Climate change and nutrient pollution are depleting oxygen from oceans: study
Boy are characterizations like this getting tired. An actually accurate title would read something like: <i>Farm and industry run-off in certain areas of the world is depleting oxygen in certain parts of the ocean.</i><p>The vast majority of the issue isn't related to rising temps, it would still be there if there were no rising temps. It is the agricultural and industrial runoff in what I suspect are very, very specific parts of the ocean. The title "as temperatures rise" is totally dishonest. It's probably closer to something like "as demand for palm oil increases" (not trying to finger that one crop, but its more accurate than "as temperatures rise").<p>> "To stop the worrying expansion of oxygen-poor areas, we need to decisively curb greenhouse gas emissions as well as nutrient pollution from agriculture and other sources."<p>If you want to do something decisive, point out where these oxygen depleted areas are, and do something to stop the runoff. That's the main problem. Tying it in to the much more nebulous "carbon emissions" hurts more than it helps but its like climate writers cannot help themselves.<p>Imagine if everyone trying to stop the ozone-depletion problem did this. Nothing would have gotten done to this day. Find the smallest unit of actionable, measurable change and try to change that <i>first.</i><p>EDIT hokay lets read the study:<p>BBC: "Around 700 ocean sites are now suffering from low oxygen, compared with 45 in the 1960s."<p>Section 2.5 summary on page 109 (PDF) or page 85 of the report, two bullets:<p>• Over 900 areas around the world have been identified as experiencing the effects of eutrophication. Of these, over 700 have problems with hypoxia, but through nutrient and organic loading management about 70 (10%) of them can now be classified as recovering.<p>• There is no other environmental variable of such ecological importance to coastal ecosystems that has changed
so drastically in such a short period of time as a result of human activities as dissolved oxygen.<p>Look, the part BBC wants to spook you with? It's eutrophication! It is independent of warming and can be fixed independent of warming. This is a good thing! It is already being fixed in some areas, which is even nicer. All I ask is that we actually decouple these from "warming" so we can do something about them faster.