This alarming missive just in from the: University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
As oxygen-deprived waters increase, they emit more greenhouse gasses into atmosphere
Above graphic from NOLA.COM click for details.
Cambridge, Md. (March 11, 2010) – The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived “dead zones” along the world’s coasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters. In the March 12 edition of the journal Science, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science oceanographer Dr. Lou Codispoti explains that the increased amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) produced in low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters can elevate concentrations in the atmosphere, further exacerbating the impacts of global warming and contributing to ozone “holes” that cause an increase in our exposure to harmful UV radiation.
“As the volume of hypoxic waters move towards the sea surface and expands along our coasts, their ability to produce the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide increases,” explains Dr. Codispoti of the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory. “With low-oxygen waters currently producing about half of the ocean’s net nitrous oxide, we could see an additional significant atmospheric increase if these ‘dead zones’ continue to expand.”
Although present in minute concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere, nitrous oxide is a highly potent greenhouse gas and is becoming a key factor in stratospheric ozone destruction. For the past 400,000 years, changes in atmospheric N2O appear to have roughly paralleled changes in carbon dioxide CO2 and have had modest impacts on climate, but this may change. Just as human activities may be causing an unprecedented rise in the terrestrial N2O sources, marine N2O production may also rise substantially as a result of nutrient pollution, warming waters and ocean acidification. Because the marine environment is a net producer of N2O, much of this production will be lost to the atmosphere, thus further intensifying its climatic impact.
Increased N2O production occurs as dissolved oxygen levels decline. Under well-oxygenated conditions, microbes produce N2O at low rates. But at oxygen concentrations decrease to hypoxic levels, these waters can increase their production of N2O.
N2O production rates are particularly high in shallow suboxic and hypoxic waters because respiration and biological turnover rates are higher near the sunlit waters where phytoplankton produce the fuel for respiration.
When suboxic waters (oxygen essentially absent) occur at depths of less than 300 feet, the combination of high respiration rates, and the peculiarities of a process called denitrification can cause N2O production rates to be 10,000 times higher than the average for the open ocean. The future of marine N2O production depends critically on what will happen to the roughly ten percent of the ocean volume that is hypoxic and suboxic.
“Nitrous oxide data from many coastal zones that contain low oxygen waters are sparse, including Chesapeake Bay,” said Dr. Codispoti. “We should intensify our observations of the relationship between low oxygen concentrations and nitrous oxide in coastal waters.”
The article “Interesting Times for Nitrous Oxide” appears in the March 12, 2010 edition of the journal Science.
Gail Combs (15:53:20) :
Stephen Brown (13:33:44) :
“Even cow dung worked back into the soil is a good thing… ”
Sorry, but that is incorrect. Animal dung spread on a field is the cause of more eutrophication than the correct usage and application of “chemical” fertilizers. It is a pracitce which is actively discouraged here in the UK.”
There is a BIG difference between spread on the top of a field and worked into the soil so it is near the roots. If it is placed on the top you are correct it will wash away. Also here in the USA, at least with chicken and pig manures they are placed in a covered containment area, composted and then applied to the fields otherwise they will “burn the plants.
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Gail, of course, you’re right. Every intelligent farmer knows that it’s necessary to incorporate the organic manures in some type of a plow-down manner, whether by tiller or actual plow. (Who owns a plow these days?) And since all surviving farmers in the USA are both intelligent and computer-literate, this bit of the obvious is understood. After all, plow-down is the fastest way to improve soil structure and promote future root growth. The nitrogen burn from raw manure has ended many a 4-H project. The fact that there isn’t enough manure to produce the crops which America demands seems to be overlooked.
I wonder what our croplands would look like if the farmers could actually AFFORD to use as much surface-contact fertilizers as the “run-off analysis” has suggested that they do.
But, what do I know. I started life as “just a Quaker boy from Illinois.”
Regards, Henry.
Now this is just downright freaking nutz. Every year nearly a quarter million caribou migrate between summer and winter grounds. They cross a lot of rivers and streams. The world is well acquainted with fertilizer drifting out to sea and has been for a very long time.
