From the executive summary at the beginning:

The loss of oxygen in the ocean can broadly be put down to two overlying causes – eutrophication as a result of nutrient run-off from land and deposition of nitrogen from the burning of fossil fuels, and the heating of ocean waters as a result of climate change, primarily causing a change in ventilation with the overlying atmosphere so that they hold less soluble oxygen, and compounded by reduced ocean mixing and changes in currents and wind patterns. Ocean deoxygenation is but the latest consequence of our activities on the ocean to be recognized. Ocean warming, ocean deoxygenation, and ocean acidification are major ‘stressors’ on marine systems and typically co-occur because they share a common cause.

Then from Section 2.1, Global Evidence of ocean deoxygenation:

+ Open-ocean deoxygenation is resulting mainly from a warming ocean, increased stratification and changing circulation which interact with eutrophication-induced hypoxia (oxygen concentration below ~60 to 120 µmol O2 kg-1) and biological activity in shelf regions.

+ Oxygen loss is closely related to ocean warming and acidification caused by CO2 increase driven by CO2 emissions as well as biogeochemical consequences related to anthropogenic fertilization of the ocean; hence a combined effort investigating the different stressors will be most beneficial to understand future ocean changes.

I'm responding to something presented in the BBC article, something they mention context-free, because they want to(?) imply that the problem is related to open ocean temp changes, when... it's not. It's a problem of eutrophication.

It's still a man-made problem, maybe its exacerbated by additional forces, but its dishonest to paint it as if warming has caused these 700 dead zones. Warming did not. Eutrophication did. Most people who read this:

> While nutrient run-off has been known for decades, researchers say that climate change is making the lack of oxygen worse.

> Around 700 ocean sites are now suffering from low oxygen, compared with 45 in the 1960s.

Will think that climate change caused the 700 ocean sites, up from 45, and not run-off. It's how they are couching it. It is bad and we should scrutinize that.

To take the part you criticise, the preceding sentence is "While nutrient run-off has been known for decades, researchers say that climate crisis is making the lack of oxygen worse.", and the following sentence "The threat to oceans from nutrient run-off of chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus from farms and industry has long been known to impact the levels of oxygen in the sea waters and still remains the primary factor, especially closer to coasts."

Are they painting that as warming? Not by my reading. Does every single sentence have to correlate to the title when most do? Hm. No.

Then the article goes out into the wider oceans and talks of deoxygenation there, and the lack of mixing. Suitably dumbed down for their target audience. Could they have spelt it out better whilst meeting the needs of their non-scientific audience? Probably - it's sloppily worded, which can be said about just about every science article in every mainstream publication.

But the core point remains - the report, and the article point to a joint cause, and from my fast skim of summary sections of a 500+ page PDF a majority of the problem stems from heating.

"While X has been a known issue, we now know about Y making things worse"

"What was [a little bad] in the 1960's is now [really super bad]"

The implicit finger is pointed at Y, I think. I sincerely think that's the takeaway most audiences would get from a setup like this.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the article. But the really damning thing (700 dead zones) seems way too context-free for me.

Sure it's sloppily written, but so is nearly every article on astronomy or medicine etc. But I'd generally like more science in my science reporting than I'm ever going to get.

And as it's a longer one, I wonder how much time they get to boil down a 500 page report to 1 page pop-science piece.

I'm not sure why you think we should take your non-expert, evidenceless hot take on a BBC article more seriously than an actual study, but if you'd like to dig in more, here it is: https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/48892

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

Baseless, uninformed skepticism is bad.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...

It's partially our governments fault for doing things like when the Atomic Energy Commission got caught being fraudulent about what killed 5000 sheep after the 1953 Upshot-Knothole nuclear weapons test series. When the top scientific institutions lose credibility, where we are today seems at least a little inevitable.

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/09/magazine/downwind-from-th...

Instead of complaining about sensationalism or nonsense, why don't you skip instead to discussing the actual study at hand and suggest some actual actions we could do to solve the problem? Since you're apparently more of an expert than the journalist here.

I don't know where the brigade was drawn from, but this is simply incredible anti-intellectualism writ large. Seeing the pandering of this sort of behavior on HN is deeply disturbing. Seeing this guy's classic denialist post literally as the top moderated post on HN -- wow, I wouldn't trust this aggregate crowd on any topic.

It is one of those eye-opening moments that makes me seriously ask what I'm doing here. When we have to treat all "opinions" as if they carry weight, we are doomed.

