
Unprecedented Level of Human Harm to Sea Life Is Forecast - mikek
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/science/earth/study-raises-alarm-for-health-of-ocean-life.html
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johnloeber
The best book I've read on these matters is _The Ocean of Life: The Fate of
Man and the Sea_ by Callum Roberts. It's about 400 pages long and meticulously
details our effects on the marine environment (though in an entertaining and
accessible manner).

We're looking at cataclysmic changes in the oceans. It's not too late to
revert course, but overfishing and pollution (acidification, in particular)
have already changed our marine ecosystems, and they will continue to do so.
Great diversity has been lost, while jellies and other more primitive
lifeforms used to less hospitable conditions are now thriving.

The bizarre tragedy comes, in part, from the dilution hypothesis: it's
commonly accepted that the oceans are _really big_ , so big that they can
withstand our meddling. While the oceans are big, they're neither that large
nor are they totally homogeneous: there are many marine ecosystems, all of
which are fragile. But most of these marine ecosystems are still large enough
to change slowly -- too slowly to be immediately noticed by laypersons.

The slowness of change in the marine ecosystems makes environmentalism a
politically difficult platform: good policies do not yield immediately
measurable positive results, and while the threat is grave, it is creeping
sufficiently slowly for action to be continuously procrastinated.

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stolio
> Bottom trawlers scraping large nets across the sea floor have already
> affected 20 million square miles of ocean, turning parts of the continental
> shelf to rubble.

That's a number I wouldn't have guessed, that's about 1/7th of the ocean
floor.

~~~
lugg
If thats 1/7th of the total ocean floor, what percentage is it of the
accessible / usable ocean floor?

~~~
stolio
I would really like to know. NOAA has a really impressive map here[0] (with a
really impressive name) but I don't think it's set up for "surface area of
ocean above X elevation."

However, I would expect dragging to occur in shallower waters rich in life
because economically we're looking to extract maximum value. I'm worried that
might roughly correlate to maximum damage. (Sure we could do more damage if we
tried, we could bomb a coral reef, but we're essentially mining for certain
lifeforms _from_ an ecosystem.)

[0] -
[http://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/bathymetry/](http://maps.ngdc.noaa.gov/viewers/bathymetry/)

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zkhalique
Sometimes I wonder if humanity will finally wake up when some ecosystems start
to collapse. How will we turn around the freight train of capitalism raping
externalities? Fossil fuels, fracking, overfishing, etc.

Makes one wonder what will happen in 20-30 years and if they should have
children...

~~~
hvs
It's not just an issue in "capitalism". Communist countries like the USSR and
China have had as bad or worse effects on the environment. It's an issue of
humanity.

~~~
fsloth
I don't think it's very helpful to just blame humanity in the general sense
without explicitly stating what exactly is fucked up about them (this time).
Just like in interpersonal relationships, to fix a problem it's best to focus
on single issues rather than ruminate over character flaws.

I'd say that it's an issue of humans wielding industrial strength tools
without proper technology for monitoring and constraining resource
consumption.

Effectively the planet is populated by autonomous agents focusing on locally
optimizing their short-term finances, using capital* to convert landmass and
biomass to marketable commodities. The side-effects are as we see.

Now that we have stated the problem, we can actually start figuring out how to
limit this. But as economic system design and political action goes I'm all
thumbs.

There is a slight reason for optimism. If governments recognize that there is
a general action that can be taken then usually a way can be found for global
action - and with proper response this actually works. See what happened to
the usages CFC:s in refrigerators after it was proven they lay waste to the
ozone layer.

Unfortunately the damage to biomass is already extensive. When one kind of
food source becomes scarce we can just move to another, without reflecting why
did that particular fishery dry up.

With ozone layer the problem was a bit more urgent - "OMFG we are all gonna
fry up!".