Now let’s toss in migrating whales and other aquatic mammals, fish and mollusks that poop it the sea daily, musk ox, deer, elk, lemmings, and bears that actually go doodoo in the woods, and you have a lot of fertilizer heading down stream or is already in the sea. It’s anyone’s guess how many dead mammoth remains are swept off to sea each year – recall they were early victims of global warming when their habitat melted. Not to drag out this meme too far, but before the flyover states were black with Black Angus beef they were black with bison and there were no fences then. They pretty much “go” where they want, and where they went was ultimately flooded down stream to NOLA. In fact the whole French Quarter is probably old bison poo sediment given that the entire inland drainage system passes through NO. There’s just nothing new under the sun regarding what floats down stream.
I don’t know how many of you have been to Alaska, but the state bird is the mosquito. There are tons, no, megatons of them. They too drift off to the great white sea. There is just no shortage of stuff heading out to sea each and every year that smaller and yet smaller things live on. We should think of algae blooms as the grout that fills the gaps in the ocean’s floor.
But wait, there’s more – all those Russian larches so much in the news, the spruce, the, well, you name it flora, drop dead or drop needles and a huge amount of that is swept off to nature’s garbage dump – the world’s oceans.
Lordy, the very floor of the oceans is the natural dumping ground for nature’s greatest threat, CO2 and methane. And wait just one damn minute, the vilest villain of the green house gases is what, again? Water! Keep that out of the oceans and this will be a long lived and greening world for generations to come. It’s that dam water – there’s your problem.
Wayne Delbeke (13:57:43) :
Well spoken – dont take my my last comments as lack of care for the environment. Quite the opposite – “research” as represented in this paper is a threat to truly protecting the environment – we cant properly allocate research dollars to true problems if everything is disingenuously pitched as a “crisis” , which looking at the last paragraph of the post, clearly this is just a poorly conceived pitch to get another grant. I would concur there are true problems out there to be concerned about, although this paper leaves me highly unconvinced that N20 as it relates to AGW is one of those problems.
M. Simon (12:10:41) :
We need to undertake a massive project to get the nitrogen out of the environment. No fertilizer for farms. Unless it is dead fish.
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Reply:
I suppose that, even though the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, we could figure out a way to get rid of it. Hmmmm…. Still figuring. 😉
The whole problem with this posting is that it began with “{blah blah} contributing to climate change”. Anything “{blah blah} contributing to climate change” is BS (bad science). The heap pile of BS (bad science) that includes “{blah blah} contributing to climate change” is too high to be sustainable.
There is nothing wrong with our oceans that eliminating government meddling won’t cure.
RockyRoad (20:10:16) :
M. Simon (12:10:41) : We need to undertake a massive project to get the nitrogen out of the environment. No fertilizer for farms. Unless it is dead fish.
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Reply: I suppose that, even though the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, we could figure out a way to get rid of it. Hmmmm…. Still figuring. 😉
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The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
“At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’s scientists to find a solution.
This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives. Their invention continues to feed us today; without it, more than two billion people would starve.
But their epochal triumph came at a price we are still paying. The Haber-Bosch process was also used to make the gunpowder and high explosives that killed millions during the two world wars. Both men were vilified during their lives; both, disillusioned and disgraced, died tragically. Today we face the other unintended consequences of their discovery — massive nitrogen pollution and a growing pandemic of obesity.”
S.E.Hendriksen (12:24:29) :
Hereby the latest example of algae bloom…. just in one single day because of flooding in Southern Spain.
Actually that’s 1 year and 1 day.
Pat Moffitt (14:29:43) :
Most of our greatest environmental problems – we pay to create via subsidies.
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Indeed! Overfishing has largely been a result of government-subsidized fishing industries: the factory trawlers, for example, were not built by the industry, but through government grants. Governments subsidized the modernization of the fleet from sail to steam, or subsidized the construction of large-scale fish processing plants, or used subsidies to allow one nation’s fishery to undercut that of its competitors.
Henry Phipps (19:58:30) :
(…)
But, what do I know. I started life as “just a Quaker boy from Illinois.” (…)
Yeah, so? Nixon was a Quaker.
