Runoff is a likely culprit. From nitrogen-based fertilizers. Problem is, these same fertilizers feed a very hungry and constantly growing world. The answers will not be easy...give up the fertilizers, and you risk mass starvation. The answer may also lie in more effective land management, and keeping fertilizer from migrating off of farmland will also help.

I'm not sure the number of dead zones matters, per se. In fact, what I'm really worried about is the count will go down to 1.

Standing by for an industry-sponsored "think" tank to tell me it's all a liberal hoax...

"The next big challenge, after global warming, is going to be addressing the massive upset of the world's nitrogen cycle," Rader said.

Well, we should have that global warming thing taken care of any day now.

It's interesting, but I think that as we develop we are going to have to take over and actively manage more and more of the world's ecology.

We started with providing food: agriculture & animal husbandry.

Then clean water & sewage removal.

Then (relatively recently) our microbial environment.

More recently still our germ line.

It looks like we'll be actively managing the carbon cycle soon, why not the the nitrogen cycle too..

kinda cool when you think about. Humanity, the eusocial ape.

The industry knows all about it. And they are working toward solutions that will be effective without endangering our food supply.

Yes, it is possible to be both a liberal and an executive in a fertilizer company :)

The researchers wrote that it is unrealistic to try to return to pre-industrial levels of nutrients flowing into coastal waters

Unless we make a serious effort to remediate the effects from pollution we will eventually return to pre-industrial levels of nutrient runoff - but not for the reasons they're thinking about.

Mark: Good point.

Read recently, probably Science News, that dead zones appear to be caused by excess phosphorous.

>Yes, it is possible to be both a liberal and an executive in a fertilizer company :)

I guess I get to be the first: "It is impossible to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair (from memory, might be a word or so mangled)

die-offs are fine. we need to eat less fish anyway - too much mercury.

Windhorse at 7:30:

exactly

We should be watching climate too, but water issues (dead zones, water use conflicts, etc.) are really going to crunch us. Consider e.g. how much water it takes to process the lower-grade HC sources that conservatives are so hot to trot.

The problem could be mitigated quite a bit if we'd stop eating animals...and breeding like rabbits. Too much to hope for though.

It can more easily be called a liberal conspiracy with a chart like that. 1910? We were barely recording daily temperatures back then.

In one year, Malawi went from unbelievable rates of starvation to exporting food. What was the change? Fertilizer and rain.

It's not so simple. And we need to recognize that before we start making pronouncements about "not eating animals" and assuming that anyone who works for a major corporation is evil.

Too many people on a small planet. Period.

This is the ultimate issue affecting our well being and even our survival. Unfortunately this cannot be addressed or even whispered in the US political system.

Great electorate we have here... the light of the western world.

After my death, I was hoping the nitrogen I am made of would be reorganized into a flowering plant. Blooming algae was not on the list.

This is just more conclusive proof that it's Stephen King's world. We just live in it.

Brojo: Blooming algae was not on the list.

But algae grown in a controlled environment may be a great substitute for petroleum. Just think, your remains could be used to fill someone's gas tank!

Calm down everyone!

Extinction is the "invisible hand" that will ultimately reset the various global ecological processes to sustainable equilibrium states.

It's Mother Nature's free market.

Sure, we may be among the many "higher" vertebrates that are casualties of the process, but ultimately, it's for the greater good.

The market works.

This worries the shit out of me. Many of the world's fisheries have already collapsed. But when you have right-wing twits like Minnesota's Michelle Bachmann in Congress, what hope do we have of any meaningful action being taken?

Malthus was right. So was Marx, e.g., "the capitalist will sell the rope," etc., although one suspects he'd be surprised at just how it came about.

Anybody know where algae and jellyfish fit into the Fed's daily food pyramid?

The problem with your conclusions is that they don't take into account um gubba blab gnung choog ferf jesus weelajaj sosha-lizm turp free market cowboy bald eagle jesus. When you start making sense, email me.

Let's double the population of the US every twenty years. That should help.

j goodby @7:15: Runoff is a likely culprit. From nitrogen-based fertilizers. Problem is, these same fertilizers feed a very hungry and constantly growing world. The answers will not be easy...give up the fertilizers, and you risk mass starvation. The answer may also lie in more effective land management, and keeping fertilizer from migrating off of farmland will also help.

