Ask HN: I need help with some math

3 pointsby DoreenMichele3 yıl önce11 comments

Since the 1700s, the world has lost more than 85 percent of its wetlands. Peatlands cover just 3 percent of the planet’s surface but they store about 30 percent of all land-based carbon, or twice as much as all of the world’s forests combined. Coastal wetlands remove atmospheric CO2 up to fifty-five times faster than rain forests.

So we would need to increase our wetlands 6 2/3 fold to get back to what we had in the 1700s.

I'm curious how close that would get us to fixing human-caused climate change.

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of figures. What factors do I need to even begin to calculate this?

3 comments

defrost3 yıl önce

A good place to start is current studies on peat and wetlands.

From https://phys.org/search/?search=peat

* Re-wetting is key for boosting carbon dioxide storage in southern peatlands ( https://phys.org/news/2023-09-re-wetting-key-boosting-carbon... )

* Officially endangered: Critical environmental research saving Western Australia's precious peatlands ( https://phys.org/news/2023-09-endangered-critical-environmen... )

* Rewetting German marshes to blunt climate change impact ( https://phys.org/news/2023-07-rewetting-german-marshes-blunt... )

etc.

Reading the types of papers these articles overview will provide some insight into the weighting factors deemed important for these kinds of calculations.

DoreenMichele3 yıl önce

Thank you.

meristohm3 yıl önce

I don't have an answer to the math question but carbon sequestration is an important topic. Related, sometimes with pop-sci/layperson citations:

-Beavers will play a role in bringing back wetlands. They can do it better than we can. See book: Eager, by Ben Goldfarb (maybe you've read it already?)

-Reversing climate change feels like it is going to require a massive cultural shift. To get to the point of large-scale wetland recovery we'll need government regulation and widespread public support and cooperation. I don't know this happens within the next seven years or so, but it has to. Maybe it'll turn out that Voyageur 2 has revealed our position to the Vogons.

DoreenMichele3 yıl önce

Yes, I'm aware beavers are a big deal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37096975

meristohm3 yıl önce

D 'oh! Yes, I remember your post- thank you for sharing that isthmus article.

subject40563 yıl önce

You ought to begin by getting really good citations on each of those figures. If you or the source you got them from had any confusion about how to arrive at those numbers, any results you get from them will likely be meaningless.

Hopefully in doing so you will start to notice the missing pieces of info and can ask more targeted questions to get better results.

DoreenMichele3 yıl önce

I'm a woman

Rest assured, everything I do is somehow "wrong", even if I did exactly what some guy did.

But thank you for playing.

My last Ask HN got zero replies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490215

PaulHoule3 yıl önce

Huh? I took a class on geoengineering taught by a woman who'd done work on ocean iron fertilization and a man who'd done work on sulfate aerosol injection.

Also the average "Ask HN" gets zero replies. I tend to "lean in" and answer a lot of them but that might say something more negative than positive about be but you can tell I am karma motivated by my score and I think I deserve more upvotes for this than I get.

I'll add to the other person's comment in that you probably won't find just one input for your figures but you'll find many of them.

You might find one paper that says that an acre of wetland holds 10 tons of CO2 and another that says it holds 15 tons of CO2. (I just made those numbers up)

In fact it probably depends on the wetland and if you spent a lot of time looking at papers you might find 20-30 numbers. All this is fine because this reflects real uncertainty and you're either going to say "the average is 12 tons with a standard deviation of 3 tons" or you're going to repeat your analysis with a wide range of inputs to do your sensitivity analysis that way.

----

My take is that soil carbon is like "dark matter" in that it is really mysterious. If anything is fraught it is soil carbon because Bayer sure wishes farmers quit plowing to control weeds and just spraying a lot of glyphosate everywhere which might be good for the carbon balance but the glyphosate almost certainly has unwanted side effects.

DoreenMichele3 yıl önce

You also use UFO to mean aliens:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37629528

(Insert joke about how you wouldn't do that if you actually respected me.)

FYI, I'm an environmental studies major. I'm aware that in the real world, figures vary. A lot.

There are lots of smart people on HN. I'm hoping to not have to reinvent the wheel. At least not too much.

If anyone can point me to some formulas that already exist for what gets used to calculate climate change targets, I would appreciate it. I'm excited to learn that wetlands loss potentially accounts for a substantial part of the problem and is largely overlooked.

I would like to begin running some numbers on this dreary Saturday rather than just stick with "It's a whole lot!"

PaulHoule3 yıl önce

Not so sure what meaning of UFO you have other than "Unidentified Flying Object" which I am used to describe "intelligent aliens who have a physical presence on or near Earth" (don't believe in them) vs. "intelligent aliens who live somewhere else" (do believe in them)

Of course Jacques Valee thought it was more likely they were time or dimension travelers

https://www.amazon.com/Messengers-Deception-UFO-Contacts-Cul...

ssss113 yıl önce

The parent’s response was completely grounded in logic and was reasonable. That has nothing to do with gender. They didn’t deserve that response.

Your topic and hypothesis sound interesting - best of luck working through the problem.