I suppose I could dig up a better example, besides William Penn. But hey, Nixon was worthy of being memorialized with an ancient Vulcan saying! That counts!
Gail Combs (15:07:03) :
The insanity of the politicians is increasing by leaps and bounds. The mega-corporations and the USDA/FDA food “safety” hoax is now pushing “sterile farming techniques modeled after the drug Good Manufacturing Practices. It is called HR 2749: Food Safety’s Scorched Earth Policy.
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The practices you describe are truly frightening – these so-called sterile strips sound like the recipe for a dustbowl, not to mention enormous food waste and loss of habitat. Obarmy and his ilk are out of their collective trees – and where is Greenpeace and the EPA on this issue?
S.E.Hendriksen (12:24:29) :
Hereby the latest example of algae bloom…. just in one single day because of flooding in Southern Spain.
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You presume too much. There is nothing in the write up regarding algal bloom. Neither do I think one would develop in a single day during a flood when mean temperatures are 44 to 50 degrees F. But if one were developing, wouldn’t it be more in evidence with a color change from the blue range to the green range (various other satellite photos at NASA specifically identifying algal blooms show a green color range) as flood waters leave the wetlands and enter the warmer ocean waters?
As it is, the blue range appears to be a combination of water depth and siltation. Further, evidence of it being siltation appears in the flood waters further out in the ocean, where rather than a growing bloom, the opposite — a dispersal via sedimentation and the area showing as a darker blue — is the case.
I’ve consulted with the European GHG credit aggregators on mitigation of nitrogen oxide, and was surprised to find that, by far, the great majority of N2O is generated by nitric acid production. It generated a nice price for credits due to its supposed greater impact upon GW.
At least the complexity of atmospheric chemistry is getting some new attention. Thanks, Anthony, this is good information to disseminate.
And cheers to Mr. Wayne Delbeke, I agree with your post. I’m a skeptic of the shoddy “science” that the folks from the climatology community keep shoveling at us, but there are also legitimate and pressing environmental problems mixed in with the garbage.
Agricultural runoff is a big one, we are killing off all the estuaries, fisheries and oyster beds with the effluent from factory poultry farms, over-fertilized fields and the like. Not much really being done about that, either.
Does seaweed have “tree-rings”, we could study ancient seaweed “tree-rings” to discover that such “dead-zones” were an infrequent occurance in the past until about the 1850s, when the would have suddenly increased with a terrifying exponential curve… for one reason or another…I just can’t think of it right now…
This is getting way OT but one last reply about the GMO issue and its parallels with the AWG movement then I’ll desist.
” Doug in Dunedin (15:33:07) :
Tim. You name me any food not harvested from the sea and eaten by man that is NOT genetically modified.”
Most processed foods in North America do contain it because they rely on the cheapest junk fat and carbs to provide “value” to their customers. You can get a complete list of products that are GMO free a thttp://www.nongmoproject.org/ and the list is growing quickly (some are even cheaper than their GM alternatives much to my surprise).
If you avoid corn, cotton, soy & canola you can avoid a lot of it. Right now those are the highest (75+ %) GM market penetration. Several others like alfalfa were ordered off the market by the courts because they found the USDA negligent in doing any reasonable environmental impact assessments.
I do not oppose GMOs but I am not a lab rat. They were rushed to market without proper testing and are now through “accident” spreading even in countries that have banned them. They are the classic double edged sword that science gives us. Great potential and great danger.
Right now we are polluting the very DNA of our world so greedy, control freak corporations who want to control the entire planet’s seed stocks can make profit. All done with nothing more than “trust us, we’re scientists and we know what we are doing” attitude that strikes me as very much in the same vein as AWG proponents. Sorry but science is NOT based on trust. It is based on repeatable experiments that get consistent results and open data access to name a few things that both the pro-AWG & pro-GMO groups seem hellbent against. That makes me suspicious right away.
I think the equivalent to this one for the GMO debate is http://www.seedsofdeception.com and until the AWG crowd address the issues raised here and the GMO crowd address the issues raised there I think they are hiding a lot of shoddy research and justifying their existence at the expense of others.
