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Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see both sides. I appreciate these documentaries for raising awareness as you said. The reason why experts don't "try to explain it to us" probably is exactly because they think it's complex and nuanced. They probably don't even think there is an "issue" that need to be explained to begin with. Think it this way: you're in a field, and you know its pros and cons. You are not going to randomly speak anything abo…

I can see both sides but the side of the experts can clearly do better here. “It’s too complex to explain to all you people” or “this isn’t really a problem, the documentary makes a mountain of a mole hill” aren’t good approaches. If you are an expert in a field you should have at least some ability to simplify the issue or point out the mitigating factors that the documentary missed. The much more likely explanation…

I think there is a fundamental difference between the two groups about how much simplification/inaccuracy can be accepted.

The TV producer would take 90% fact, 5% oversimplification, and even 5% misleading info all day every day.

The experts probably won't accept that. This is not to say they are unable to simplify things (which as you said, is a very crucial skill on its own) if asked, they just won't go ahead and actively publish anything that way.

I personally side with TV producers here as soon as they have good intention. But can see why other people think otherwise.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#62
post #59
post #48

I watched that documentary and had a good laugh at how poorly made it was. The filmmaker starts out by revealing that he just loves the ocean and wanted to make a film about it but didn’t know what the topic should be. The arc of the film is him googling for things, gaining the most basic perspective on an issue, pivoting his film toward it, and then failing to get any good interviews or original footage. So funny. H…

Naming - because the same guy also made cowspiracy. Quality - I would say it was pretty illuminating on a lot of issues that almost nobody here will get to see first hand.

[deleted]

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#63
post #48

I watched that documentary and had a good laugh at how poorly made it was. The filmmaker starts out by revealing that he just loves the ocean and wanted to make a film about it but didn’t know what the topic should be. The arc of the film is him googling for things, gaining the most basic perspective on an issue, pivoting his film toward it, and then failing to get any good interviews or original footage. So funny. H…

Not good work at all.

Tabrizi's approach is to tackle a bunch of different subjects with the same attention span of a child on Xmas morning. Each new subject is treated as 'the' most important one, but he drops it unceremoniously after ten minutes.

Then there's the cherry picking of interviewees and their arguments, which is a disservice to the cause – and completely unethical. Even environmentalists interviewed as 'the good guys' complained about this[0].

If Tabrizi is genuinely a fan of the likes of Cousteau and Attenborough, he should watch and listen a lot more before making another documentary.

[0] https://twitter.com/christinachicks/status/13753901779133726...

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see both sides. I appreciate these documentaries for raising awareness as you said. The reason why experts don't "try to explain it to us" probably is exactly because they think it's complex and nuanced. They probably don't even think there is an "issue" that need to be explained to begin with. Think it this way: you're in a field, and you know its pros and cons. You are not going to randomly speak anything abo…

This is the problem I have with climate change. I am a very rational, science oriented person (actively promoting science, atheist, PhD in physics, actively hating homeopathy pseudo-science, you name it). I wanted to understand: - why there is a problem with climete chnage - how we know there is one - my winter was cold, where is the warming (exaggerating that of course) - etc. I am not an expert, nor want to become…

This is, in essence, the crux of the problem. With your level of education it shouldn't be at all difficult to find a resource that answers your questions. Instead you've sought out two comic strips and two extremely ideological sources.

The basics of climate change can be taught standing on one foot. Carbon dioxide absorbs IR radiation, while oxygen and nitrogen are transparent to it. There was an equilibrium between visible light hitting the earth, being absorbed, and being reemitted as IR. We've doubled the amount of CO2, so you would expect twice as much of that heat to be retained. Compare it to the surface of the moon, which is at the same distance from the sun as us, but is on average well below freezing. CO2 isn't the only factor, but we've changed the equilibrium by doubling it.

That's it. It's very, very simple. The reason it produces only yelling is because it's been said so many trillions of times that if you haven't seen it, it's because you're not looking. There's no sane counter-argument: more CO2 produces more heat. It couldn't not do so.

The economics of why that's a problem is more complicated, but we've spent so much effort fighting anti-science attempts to deny really basic, obvious, trivial chemistry that we don't get to the even slightly non-trivial parts. The slightly non-trivial parts are "Yes, if you raise the temperature 4 degrees F it's going to make a lot of marginally livable places unlivable, and many millions of people will die. Also, some of that carbon dioxide becomes carbonic acid when absorbed by the oceans, which isn't good for sea life. Also, you know that weather is a chaotic system, and changing the energy balance of it causes changes to what meta-stable parts do exist, requiring substantial changes to the lifestyles of people there."

