All right, so you know how people say that the Amazon and other large rainforests are the Earth’s lungs, and by chopping them down it’s like the earth smoking a pack a day and slowly losing the capacity to breathe? Well, it turns out that the rainforests don’t actually produce the majority of our oxygen. Before you fire up your chainsaws for some recreational logging, understand that it’s still probably a bad idea to cut down enormous chunks of rainforest. But that’s a discussion for another day.
The interesting thing is that it turns out a great majority of the world’s oxygen comes from microscopic plants floating on the surface of the ocean. These plants are everywhere in the oceans, and they generate huge amounts of breathable air. It’s a good thing human beings don’t treat the ocean like an enormous toilet/waste disposal system then, isn’t it?
Oh shit.
Scientists have been noticing for a few years now that large expanses of ocean now are essentially “dead”, as in, all of it’s plantlife has died, rendering it unable to produce oxygen. The areas are getting larger with each passing year, and with each passing year the world gets shorter and shorter of breath. Eventually, it will suffocate.
But we’ll probably all starve before we get to that point, because marine life will have died out, and with most fish and aquatic food sources removed, the ecosystem will be in serious imbalance. Take a major piece from the bottom of the teetering Jenga tower that is the Earth’s biosphere and everything tumbles. Only you can’t get bored and go play Guitar Hero afterwards.
So that’s why my fallout bunker is equipped with both hydropnics bays and breeding tanks. It’s good to know I’ll eat salmon while the rest of the world eats gruel.
One of the crazier plans to help lower global warming involves mining shit loads of iron, grinding it up into a powder and seeding the oceans. Various studies have shown this will lead to a jump in the phytoplankton population, which will consumer more carbon dioxide, produce more oxygen and help feed fish etc.
Of course what we do when we run out of iron, can’t seed the oceans anymore? The phytoplankton die off and return to normal levels, which means this HUGE biomass starts to rot, and creates carbon dioxide.
Considering the energy we would have used to get that iron, and the carbon dioxide we’ve created; you can see a slight problem with the plan.
We of course could cut the crap and reduce our carbon dioxide output… but you don’t much sweet mining-coin off sacrifice do you?
/greenie rant
“Only you can’t get bored and go play Guitar Hero afterwards.” Brilliant.
Nice post, Stu. Everytime I read one of these ‘Ways the world will end’ posts I feel a little more dread pile onto my worry-bank. I hope there’s room for me in that bunker, cos unlike you, I actually like salmon.
While rainforest deosn’t produce the majority of out oxygen, they produce 28% of it while only covering 2% of the Earth’s surface. Rainforest is far, far more effective than anything else in terms of area used to oxygen produced. That’s why losing rainforest is bad news, not to menation the biodiversity and carbon release issues.