Trend of atmospheric oxygen (O2) from Cape Grim, Tasmania. This looks serious, right? Read on.
FOREWORD: I had to chuckle at this. This is the sort of story I would expect in the supermarket tabloids next to a picture of Bat Boy. For the UK Guardian to say there is a “oxygen crisis”, is not only ignorant of the facts, but simple fear mongering riding on the coattails of the “CO2 crisis”. Read the article below, and then read the reasons why myself and others are saying this story is worry over nothing.
UPDATE: Physicist Lubos Motl also takes this article and the author to task, here
UPDATE#2: According to the Guardian website: “It is the policy of the Guardian to correct significant errors as soon as possible” For those readers that think this Guardian article needs correction, here is the contact info:
Readers may contact the office of the readers’ editor by telephoning +44(0)20 7713 4736 between 11am and 5pm UK time Monday to Friday excluding public holidays. Email reader@guardian.co.uk, send mail to The Readers’ Editor, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER, or fax +44(0)20 7239 9997. The Guardian’s editorial code incorporates the editors’ code overseen by the Press Complaints Commission.
The oxygen crisis
Could the decline of oxygen in the atmosphere undermine our health and threaten human survival?
Peter Tatchell guardian.co.uk, Wednesday August 13 2008 20:00 BST
The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects.
Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis.
Read the rest of the story here.
Predictably, once again mankind gets the blame in the article:
Much of this recent, accelerated change is down to human activity, notably the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels.
From a mailing list I subscribe to, there’s been a number of comments made about this story. Here are a few:
The O2 concentration of the atmosphere has been measured off and on for about 100 years now, and the concentration (20.95%) has not varied within the accuracy of the measurements. Only in recent years have more precise measurement techniques been developed, and the tiny decrease in O2 with increasing CO2 has been actually measured….but I believe the O2 concentration is still 20.95%….maybe it’s down to 20.94% by now…I’m not sure.
There is SO much O2 in the atmosphere, it is believed to not be substantially affected by vegetation, but it is the result of geochemistry in deep-ocean sediments…no one really knows for sure.
Since too much O2 is not good for humans, the human body keeps O2 concentrations down around 5% in our major organs. Extra O2 can give you a burst of energy, but it will harm you if the exposure is too long.
It has been estimated that global wildfire risk would increase greatly if O2 concentrations were much more than they are now.
Here’s one I remember reading about a long time ago:
Around 1920 when steel production began to expand to what looked like no limit, it was believed (and demonstrated) that the use of coal would consume all the oxygen in the atmosphere in 50 years.
So far, we are still breathing O2, even though we have increased the volume of coal and oil used steadily since then. More worry based on bad science.
For those wanting to brush up on the history of oxygen concentrations though the millenia, I suggest this essay in Science News:
Changes in the air: variations in atmospheric oxygen have affected evolution in big ways
Science News, Dec 17, 2005, by Sid Perkins
But the most interesting perspective on why there is no oxygen crisis comes from this article from Wallace Broecker of Columbia University titled Et tu, O2?
AN OFT-HEARD WARNING with regard to our planet’s future is that by cutting back tropical forests we put our supply of oxygen gas at risk. Many good reasons exist for placing deforestation near the top of our list of environmental sins, but fortunately the fate of the Earth’s O2 supply does not hang in the balance. Simply put, our atmosphere is endowed with such an enormous reserve of this gas that even if we were to burn all our fossil fuel reserves, all our trees, and all the organic matter stored in soils, we would use up only a few percent of the available O2. No matter how foolishly we treat our environmental heritage, we simply don’t have the capacity to put more than a small dent in our O2 supply. Furthermore, the Earth’s forests do not play a dominant role in maintaining O2 reserves, because they consume just as much of this gas as they produce. In the tropics, ants, termites, bacteria, and fungi eat nearly the entire photosynthetic O2 product. Only a tiny fraction of the organic matter they produce accumulates in swamps and soils or is carried down the rivers for burial on the sea floor.
While no danger exists that our O2 reserve will be depleted, nevertheless the O2 content of our atmosphere is slowly declining–so slowly that a sufficiently accurate technique to measure this change wasn’t developed until the late 1980s. Ralph Keeling, its developer, showed that between 1989 and 1994 the O2 content of the atmosphere decreased at an average annual rate of 2 parts per million. Considering that the atmosphere contains 210,000 parts per million, one can see why this measurement proved so difficult.
