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I love nature, but interestingly apparently photosynthesis doesn't actually contribute all that much oxygen and Earth's levels would stay stable for millions of years if all organic matter disappeared. We'd have many, many other problems, but not that one specifically:
“If all the stuff on earth that consumed oxygen disappeared then the levels would be stable for a long time” yea, buddy, that’s kinda just how that works.
That's not what I meant, I meant if all organic life that produces oxygen disappeared.
Photosynthesis is generally so slow at it's job that the current oxygen levels were only built up over hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, Rubisco, a key enzyme in photosynthesis, surprisingly, is slow and not very good at distinguishing oxygen from carbon dioxide, because it evolved before there was much oxygen on Earth. Therefore a lot of oxygen was produced at the beginning, most of the oxygen we have today in fact, and then not very much thereafter.
Additionally, the Earth's oxygen levels stay stable due to the release of oxygen trapped in minerals. Over those hundreds of millions of years, they absorbed it. This absorption and release has kept levels stable for well beyond our existence.
At least that's what I got from the PBS video. If you don't agree, go argue with them, I'm no expert. I'm just forwarding what I learned.
It may behoove you to say what you mean, then, and to forward accurate information.
Sounds interesting, with this additional clarity, so I may check that video out in the future.
Yeah it was refreshing to read the detailed reply to you because the initial comment had the tone of “I just learned a sweet climate change hoax gotcha on talk radio / youtube” when I read it. It’s not necessarily their fault. That’s just how anti-science conservatives sometimes word their hot takes.
Exactly yea lol
And honestly, I was giving them a little more than that but I’m still getting really frustrated at the abyssmal communication skills, both reading and writing, that I keep seeing on the internet these days. People will either make it your fault because they “meant something else” or take something absurdly clear like “I like the colour blue” and still somehow come to the conclusion that you actually hate all colour.
It’s so tiring.
I’m not even sure what to do with this argument. It’s irrelevant. An exercise in extraneous thought. No, we wouldn’t have millions of years - unless you’re referring to molecular oxygen vs higher life form sustaining oxygen, and it certainly would stabilize once all life was gone. There’d be nothing left to care. Maybe a few thousand years. Estimates are all over the place, from 1,500 to 2 million years.
Photosynthesizing plants remove carbon dioxide in addition to producing oxygen. We’d feel the effects of depleted oxygen long before it “ran out.” We’d also be killed by the excess CO2 before the oxygen disappeared. And of course, all higher life on this planet would be dead in a month or so if plants disappeared seeing as plant life is pretty much the base of the food chain for most everything.
I just thought it was an interesting video that challenges what I previously understood about one specific thing 😅 I'm not advocating against the environment, neither is the video, that'd be terrible for many reasons. It's just that the video is from PBS and seems pretty evidence based in why photosynthesis is quite terrible at converting CO2 to oxygen due to the shortcomings of the enzyme Rubisco and how we could improve that. Nothing more than that. Give it a watch, it's not some anti-environment conspiracy video