Whales Keep Carbon out of the Atmosphere (2017)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whales-keep-carbon-out-of-the-atmosphere/

by yurisagalov • 7 years ago

93 41 7 years ago

onion2k2• 7 years ago

The article mentions eco-tourism and whale watching. I wonder if the carbon footprint of someone flying to an island, staying there for a week, and taking boat trips out to whale watch actually results in whales being a net negative on the environment. If we let them die out so that tourism stopped it could be a positive for the planet.

(I'm not suggesting we should actually do this though. Whales are pretty amazing.)

11235813213455• 7 years ago

They should just offer high-resolution virtual tourism or anything. Is Youtube tourism a thing already?

Tourism or all those non-vital flights are ruining our planet, along with the high consumerism, which is surely correlated to someone who go visit foreign countries

beachy2• 7 years ago

Tourism should be much harder. Make your way to your destination by bike, yacht, even if it takes a year to get there.

nxpnsv• 7 years ago

On the other hand, aren't there also benefits of people experiencing more than their backyard?

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

It may technically be true initially but ecotourism is generally needed to preserve it economically and from a game theory perspective essentially.

* If it isn't human inhabited why not take it? * If it is human inhabited why not try to raise their standard of living by development and exploitation of natural resources? If there was some sort of payment for holding unspoiled environments it would have compliance and inspection issues not to mention funding and distribution. * However if it is an asset with tourism then "poaching" harms future income and they have incentive to keep it beautiful and clean for real. It may lead to some "manicuring" like removing pests and making trails but biodiversity would be far more preserved. * Those who are already developed may also have the local ecosystems as an effective "service" or amenity from quality of life. Needless to say that is a "late game" option only.

Environmentalism is always a game of trade offs period.

rmgraham• 7 years ago

Alternatively... how large would the whale population need to be to counter the carbon footprint of such tourism?

hinkley• 7 years ago

Zoos are very ineffective from a preservation standpoint, if you only consider them as distributed caches of a small amount of viable genetic material.

But as someone once put it to me, if you think of the zoo as an embassy, all of the animals as ambassadors, and consider the policy impacts that come from having people carry around these positive experiences involving the animals, then the benefit of zoos is much more compelling.

I do some work with plants and diversity. There are some very confused people in my peer group who earnestly believe that changing a few acres of real estate inside of a metropolitan area is going to have a direct effect. Like somehow we could supply the entire city with food or materials on a few acres. In the interests of morale I don't tell them how terrifyingly naive that idea is.

Instead I just point out that what we are doing is more like a zoo. We're getting an idea into a lot of people's heads. They may go try to copy some of our strategies, at home or in another city, and that might eventually develop into a measurable change.

So. Is the Greater Good served by a few thousand extra tons of carbon going into the atmosphere today? Maybe, maybe not.

I do know that we have the rhetoric all kinds of wrong. If your friend is having money problems and his car is breaking down all the time, and his boss is getting agitated about his 'flakiness', do you criticize him for "spending money he doesn't have" to get a reliable car? We've been doing exactly that to politicians for years. "Oh don't fly to Copenhagen to talk about Greenhouse Gases you fuckin' hypocrite"

It's bullshit, and what's more it's scaring people into inaction, which basically classifies it as horizontal aggression. Which is exactly what the opposition wants. Stop attacking each other. If you have something to say, educate, don't shame.

samvher4• 7 years ago

Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon whales keep out of the atmosphere; one study suggests that every year, sperm whales help sequester as much carbon as 694 acres of U.S. forests do. Another found that in Hawaii, the swimming motion of 80 whales can absorb the equivalent carbon of 208 acres of U.S. forests.

The title of this article made me expect more. Unless they mean the 694 acres is the contribution per whale (the article doesn't provide references).

danmaz74• 7 years ago

These numbers look weird. If only 80 whales in Hawaii are equivalent to 208 acres, then the entire world population of sperm whales should certainly contribute more than not even 4 times that number. But just 1 sperm whale contributing almost 4 times what 80 whales contribute in Hawaii also looks unlikely.

samvher4• 7 years ago

They are two different mechanisms though, it could be that the swimming motion mechanism has a far smaller effect. Google tells me there are 360,000 sperm whales, that would make the combined effect of the swimming of all sperm whales similar to that of 60 km x 60 km of forest.

reportgunner• 7 years ago

Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon whales keep out of the atmosphere

What a grossly writen sentence. It suggests that scientists are !pinpointing! !exactly! how much. Except that they are not pinpointing and they don't know it exactly at all.

soulofmischief• 7 years ago

"Determining" would have been a better word, but I understand what the author was trying for.

sandworm101• 7 years ago

Only swimming motion? Ive read that sperm whale poop is massively important for feeding phytoplancton (sp) which in turn pulls radically more carbon from the air than those numbers.

0-_-02• 7 years ago

According to the article:

"Whales facilitate carbon absorption in two ways. On the one hand, their movements — especially when diving — tend to push nutrients from the bottom of the ocean to the surface, where they feed the phytoplankton and other marine flora that suck in carbon, as well as fish and other smaller animals."

I wonder if it would be possible to artificially create upwards currents in the ocean to push up nutrients, you could do the job of a million whales. Might be cheaper than planting forests...

a_imho• 7 years ago

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

0-_-02• 7 years ago

That's very interesting:

"Martin's 1988 quip four months later at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age", drove a decade of research. "

Etheryte• 7 years ago

Oceans are huge and human machines aren't anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines. It's an interesting idea, but I think we might see way easier wins by first simply stopping killing whales with everything else we're doing.

todd8• 7 years ago

In the technical sense, Idon’t agree with your claim that “human [produced] machines aren’t anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines”. Perhaps you meant that sometimes the least costly way of performing work for some task involves utilizing a biological process.

On the other, hand I do agree that we should stop killing whales (and perhaps there is now another reason to stop as well).

samvher4• 7 years ago

There are actually people exploring this. I saw a documentary at one point about passive ocean pumps (using wave energy) transporting water from lower layers upwards to increase plankton growth. It seems the company Atmocean is doing things like this and James Lovelock wrote a letter about it to Nature, I'm not sure if this is necessarily related to the docu I saw though.

mhandley• 7 years ago

This is also one of the positive side effect of electricity generation from ocean thermal energy. I've wondered for a long time why we're not investing more in this, as it's one of the few possible large scale generation mechanisms that's actually carbon-negative.

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

ivanhoe• 7 years ago

It's actually phytoplankton that captures the CO2, so what about other kinds of whales that actually feed on plankton and don't dive as deep as sperm whales?

kian• 7 years ago

Curious here - with everything going on with ocean acidification, would we really rather sequester carbon dioxide in the oceans, where it will contribute to the destruction of corals, or leave it in the atmosphere?

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Much of this research is aimed at understanding present nutrient cycling. Remediation is secondary.

spodek• 7 years ago

Read The Once and Future World https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-Could/dp/030... to learn how much more whales there used to be and their effect on making the environment more stable and able to sustain life.

It's stunning and, I hope, behavior-changing.

I did two video essays on the book, though I didn't cover the parts on whales

- http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-...

- http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-...

Whales Keep Carbon out of the Atmosphere (2017)

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