Climate change is a long-term issue we absolutely should deal with, but the consequences of not doing as much as ideal are, while large, still normalish-distribution-bad, not apocalypse-bad. Too much of the messaging around climate change to date has been apocalyptic. Realistically, anyone who wants to create a bubble of actually constructive discussion and action in this area in a public forum in 2019 should ban all apocalyptic terms/discussion on sight, to avoid triggering a huge number of people who are offended by bogus apocalyptic claims.

Banning that sort of discussion just means nations like Vanuatu get to continually be silenced.

Hint: Most of Singapore is at an elevation of <15m; they’re roughly as exposed as Vanuatu. They also have a government with one of the best technocratic track records in the world. And they’re keeping an eye on climate change, but they aren’t panicking.

So here we are.

This is how we ended up in the situations of enormous ignorance in the climate change and immunization realms, as if scientific rigour, consensus, statistical and foundational fact, etc, are all contentious the moment some random blowhard gives their opinion.

That random comment by a random guy on the internet is adding clarity.

This claim has been made multiple times, and the single example has been a misunderstanding of the English language (e.g. "running out").

"That random comment by a random guy on the internet is adding clarity."

That random comment that inserted non-fact, dismissed essentially the entire report...yeah, no, it added just noise. Oh look now the root comment instead of just blanket dismissing global warming entirely has now listed a small sub-summary dealing just with run-off. This is a classic denialist tactic, just moving the fence posts enough, pretending to actually be considering the science.

The journalist is at the same time lying about a problem where there isn't any and hiding a huge problem that can be solved if people focus on it.

They didn't. They blanket dismissed it, gave their own theory, and expressed how tired they are from this cross they must bear.

https://www.unitgraphics.com/deox/IUCNDeoxreportBOOK15-11-20... (77MB)

There's the actual study. The BBC article is pretty accurate in its summary.

I don't see why a random internet commentator's pet theory (with nothing in the article to support it) should be treated as necessarily better.

We have the greatest interpersonal communication capability the world has ever seen and we piss it away on insults.

It’s gotten to the point on HN where the “highbrow lowbrow” is dominating all discussion, because you can’t outright call a lie a lie here. It wouldn’t be “polite”. But it’s pretty easy to toss off a quick, thoughtless dismissal of any particular subject that sounds smart and polite.

[1] as documented by NeedBigTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21736510

Much of the [oxygen] loss is expected in the top 1,000m of the water column, which is richest in biodiversity.

You are focusing on eutrophication of shallow waters near land, but that isn’t the problem.

Taking HN threads further into flamewar is also not ok. Would you please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules when posting here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I mean, where's the warning for insubstantial, ideological flamebait in the first place for the top post, dang? And the climate change post before that, and the one before that...

They post these things based on their gut reaction to the headline, and now the discussion in here is about the OP and not the subject at hand.

If you see a comment that you think we should have moderated but we didn't, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

It is incredible and sad that HN is yet another tool for deniers and anti-science charlatans. And if dang thinks that's a personal attack, feel free to delete my attack friend -- the value of this site when it hosts such a cancerous collection of knuckledraggers approaches zero.

This is the classic denier play book. Denier 101.

It sits high and mighty. It must be correct, right?

Congratulations, dang, you've moderated yourself a wonderful little AGW denier niche. All while we pretend that scientific reports are "political" lest we ruffle the feathers of idiots who want to imagine how things should be based upon their opinions.

If you know more and have better information than someone else, you actually have a greater responsibility; breaking the rules by ranting, doing flamewar, calling names and so on, discredits the greater truth you're in possession of. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I realize that's far from easy when you're surrounded by lies and distortions, but it's work we're all asked to do here.

Further, from the study it's clear that "deoxygenation recorded in tropical regions often reflects mostly untreated sewage inputs and agricultural runoff (areas identified in Diaz & Rosenberg, 2008)," with many other citations provided as well.

I think you're completely missing the point.

The bombast ("the oceans are running out of oxygen","we only have 12 years left") is counter productive. We need to identify actionable problems and address them now. Alarming everyone through apocalyptic headlines will only fatigue and confuse.

It's not about feeling good, it's about accuracy. If accuracy is something you see as an optional component of reporting, then I'm not going to be able to get on your wavelength.

Warmer temperatures can be survived. It's the rate of change that's going to be the killer. Living things can adapt to change but not suddenly.