Wouldnt the dying algeal bloom draw co2 out of the atmosphere? This has been proposed already as a solution to global warming, no mention of creating anorobic conditions back then though!
Jimbo (23:40:11) :
[from the recent Methane panic de jour thread]
“I posted this comment at Real Climate just yesterday evening GMT.
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#89 “From Co2 to methane, then what?
Water Vapour, 40,000 parts per million.
CO2, 360 parts per million
Methane, 1.7 parts per million
Comment by Jimbo — 7 March 2010 @ur momisugly 6:25 PM”
Here’s your answer – N2O! 300 parts per billion!
Here is an executive summary:
Lou Coddswallop, Miss Conditionality et al. 2010:
“can negatively impact … can elevate … further exacerbating the impacts of global warming … ability to produce … we could see … if.
appear to have … but this may change … may be causing an unprecedented … may also rise substantially … these waters can increase.
can cause N2O … what will happen? … We should intensify our observations”
Not one shred of evidence or data.
We’re back in the dark ages.
These organic rich sea bottoms will form oil and gas fields in a couple of million years.
Tim (22:16:02) : Said
” Doug in Dunedin (15:33:07) :
Tim. You name me any food not harvested from the sea and eaten by man that is NOT genetically modified.”
Most processed foods in North America do contain it because they rely on the cheapest junk fat and carbs to provide “value” to their customers. You can get a complete list of products that are GMO free a thttp://www.nongmoproject.org/ and the list is growing quickly (some are even cheaper than their GM alternatives much to my surprise).
Tim
That outfit is of no assistance at all. Your reference is just a blog pushing its own products.
Anyway you miss the point. All food that has been in cultivation since man began selecting and breeding plants and animals for food has been genetically modified. All that has happened over the years is that the techniques to achieve genetic modification have changed. You are just riling against ‘big business’.
Ed Scott (17:34:14) :
SENATE EPW MINORITY RELEASES REPORT ON CRU CONTROVERSY
Ed, what a wonderful job they have done and so much quicker than the UK Comittee and UEA.
Perhaps Anthony could do an article on it.
In relation to the changing Earth orbit, remember there are other orbiting bodies that change the shape of our orbit. The Earth’s orbit is becoming more elliptical each year as influenced by the outer planets.
The next ice age is where we are heading.
Another problem is identified, more calamities predicted. $billions for additional research must be granted and spent. Only the collection of additional $trillions in tax dollars will avert the calamity. This will be Al Gore’s source material for “An Inconvenient Truth Part II”
Coming soon to the antarctic, palm trees and crocodiles.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/03/12/2844839.htm
You’ve gotta laugh.
http://www.animalpicturesarchive.com/ArchOLD-7/1192252926.jpg
I have an unscientific take on these types of ‘science’ articles ____
“The increased frequency and intensity of oxygen-deprived “dead zones” along the world’s coasts can negatively impact environmental conditions in far more than just local waters.”
First sentence — Key word here is ‘can’, stop right there. What if we filled the whole of Chesapeake bay with oil, CAN that make a dead zone — The article infers about fertilizer pollution, N2O, and changes quickly into the notion pollution causes global warming. The mixing of the two is to try and blur the lines, to get people to accept ‘pollution causes global warming’. This is becoming more prevalent as the temperature record and lack of substantiated CO2 forced global warming science fails, and in general the fossil fuel driven global warming theory takes more hits.
Isn’t it true that no one wants pollution, in any form.
It’s worth noting — One of the biggest travesties in human history, the junk science of DDT — In the old days, Rachael Carson convinced people that DDT was going to kill off nature in her hoax book Silent Spring. Over 35 million African children died of malaria because of this hoax. After over 30 years of trying by the UN-WHO they found nothing tangible about DDT. Later in late 2006 the UN-WHO allowed DDT to be used once again.
I also think that the CFCs-Ozone hole theory needs a serious re-looking as well. The Sun UV-A and UV-B produces and destroys ozone in the upper atmosphere …..