How about we give family planning some consideration?

.

What is really depressing about this is that we already know the cheap technological fixes -- air bubbling through our sewage and dispersion at sea of small-grained iron-oxide.

A trawler that can destroy ten square miles of sea-bed on a single trip out can probably recoup the damage by shoveling a couple of ground up old cars over the tafrail as she does so.

If every oil platform bubbled a ton of air into a riverine sewage plume for every ton of oil, mud, dirty water, and crud that it brought up, that would leave a huge sigh of relief downstream.

What's sad is that us humans have not yet developed the institution forms -- corporations, enforcement agencies, profit-feed-back-loops -- to make these obvious necessities happen.


.

j goodby warns us against "assuming that anyone who works for a major corporation is evil," but the closest anyone has come to that in this thread is the (reasonable) imputation that self-interest makes it hard for people to see inconvenient things. Bad conscience? Or just sloppy transference of actual reactions in other conversations to phantom comments in this one?

And sure, it's not a simple problem, but note the dismissal of "not eating animals." I'm not a vegetarian, but I think a large part of the solution WOULD be a large reduction (not elimination) of meat consumption. Since currently about 60% of our grain goes to feed animals, we could feed a lot more people if we ate a lot less meat.

Here in New York where a lot of land is better for pasture than for crops, a Cornell group recently calculated that the most "sustainable" local diet includes the modest amount of meat that can be raised on pasture, with cropland devoted to direct human feeding. The same idea could be generalized worldwide: use pasture for animals with no or minimal fertilization, and use cropland for things people eat. Problem not necessarily solved, but definitely reduced.

And someone who dismisses that by saying it's too simple? That's someone who knows all too well that his fertilizer company doesn't make more money under this strategy.

Diaz' institution, VIMS, has a googlemap of the dead zones: http://www.vims.edu/deadzone/

Nixon,

I think that was Lenin with the quote about the rope; he was right by the way. The Market is God! About the jellyfish, who knows? But I used to work on the creatures and the populations of many species in the Pacific Northwest have collapsed. Could they be the marine equivalent of the disappearing amphibians of the rain forest? I'm betting that the answer is yes.

Heterotrophs put untold gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Dead zones are just nature's way of combating global warming.

Also, the cummulative number of anything will go up the longer you are counting. As this is based on publishing results and the net thickness of ecological papers published is probably increasing exponentially, I really wish they had a different graph.

A few of the dead zones (i.e. oregon coastal hypoxia in the last decade) are hard to pin directly on anthropogenic influence. It's fairly likely that wind patterns that create strong coastal upwelling in this area are not a new phenomenon and I don't think we've had a huge impact on the nutrient load of intermediate water in the area.

I'm sure there are species which are struggling but I've heard of many reports of jellyfish population explosions.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/060710_jellyfish_explosion.html

1910? We were barely recording daily temperatures back then.

We weren't talking about the trailer park.
.

This could be the reason we have a desperate shortage or Nordic seaman.

K,

Indeed, there have been blooms of jellyfish. As the link points out, however, the increased biomass of jellyfish off the coast of West Africa is likely due to the collapse of fish stocks due to overfishing. The bigger problem is the spread of exotics in the ballast water of ocean going ships. More evidence that we are using the planet as a refuse pit...and the consequences are catching up with us.

I can't imagine being a young person in this intellectual environment of gloom and doom. They need an Obama leader more than the wrinkly old man one.

Adam wrote: "It looks like we'll be actively managing the carbon cycle soon, why not the the nitrogen cycle too."

Did you hear the one about the guy who walks into a bar with a sledge hammer, which he begins swinging wildly around until he has pretty much smashed and trashed everything into the place, and then as the customers and bartender cower in fear, he pauses, surveys the wreckage, and says with satisfaction, "That's just what this place needed -- somebody with brains, like me, to actively manage it!"

Let me ask you a question, Adam: why don't you just go ahead and actively manage the functioning of your liver, and why not your kidneys too? Surely you are so smart, you can do a better job of it than a stupid liver or kidney can do.

Keep in mind that this problem will interact synergistically with two problems caused by human emissions of CO2 and other "greenhouse gases": (1) the increasing acidification of the oceans caused by their uptake of excess CO2 and (2) the anthropogenic warming of the oceans, both of which are damaging to a variety of ocean life, from corals to phytoplankton.

