
Humans 'damaging the oceans': research - toni
http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/seachange.html
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DanielStraight
It always saddens me when people wait for official scientific studies to prove
things which are obvious. Arbitrarily screwing with things tends to
arbitrarily screw them up. Imagine what your code would look like if you let
anyone in the world put anything they wanted in it at any time.

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pyre
Most people just don't have a sense of scale. If you would have told a buffalo
hunter/poacher (back when there were seas of buffalo) that buffalo would one
day be so few that they needed to be protected you would have been called
crazy. Things like that were viewed as 'impossible' to happen because there
were so many buffalo that humans couldn't possible hope to put a dent in their
numbers, yet it happened.

There is a saying, "No individual raindrop ever considers itself responsible
for the flood." Much in the same way that a lot of people don't vote because
they believe their vote won't make a difference. In general, a majority of
people have trouble taking in the 'larger picture' on many issues.

Talking with someone about how much CO2 emission could be prevented or how you
could prevent many animals from being mistreated (or even still being alive
and conscious as they go down the 'assembly line' of being chopped up into
pieces) doesn't become a matter of 'what is ethical' or 'what is the best
thing for the planet' or even 'what is the best thing in the long-run'. It
just becomes a discussion of, "but I want to eat meat!"

All of these calls for massive change on a global scale just fall onto deaf
ears. People are more concerned with their own lives and troubles than
something that is arguably intangible to them.

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pyre
Ugh. The blurb is suggesting sequestering carbon by using plankton blooms...
but they already tried that. It just caused an increase in the number of
plankton predators... that's all. They weren't able to overwhelm them with so
much plankton that 'some' would end up dead at the bottom of the sea.