* ie. machines, labor etc.

~~~
stolio
I'm guessing you're aware, but for other readers this is often called _The
Tragedy of the Commons_. Since nobody's made much headway since it was
introduced 50 years ago new ideas are needed.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy_of_the_commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy_of_the_commons)

------
javiramos
An article in Nature, that mostly highlights the view of scientists from the
University of Western Australia, argues that the threat of a major 'ocean
calamity' is oversold. I'd rather be safe than sorry and given the evidence,
we can almost definitely conclude that we are changing (and most likely
harming) the ocean environment with our activities.

[http://www.nature.com/news/ocean-calamities-oversold-say-
res...](http://www.nature.com/news/ocean-calamities-oversold-say-
researchers-1.16714)

------
harrylove
Here are some practical things you can do as an individual or household:

[http://www.whaleresearch.com/#!orca-
conservation/cbuu](http://www.whaleresearch.com/#!orca-conservation/cbuu)

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flippyhead
This is so depressing.

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cageface
Sometimes I really wonder if it would have been better if evolution stopped at
monkeys.

~~~
meric
Wondering if evolution could have stopped at monkeys is like wondering if
there's a button that can reset the ecosystem with one press. Evolution will
keep selecting for organisms which is able to collect the most negative
entropy and dissipate it all - if not humans then it would have been something
else that would cause a huge pollution event.

Earth once did not have much oxygen - Oxygen was in fact toxic to most life
forms in Earth's early days. One life form produced oxygen as a byproduct. It
spread all over the planet, produced a lot of oxygen, and caused what we call
an extinction event.

------
ChuckMcM
When I was a kid, the media had convinced me there wouldn't be any wildlife
left on the planet and pollution was going to render large sections
uninhabitable by humans.

That was really my first experience with reasoning by extrapolation and it
really affected my thinking. Later, when none of the things that were forecast
came to pass, I began to examine the whole process of reason by extrapolation
and its application to dynamic systems.

That isn't to say that there haven't been pollution events, or that things
that shouldn't have gone extinct haven't, instead the dynamics of the system
shifted and pushed things in different ways.

I also read about the many extinction events in the planets history and how
things came back from each one, different than before.

It is always possible that humans will be the cause of the next major
extinction event, and if we are, that event will likely take us with it. And
that would demonstrate that ultimately the system stays in balance. And that
ultimately the planet doesn't really care about us at all.

That said then, do we as a species kill off our own fishermen? It has been
estimated by some [1] that less than 2 billion people can live on the planet
in "harmony" (what ever that means) so do we go kill off the other 4 - 5
billion losers? And then take up residence in caves?

Or do we focus on harnessing the energy and technologies we need to support as
many people as we would like and to move them to other planet too? Ultimately
someone has to tell the general population that whether it is humans, an
asteroid, a volcano, or something else this place is a death trap and we
better get working on a plan to go elsewhere.

[1]
[http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_ca...](http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf)

~~~
dredmorbius
Those documentaries are largely correct. Over 80% of the biomass of the oceans
has been lost in the past century, and a substantively similar amount of non-
human, non-domesticated vertebrate terrestrial biomass.

"Researcher Reports Stunning Losses in Ocean Fish Biomass" 28 February 2011
Edward W. Lempinen [http://www.aaas.org/news/researcher-reports-stunning-
losses-...](http://www.aaas.org/news/researcher-reports-stunning-losses-ocean-
fish-biomass)

In the past 100 years, 80% of the biomass of fish in the world’s oceans has
been lost, Christensen says in a AAAS video that coincided with a symposium at
the Annual Meeting. “Just in the last 40 years, we have lost 60% of the
biomass,” he explained. “So we’ve seen some very serious declines, and there’s
no doubt about what the cause is: We’re talking about overfishing—overfishing
at the global scale.”

There's been a similar huge transformation in both the absolute and relative
amounts of terrestrial vertebrate biomass, as plotted by +Paul Chefurka:
[https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152825071748824](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152825071748824)

See also: [http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/tag/paul-
chefurk...](http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/tag/paul-chefurka/)

His thermodynamic footprint article discusses related issues, though not
specifically animal populations:
[http://www.paulchefurka.ca/TF.html](http://www.paulchefurka.ca/TF.html)

~~~
001sky
I think this gets released after every cold spell on the east coast. I'm
pretty sure I can correlate the actic vortex to various friendly reminders
these climate people need to get paid.