EDIT: Source for the downvoters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png

And discussion from a world-class geologist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/07/28/who-cares...

So....what's inaccurate about the reporting? You've strangely yet to mention any, though you did add your own invented "we only have 12 years left" bit for whatever reason (neither the article or report say anything of the sort).

But yes, we aren't going to get on the same wavelength, clearly. Your original post claimed that I "missed the point", when I clearly replied to someone's specific points, then you injected yet another narrative. This is a tactic as old as time for baseless rhetoric -- just constantly spin around the topic, adding just enough noise that you hope it disrupts the conversation.

Let me see if I can find the actual quote...

[Edit:] There we go: "[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."

With lots of other references to communism, Stalinism and Stalin in the Wikipedia section. One more quote worth relaying:

In his 1946 essay "Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia

Hence calling him an anti-communist democratic socialist. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Sources_f...

Also, Orwell was a democratic socialist and 1984 wasn’t about socialism..

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Their own characterization is more nuanced than that. The study says that solubility changes account for about 15% (10-30%) [their % and range] of the oxygen change measured. They mention that most of the oxygen loss is at deep levels which are not affected by solubility, though there may be other second order effects from warming. In the section 3.1 conclusion they also mention the big gaps in models vs observed data, and wonder what they're missing.

The study is fine and full of expected caveats. The reporting is lame.

"As the ocean warms from the surface, stratification is expected to increase, with a tendency for a slowing down of the ocean circulation. A slowed down circulation is expected to account for up to 50% of observed deoxygenation in the upper 1000m, and for up to 98% in the deep ocean (>1000m)."

Hardly all farming runoff then. In fact that looks like the vast majority is heating related as the article notes. Yet of course we need to mitigate runoff too, given the enormous dead patch in the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course it's more nuanced. I'm speaking directly to their conclusions relative to global warming, clearly, and your very firm put-down of it, though you seem to be backtracking now.

"The study is fine and full of expected caveats. The reporting is bad."

How is the reporting bad? Why? Because it doesn't take a contrarian approach because the science of a massive, very complex system can't be 100%? This is exactly the nonsense every global warming denialist has plied for year ("They're only 99.99% sure, so you should believe my pet theory about like sun spots or something"). It deserves to be stomped out on sight and not tolerated as if it's on some equal footing.

Your post that I replied to has you firmly and with complete conviction wiping away all of it but industrial and farm run off, implying that they just don't know how to measure, etc. It's pretty hard to try to position yourself in the middle ground after that.

1. Oceans are not running out of oxygen, as the title suggests

2. The article leads with 700 ocean sites suffering from low oxygen, up from 45 in 1960, which is not because of oxygen solubility but because of eutrophication. The paper specificually discusses eutrophication here, and goes on to mention "but through nutrient and organic loading management about 70 (10%) of them can now be classified as recovering." (see section 2.5 intro) But that's not shitty doom-saying so it goes unsaid that it's eutrophication and that it's getting better and can be made better independent of warming.

Does "running out" to you mean hitting 0%? In real-world use it means reduces to the point where it has a negative effect on the system, which is reportedly happening. You and a few others have taken this tact that you just disagree with the claimed alarmism of the article (and its completely accurate title) -- read the executive summary. It's pretty "alarmist" too.

Again you're back to run-off, which is weird -- the science has long targeted it, and regulations and behaviors have changed dramatically to ease it, to good effect. Things as little as most laundry detergent not having phosphor anymore. Yeah, they were "alarmist" about that, solutions were found, and the problem has improved in a lot of the world. But now global warming is coming and it is a massive external force that you can't simply change a laundry detergent around. The report isn't even saying "oh no, get rid of your pick-up", it's simply saying "this is happening". Understanding and planning, if that's the best we can do, is pretty valuable.

If I say “general relativity is likely wrong, but we should use the verifiable predictions it makes” no one will care. If I say “climate models are likely wrong, but we should use the verifiable predictions they make” the hackles will rise despite there being no known climate model with predictive power anywhere close to GR.

Obviously this makes the discussions far less rewarding to one’s intellectual curiosity. Like a fool I still check occasionally on the off chance that there is something interesting to be learned.

[0] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_...

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja01861a033

EDIT: I didn't see any replies before commenting, so "eventual consistency" of independent commenters likely led to what looks like piling-on. Sorry, that's not the intention.