This drop was not unexpected, for the combustion of fossil fuels destroys O2. For each 100 atoms of fossil-fuel carbon burned, about 140 molecules of O2 are consumed. The surprise came when Keeling’s measurements showed that the rate of decline of O2 was only about two-thirds of that attributable to fossil-fuel combustion during this period. Only one explanation can be given for this observation: Losses of biomass through deforestation must have been outweighed by a fattening of biomass elsewhere, termed global “greening” by geochemists. Although the details as to just how and where remain obscure, the buildup of extra CO2 in our atmosphere and of extra fixed nitrogen in our soils probably allows plants to grow a bit faster than before, leading to a greater storage of carbon in tree wood and soil humus. For each atom of extra carbon stored in this way, roughly one molecule of extra oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere.
Now remember the graph I showed at the beginning of the article? Here is what Australia’s Ray Langenfelds from CSIRO Atmospheric Research has to say about the Cape Grim O2 measurement.
“The changes we are measuring represent just a tiny fraction of the total amount of oxygen in our air – 20.95 percent by volume. The oxygen reduction is just 0.03 percent in the past 20 years and has no impact on our breathing,” Langenfelds. “Typical oxygen fluctuations indoors or in city air would be far greater than this.”
So there you have it. So much for the “oxygen crisis”. I really wish the media would do a better job of researching and reporting science stories. This example from the Guardian shows how bad science and bad reporting combine to create fear mongering.
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From my confined space training. Seems that a city at 12% O2 wouldn’t operate very well.
23.5% & Above High Oxygen Levels
20.8% to 21% Normal Oxygen Levels for Air
19.5% & Below Low Oxygen Levels
10 to 14% Very faulty judgment, very poor coordination, rapid fatigue
from exertion that may cause permanent heart damage
intermittent breathing.
6 to 12% Deep breathing, accelerated heartbeat, impaired attention
impaired thinking, impaired coordination.
10% or Below Nausea, vomiting, inability to perform vigorous movement
or loss of all movement, unconsciousness followed by death. Less than 6% Spasmodic breathing, convulsive movements
death in minutes.
If this site censored as vigoursly as Peter Hearndon contends, it seems to me that none of Peter Hearndon’s posts would have ever made it to the screen.
Given the paucity of plants in most cities, it’s hardly surprising, much less a conspiracy that O2 levels are less in cities by a barely measurable amount.
If Peter believes that this is a problem worth pursuing, why doesn’t he demonstrate why those who are ridiculing this article are wrong, rather than complain that anyone who disagrees with the article is anti-science, or anti-city.
Living at 6300 feet above sea level, the O2 (and everything else) is about 25% less than flatland. Still 21% concentration or so, just less overall. Climbing a 14’er drops O2 pp down a lot more. Takes a while to adjust, but no biggie for most folks. (base camp at Everest is around 17k feet. That’s another matter.)
If the O2 concentration in ‘some cities’ is really that low, what replaces it? N2? or a mix of CO and VOC’s? That would be a far worse problem than O2 levels.
As for scuba diving, go down 35 feet on a normal air mix, and you have doubled the pp of O2. Doesn’t seem to hurt.
Ah, another crisis to be alarmed about. Now that the temps are declining, we can reassign UHI from Urban Heat Island to Urban Hypoxia Island effect.
Assuming there is a global cooling trend, expect exaggerated temperature drops in urban areas. Heat sinks effect works both ways. Even as it exaggerates warming trends it also exaggerates cooling trends as the effect “undoes” itself and reverts to closer to its true level.
But fear not. I have no doubt that an “adjustment” will be applied to “correct” for such “artificial” cooling! #B^1
“I do not believe that the article is that crazy.”
I am with John McLondon on this. Forget AGW, we need to get the O2 up. At this time, we have only one viable mechanism to accomplish this and we must start right now. If you can not do your part, email me regarding CO2 credits.
Evan,
All too true, a heat sink is a heat sink, and since everything above zero Kelvin is heat, cities will store less of it as temps drop. We shall see how GISS, NOAA, and HADCrut smooth out this year’s drop in temperature.
