the USA that makes it intolerable in your opinion, but it will always pale to the multicausal.

imhelpingu• 7 years ago

In terms of giving people a reason for skepticism, simply telling the truth (for once) is a drop in the pan compared to all the bald-faced, dishonest, say-anything "activism" performed by various groups (e.g. the entire neoliberal media establishment) pertaining to global warming. I think climate change is a serious issue and a threat to the species, just by the way.

dejaime• 7 years ago

This feels like a simple strawman. The problem is called global warming, not global deoxygenation.

stinos• 7 years ago

This feels like a simple strawman.

Maybe feels like it, but the argument being attacked here is just the false 'amazon = world's lungs' claim, not something else, not global warming, so I don't think it qualifies as strawman according to it's definition? (Plus note that the article specifically mentions burning down the amazon is a tragedy)

wutbrodo8• 7 years ago

Strawman of what? The article isn't titled "there is no problem with deforestation, go nuts". The first paragraph describes the hypothetical loss of the Amazon as a "planetary historic tragedy beyond measure", and says that it'll make the Paris climate goals impossible to reach.

None of this contradicts the premise of the article, which is that a commonly-held and - expressed belief about the Amazon's role in our oxygen supply is not supported by the science.

Strawman doesn't mean "talking about a different topic than I'd prefer".

gnusty_gnurc• 7 years ago

Some are motivated to hyperbolize about the wildfires in Brazil in order to craft a narrative that Bolsonaro is ushering in the apocalypse. There’s wildfires in Bolivia but no one is blaming socialism (Evo Morales).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/02/bolivia-evo-mo...

Carioca3• 7 years ago

Brazilian Amazon deforestation went up 222% in August, compared to the same time last year[1]. Bolsonaro has a very anti-conservation agenda. He has:

- Appointed a climate denialist conspiracy theorist as his foreign minister [2]

- Appointed as minister for the environment a man convicted of forging documents in favour of mining companies [3]

- Contradicted the National Institute for Space Research, responsible for satellite tracking of deforestation, when it published preliminary data that showed the increase (as it had done every year), then fired its director[4]

- Then went on to blame the fires on conservation NGOs [5]

This is just off the top of my head (I'm Brazilian), links provided are just the first search results from reputable sources in English. Happy to provide more info to anyone who needs it.

That said, I have no love for Evo nor do I know the specifics of the situation across the border, but Bolsonaro is terrible for the environment and the world should be concerned, not in the least because 58.4% of the Amazon is inside Brazil's border. In contrast, 7.7% of it falls within Bolivia

1: https://www.dw.com/pt-br/desmatamento-na-amaz%C3%B4nia-em-ag...

2: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/brazil-foreign...

3: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics-minister/...

4: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-job/br...

5: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/21/jair-bolsonaro...

[edited to add size of Bolivian Amazon]

asplake• 7 years ago

News just in: the metaphor is not the thing

wutbrodo8• 7 years ago

The article isn't nitpicking the metaphor, it's saying that the factual claim underlying the metaphor (ie that the Amazon provides 20% or some appreciable amount of our oxygen) is false.

If you click the link at the top of the page, it takes you to an article that you can read. I recommend doing so before commenting on a post in general

siliconunit• 7 years ago

Thinking that exposing the objective truth to the general public is always the best course of action is at best naive and can at times lead to tragedy... You can do this to a greater extent if your nation is small and has a high amount of highly educated citizens (ie Scandinavian countries) that are able to understand implications and distinctions and place limits to their personal volition for the sake of the community. Tell to Joe down the road that the recycling truck at times dumps everything together for technical reasons and you will dramatically diminish the care and effort to properly separate waste.

autokad• 7 years ago

I thought the Amazon was called Earths lungs because of how it sucks moisture from the ocean across land.

(Please correct me if I am wrong) its my understanding that the area would be quite dry, but the plants manipulate the atmosphere with particulates to draw in water from the oceans and create precipitation across the continent. I thought it was this 'sucking' that gave its name 'earth's lungs'.

I also dont like the focus on Co2. that's not the only way the world cools, warms. the water being converted to gas, to water, and gas again takes up energy and cools the planet. beyond c02, if the Amazon were to go away, I think the earth would get warmer to some extent.

rafaelvasco• 7 years ago

Doesn't mean we shouldn't care; It's amazing how people always view things with a negative and destructive not-my-problem mindset; Humanity in general right now is much more destructive than constructive; We must always strive to make a positive impact for others and for the entire planet, leaving things better than they were before us, not the contrary;

The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

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