We are running a grave risk of triggering a global ecological catastrophe and a mass extinction of most life on Earth, which has happened before from natural causes. In this case, the cause is not volcanic activity, or an asteroid impact, as in the past mass extinctions, but the day to day activities of the human species.

If we continue on our present course, the damage to the Earth's biosphere will be as massive and certain as if an asteroid were on course to impact the Earth. Unlike an asteroid, however, in principle at least humans have the power to change course.

SecularAnimist,

What makes you so sure previous mass extinctions weren't caused by really smart mammal like reptiles burning up a bunch of fossil fuels, screwing up the environment, and then leaving for Alpha Centauri.

Unlike an asteroid, however, in principle at least humans have the power to change course.

Maybe, but I figure that's only true when the short term economic cost is small or when excess wealth is available. I guess it depends on the stability of authoritarian governments intent on keeping carbon in the ground. We might be very much like an asteroid.

Luckily, the Republicans are all over this problem. Nothing a little offshore drilling won't cure.

Did the list of Dead Zones include the mental activity inside the Beltway and Wall Street?

As with GW, I don't really see any hope in solving this problem other than technology improvements in how we create and treat waste, as well as the use of direct technological interventions.

Cutting back on production and growth directly is simply not politically tenable. This is a job for, well, taxpayers.

And please, enough of this stupid stuff about taxing corporations. Corporations do not and cannot incurr the burdens of a tax, even if they nominally pay it to the IRS. Corporations aren't actual people. Only the various people that do business with or make up the corporation ultimately incurr the tax burden. And, ironically, when you nominally try to tax a corporation, the results are almost always a regressive tax burden (i.e. consumers and lower level workers incurr most of the effect in dampened wages and higher prices), simply because rich people are by nature more financially and geographically flexible.

Did the list of Dead Zones include the mental activity inside the Beltway and Wall Street?
Posted by: slanted tom

Cracking up.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government only when it deserves it. - Mark Twain

Look on the plus side. Just think of how many new scrolls we can find in those 'Dead Zones'

Bad,

Where was the stupid stuff about taxing corporations? I text-searched the thread for "tax" and only came up with your comment.

Agreed, taxing corporations as corporations isn't germaine to this problem.

However, taxing fertilizer use (whether by corporations or by Farmer Bob) shifts incentives toward using less of the damaging stuff. And sure, the tax guessed passed along (to the extent that market demand allows it to), but that's exactly the point. When you're doing something that causes serious environmental harm, the basic recipe for a rational response is a combination of doing less and alternate ways of doing what you're doing. In this case, a tax on fertilizer is the simplest way to do it. Simple--but still effective.

Bad: corporations already take everything they can ("all the market will bear"). Lowering taxes on corporations won't actually make them return the savings to their customers.

Progressive taxation leaves capitalism to do its thing (since it's allegedly vital to American life) and just provides a return path back to the poor for all that financial blood to keep circling.

The solution to the problems that human agriculture has created with the nitrogen cycle, including nitrogen runoff into coastal ocean waters, is organic agriculture and an end to the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, period.

Organic agriculture is at least as productive as so-called "conventional" petrochemical agriculture -- particularly in the context of small farms growing a diversity of foods rather than vast industrial monocultures -- and organic agriculture is sustainable, which petrochemical agriculture is not.

Moreover, organic agriculture has been shown to sequester carbon in the soil, so rather than contributing hugely to anthropogenic global warming as does petrochemical agriculture, organic agriculture actually helps to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

Sustainable, productive, diversified, organic agriculture is a key strategy for bringing both the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle back into balance.

SA,

We're getting there. First, though, we gotta exhaust the resources we have. Why make a big change until there is a big problem? We humans don't work that way. We compete as hard as we can for everything there is. That's what we've always done and that's what we are doing now. It is in our genes.

Mother nature rules all.

new slogan:

"Better dying through chemistry"

SecularAnimist: Adam: why don't you just go ahead and actively manage the functioning of your liver, and why not your kidneys too?

Your analogies are good, and your point well taken, but I think you're criticizing the wrong person. On re-reading his post it was clear that what Adam meant by "managing" is cleaning up our shit (sometimes literally), not geo-engineering.

alex wrote: "On re-reading his post it was clear that what Adam meant by 'managing' is cleaning up our shit (sometimes literally), not geo-engineering."