I think that this O2 depletion concept might have some legs with the greens though. When AGW is no longer the “story” they will be able to flip to hypoxia. Mind you, most of them must be hypoxic, they never stop talking long enough to inhale.
Garron,
Count me in for some of those CO2 credits, although I do my part to increase CO2, I fear that it is not enough to offset our march towards an O2 depleted future. There must be a tipping point, maybe 100 months to act?
Boy, it never ceases to amaze me what people will do with data to make it fit their preconceived ideas. I don’t say that I don’t do it too but we shouldn’t. If the graph had been plotted with a scale of 0 to 210,000 the data would not get people’s attention. It would certainly show how insignificant the change in O2 concentration is.
Keep up the good work guys and gals.
The PPO2 isn’t a particularly meaningful measurement. The lungs work by means of semi-permeable membranes, not pressurization. The process is basically the same as osmosis, where a substance crosses the membrane purely on the basis of relative concentrations. Think of it like a water system. Regardless of the relative volumes of two connected lakes, the one at higher altitude will always fill the lower one. In terms of the lungs, think of the blood vessels as being at about 14-16 meters, and the air being at about 21 meters. If the level of the (usually) higher lake drops below the 14-16 meters of the lower one, the flow stops, or even reverses. Again, the relative volumes in the lakes are meaningless. The only time that volume becomes important is when the higher lake doesn’t have enough water to fill the lower lake at the rate in which it’s being depleted. Back to the body, as altitude increases, the number of available O2 molecules per liter decreases. As the size of our lungs is fairly fixed, the required intake volume eventually passes the available internal volume. That’s where we start having problems.
Beyond that, human “exhaust” is typically around 17% O2, with about 4% having been removed. If the lungs were really capable of pulling useful amounts of O2 out of air at 12%, then people from these cities should automatically, with no training what so ever, be able to hold their breath roughly 3 times as long as people from cleaner areas. Sooooo… How many pearl divers come from Mexico City?
One could dismiss the rantings of Peter Tatchell on his political motivation and self promotion since he left the North London Polytechnic in the 70’s. One only needs to examine Wikipaedia to see that. However, working for the Guardian is common resting place for his type of activism. This would matter so much but for the fact that a significant proportion of the BBC editorial staff started work with this newspaper which perhaps explains the bias in the BBC. Tatchell is a political animal and his recruitment by the Green Party in the UK is likely to result in more nonsense like this.
More worrying is the the New Scientist article last weeks magazine (16th August) entitled
“The Decade After Tomorrow” written by Fred Pearce and Michael Le Page supporting the familiar hypothesis that the world will see global cooling in the next 10 years but the underlying trend is still warming caused by carbon dioxide .
The editorial headed ” Stormy Weather Ahead… Watch out for a renewed flood of stories rubbishing global warming” continues the global warming theme and is every bit as extreme as the article.
There is little real substance in either of these articles as readers of this blog will recognise ( together with some familiar graphs). Nevertheless the New Scientist is much more influential than the Guardian but equally biased!
Sorry I can send either of these pieces I don’t have an electronic link that allows this but I sure somebody has and they’re are definitely worth reading if only to critique.
Anthony: You say “I really wish the media would do a better job of researching and reporting science stories.”
I agree with you and it looks like the Guardian really screwed up here and deserves to get some egg on their face for it. On the other hand, I tried searching to see how this story has been picked up (http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=oxygen+crisis&btnG=Search+News and http://www.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=oxygen+crisis&btnG=Search+Blogs ) and it appears that with few exceptions, it has been ignored by other media outlets and the blogosphere except for those who are rightfully making fun of it.
I only wish that the blogosphere and media would exercise the same kind of skepticism when it comes to garbage science from the other side of the fence, such as the paper by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner, the papers by Khilyuk and Chilingar, and the ludicrous claims by Ernst Beck and others regarding the historical CO2 levels! Alas, some people’s “nutty filters” seem to work in only one direction.
John McLondon (20:48:04) :
Please tell me you’re joking, John McLondon. Surely you must have read Anthony’s ‘Forward’ above:
I had to chuckle at this. This is the sort of story I would expect in the supermarket tabloids next to a picture of Bat Boy. For the UK Guardian to say there is an “oxygen crisis” is not only ignorant of the facts, but simple fear mongering riding on the coattails of the “CO2 crisis”.
The “oxygen crisis” is not even a hypothesis. Any scientist who submitted a paper claiming that we’re rapidly running out of oxygen would be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
Where does our oxygen come from? Why, it comes from carbon dioxide, which plant life dutifully gives to us, keeping carbon for itself. More CO2 = more oxygen. Simple, no?
Bear in mind, John McLondon, that the AGW/runaway global warming hypothesis has not withstood falsification. This new “oxygen crisis” is the same.
Also bear in mind that it is a central requirement of the Scientific Method that those who originate a new hypothesis, such as AGW/runaway global warming, must bear the burden of proof — not those skeptical of the hypothesis.
Every empirical fact pattern concerning the climate fits well within normal, historical climate and temperature variation. Nothing out of the ordinary is occurring. Despite the increase in beneficial CO2, the planet’s temperature is cooling. The Earth has been both warmer and colder during the past couple of millennia, before the first SUV appeared at the first gas station.
Do you even comprehend what is being stated here? It is the AGW/runaway global warming/CO2 is gonna getcha hypothesis that has not withstood falsification. Skeptics simply think that the planet’s climate fluctuates naturally. It is up to those believing in AGW/runaway global warming to prove their hypothesis. They have failed at this; the climate is well within normal bounds. Everything the Warmist contingent says now amounts to “But what if…”
Embracing a lunatic article like “The Oxygen Crisis” makes sense from only one standpoint: there is a full moon out.
john: I think the Guardian is overreaching here.
I fully agree with the oxygen starvation crisis story.
How else can you explain the bigotted culture and distortion of our government, other politicians, and of course the BBC?
Re New Scientist, I used to read it from time to time, as there were (maybe still are) decent articles on space flight, genes, black holes, etc. But there’s definitely an editorial bias against alternatives to AGW. They appear to have consigned Henrik Svensmark to the “climate myths” dustbin, even though he’s (as far as I know) still on course to carry out his CLOUD experiment at the LHC in a couple of years’ time (thus clearly doing science, as opposed to perpetrating a myth.)
“Cape GRIM Observatory.”
Nice touch. Brings this to mind.
Smokey:
Yes, I read Anthony’s forward, but I disagree with him that it is a supermarket tabloid material. Asteroid impact on the Earth occurs roughly 26 million years apart, but we are concerned about that and we look to the sky’s to find anything coming towards us. We investigate whether a blackhole from CERN could eat up our Earth. We are concerned about bird flu, anthrax, small pox, etc. even though it may or may not affect us. Oxygen depletion is just another one of them, worth investigating. That is why I have to disagree with Anthony.
“Where does our oxygen come from? Why, it comes from carbon dioxide, which plant life dutifully gives to us, keeping carbon for itself. More CO2 = more oxygen. Simple, no?”
No, oxygen was produced by Cyanobacteria around two billion years ago – not from CO2. And they took a long time to produce oxygen. Oxygen to CO2 back to oxygen cycle through plants does not change the concentration of oxygen, if that is all what is happening. But when a part of CO2 is converted to carbonates, the atmospheric oxygen content will be reduced. Oxygen level has been going down even without us producing CO2
(see: http://www.pnas.org/content/96/20/10955/F2.large.jpg ) although this probably is not going to affect us in the near future. But that may be true about asteroids also, but we still investigate them (even though we cannot do much against a gigantic asteroid even if we know it is coming for us).
Health problems with low oxygen (simple version): http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/zoo00/zoo00755.htm
Evan: “john: I think the Guardian is overreaching here.”
Is that for me or the other John?
The article should have been written in a different way, rather than implying an imminent crisis. This I have to agree.
John: I disagree with you. First of all, I think your estimate for average times between asteroid impacts may be true for really gigantic ones, but not for ones that are still plenty large enough to pose a significant local / regional, of not global, problem. Also, an asteroid impact is sort of an all-or-nothing thing, i.e., it is not something that is a steady change and may be a problem in a few million years…but rather a cataclysmic event that has a small but finite probability of occurring even in the next 100 years.