Perhaps so. However, what Adam wrote was "It looks like we'll be actively managing the carbon cycle soon, why not the nitrogen cycle too."

What we need to "manage" is our destructive behavior, not the Earth's carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, hydrological cycle, biosphere, etc. We need to manage ourselves so as to live sustainably within the carrying capacity of the Earth's biosphere -- while leaving enough of that biosphere alone to allow it to remain healthy, diverse, resilient and robust enough to support all of the other species with whom we share this planet.

The fact that we are causing mass disruption and destruction on a planetary through reckless and irresponsible activities driven by greed and ignorance is, to put it mildly, not an indication that we have the ability to "manage" the Earth system.

Sorry, I guess I got overworked with the corporations this, corporations that stuff. Still, my (somewhat offtopic) point stands. To wit:

"Bad: corporations already take everything they can ("all the market will bear"). Lowering taxes on corporations won't actually make them return the savings to their customers.

Progressive taxation leaves capitalism to do its thing (since it's allegedly vital to American life) and just provides a return path back to the poor for all that financial blood to keep circling. "

I'm all for progressive taxation. Which is exactly the point. Taxing a corporation isn't like taxing the rich. It's like pointing a shotgun into a diverse crowd of people and pulling trigger without having much clue who you are likely to hit. And, in fact, its a tax that quite often is more likely to hit poorer people than richer ones, because they are much less likely to be able to move out of the way or shove someone else between themselves and the blast.

Corporations by and large do not determine who benefits or who loses from changes in tax policy. Whether or not the lowering of tax is returned to customers or employees or shareholders, and how much to each, is largely all about the structures of those markets and who can afford to avoid the effects of the tax mostly easily.

"Luckily, the Republicans are all over this problem. Nothing a little offshore drilling won't cure."
_________________

Thing is, most offshore rigs teem with life.

Recent hypoxia events in Oregon had all sorts of benthic life climbing the ropes tethered to crab pot buoys to gasp for air. So yeah, oil rigs might save a few starfish from certain death.

Thing is, most offshore rigs teem with life.

San Francisco, July 7 – The West Coast’s largest commercial fishermen’s organization took aim on the Bush Administration proposal to lift the 28-year old moratorium on offshore oil drilling, saying it will put the nation’s seafood resources at risk for a small amount of oil that won’t be available for a decade.

“New offshore drilling, such as the President proposes, won’t make a dent in the price at the pump, but it sure as hell could damage our fisheries,� said Zeke Grader, Executive Director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). “Our members have experienced first hand drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel and this is not something we want expanded into pristine ocean waters and some of our nation’s best fishing grounds.�

http://tinyurl.com/58kc63

The press release is illuminating concerning the long-term detrimental environmental effects of oil rigs on marine life, including fish mortality and the introduction of toxicity to the food chain.

Any underwater structure can act as an artifical reef. That doesn't mean it isn't a net negative on the biome.

With the sixth mass extinction underway due to human human impact on the environment, one of the choices is quickly becoming: eat or drill.

We are a colossally stupid species. It's a wonder we haven't eradicated ourselves already.

Hmm. I have no reason to doubt the seriousness of this problem, but this graph seems a bit disingenuous. First (as noted by an earlier poster), why do the *number* of zones count rather than their relative size or location (they can't all be of roughly equal size, can they?)? Second, and more importantly, the graph seems designed to provide the impression of exponential increase, which seems to have been the case up until the most recent data. The 2000-7 data, however, do not fit this pattern, and, moreover, seem to represent more than a decade's gap, so the increase shown by the graph is likely to be an even worse fit with the previous trend. Now, this might be an instance of the growth tailing off because the dead zones are running out of space to spread to, but regardless, I think this graph is somewhat misleading (and is meant to be so).

Another thing: I'm not sure what they mean by "cumulative number of systems" (can dead zones come and go?), but a cumulative distribution is by definition going to be non-linear increase even if the actual rate of growth is linear. Another reason to be skeptical of the graph, I think.

"The problem with your conclusions is that they don't take into account um gubba blab gnung choog ferf jesus weelajaj sosha-lizm turp free market cowboy bald eagle jesus. When you start making sense, email me."

Posted by: the last reasonable bush supporter on August 14, 2008

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Well said!