Second of all, while I am not saying that scientists shouldn’t think at all about oxygen depletion, what I am saying is that writing a news story about it, particularly one like the Guardian story, is unnecessarily hyping something that the public doesn’t need to really be concerned about on any reasonable timescale (and which is not really tied in to the burning of fossil fuels since the amount of decrease in oxygen we are causing by doing this is not signficant). And, the danger we have is that people will have trouble distinguishing about real dangers we need to face up to now, like AGW, and things like this. In fact, we already see our friend Smokey doing just that and equating the two as if they are issues of similar concern…which is ridiculous.
For you. I don’t see it as a real crisis. By the time it became one (if ever) mankind would very probably have near godlike technological powers to adjust. (Something the Stern Review fails to consider.)
John McLondon (06:45:22) :
“… We are concerned about bird flu, anthrax, small pox, etc. even though it may or may not affect us. Oxygen depletion is just another one of them, worth investigating.”
Smallpox? AFAIK, there are two countries with stockpiles, the US and Russia. GB got rid of theirs after a scientists accidentally got infected and died. Bird flu is worth worrying about, I’m amazed that it hasn’t evolved into a scourge like the 1918 flu.
“Where does our oxygen come from? Why, it comes from carbon dioxide, which plant life dutifully gives to us, keeping carbon for itself. More CO2 = more oxygen. Simple, no?”
“Oxygen level has been going down even without us producing CO2
(see: http://www.pnas.org/content/96/20/10955/F2.large.jpg ) although this probably is not going to affect us in the near future.”
Did you note the scale of the X-axis? Hint: “my” stands for “millions of years”. Perhaps you can extract just the last 100 years of data from it.
How many things do you stop and worry about before you cross a street? That’s such a risky endeavor that the US and its states keep statistics on those who don’t make it across.
Joel Shore:
The AGW/climate catastrophe has been falsified. Referring to it as a ‘real danger’ is mendacious and makes a mockery of the Scientific Method, which relies on falsification.
Those hypothesizing AGW/climate catastrophe have failed to meet the burden of proof. Carbon dioxide does not lead to runaway global warming.
However, I will agree that there is a serious concern regarding asteroids. On March 23, 1989 a thousand foot wide asteroid missed the Earth by only 400,000 miles. Had it arrived six hours earlier, it would have made a direct hit.
Six years ago another asteroid missed our planet by only 75,000 miles [a third of the distance to the Moon]. That near miss was not even discovered until three days after the asteroid had passed by.
Recall that in 1994 Jupiter was hit multiple times by a comet.
More than 100,000 asteroids lie between Mars and Jupiter, and many have extremely elliptical orbits that routinely take them across Earth’s path. With advance preparation, impact threats could be detected and averted. From far enough away, it requires little energy to divert an asteroid. No atomic bombs are necessary; a small ion engine wold suffice.
Unlike the falsified AGW/catastrophe hypothesis, the threat from asteroids is very real. The odds of a strike are not extremely high, but even a small impact would be catastrophic.
Unfortunately, the climate hype industry is sucking up most of the available increase in the science budget, starving astronomy and many other science programs that could be doing much more valuable work than alarming the populace over a non-existent AGW threat. [Note that NASA/GISS is now requesting an additional $10+ million over last year’s budget in just one single area: to simply ‘study’ its inaccurate computer models.]
The AGW/climate scam continues to deprive every other branch of science adequate funding. GISS started it, NASA saw and followed the money, and now the NOAA has started the same alarmist money-grubbing behavior.
At this point, honest science is irrelevant; now it’s all about the money, which has thoroughly politicized and corrupted government climate-related agencies.
If/when an asteroid hits, how will diverting a big part of the U.S. science budget into one [repeatedly falsified] area be explained?
We loose our atmosphere to space. Eventually, all the O2 will be gone to deep space. Just like Mars did, this planet will become oxygen free. But that is in a long, very long time. By then we might live in Closed up cities producing our own oxygen… if humanity is still here!
The real climate danger, Joel, isn’t AGW, which is a complete fraud, but cooling, which has begun. The slight warming of the past century, coming out of the LIA was a boon to mankind, as was the increased C02. A cooling climate is always worse for mankind.
joel
‘[Note that NASA/GISS is now requesting an additional $10+ million over last year’s budget in just one single area: to simply ‘study’ its inaccurate computer models.]’
I can’t believe that it would cost $10 million to find out the CO2 amplification number is a tad high or to reprogram water vapor.