Again, this has all been said thousands of times. If it helps to have somebody explain it to you, great. But you also know that I'm about to be overrun with Gish Gallopers trotting out repeated-refuted objections, and to a casual observer it's going to look like I can't keep up and therefore must be wrong. And the only way to decide for yourself is the one thing you don't want to do: as you say, you're not an expert and don't want to become one.

So I'm really not sure what to do, and I'm pretty sure I've just wasted my virtual breath. I really think that my second paragraph should have put an end to this, and you can imagine my frustration that it doesn't.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see both sides. I appreciate these documentaries for raising awareness as you said. The reason why experts don't "try to explain it to us" probably is exactly because they think it's complex and nuanced. They probably don't even think there is an "issue" that need to be explained to begin with. Think it this way: you're in a field, and you know its pros and cons. You are not going to randomly speak anything abo…

This is the problem I have with climate change. I am a very rational, science oriented person (actively promoting science, atheist, PhD in physics, actively hating homeopathy pseudo-science, you name it). I wanted to understand: - why there is a problem with climete chnage - how we know there is one - my winter was cold, where is the warming (exaggerating that of course) - etc. I am not an expert, nor want to become…

It's quite simple, and I'm surprised you have not heard this before (it's taught to school children where I live in the UK), but:

- We were alerted to a potential climate change issue by the melting of glaciers and sea ice amongst other things.

- If this continues such that large quantities of ice melts then this will cause large problems as low-lying cities (such as New Orleans) and even whole countries (such the Netherlands and Bangladesh) would be flooded.

- It is also predicted that such changes will disrupt global weather patterns and produce more extreme weather. I'm not 100% on the science behind this, but I think it has something to do with weather gradients.

- Thus scientists began to look for an explanation (such that they could predict if such warming would indeed continue). An increase in carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere were determined to be a likely cause as they are known to have an insulating effect (can be demonstrated in simple small scale experiments), and we have also been able to measure increasing levels in the atmosphere. And this was backed up by modelling (presumably of known solar influx with different concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere).

- There is also a secondary effect: Ice being whiteish reflects a lot of the Sun's energy back away from the earth back out into space. But water and soil tend to absorb a lot more of that energy. Thus there is concern that a small global temperature rise which causes the amount of sea ice / glaciers lost to pass a threshold point could cause a runaway effect where global temperatures continue to rise despite no more CO2 being released.

- Hence the focus on reducing CO2 emissions, and doing so ASAP.

- Re: "my winter was cold, where is the warming (exaggerating that of course)"

Pretty much everywhere except the North American continent. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this...

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#67
post #15

Are we destroying the biggest ecosystem on the planet or are we not? That's the only question that matters everything else is just nitpicking.

If the answer is yes, I think the far more important question is how do we stop destroying it. That's where the little "nitpicking" details start to matter.

An even greater conspiracy at work here is one the filmmakers are complicit in: teaching Americans to express their moral outlook through consumer choices. You would have thought they would have learned by now that swearing off fish (or meat, or processed foods) was a meaningless gesture that lets people sleep at night without having to reckon with the fact that even in a "democracy" the average person has zero power to make their voice heard on these issues.

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#69

Would any of you say it's definitely worth watching, to someone debating whether to spend the 90 min? Some of the reviews are pretty mixed, saying that the film's message is confused by conspiratorial threads and off-putting journalistic style. Or, if you're already aware of the problems with industrial fishing, is it a pass/not much of an eye opener and not mandatory watching? Watching episodes of David Attenborough…

I tried and had to turn it off after 20 minutes. By that point the interviewer had attempted two ambush interviews, made a lot of statements without backing them up (Japanese fleets overfishing tuna, they might well do but I'd like to see numbers), made false statements around the value of caught tuna (just because the first fish sold at auction in Japan sells for millions does not mean every fish sells for anywhere…

Maybe you should have watched to the end then your comments may have been very different

Re: Is Netflix's Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?

#70
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe they do and nobody is listening? Exactly why we need something like seaspiracy. Overfishing, coral reef deaths, and all the others problems are real and if not for George Monbiot, David Attenborough and similar figures, they would all remain hidden to the large public.

hey netflix PR plant person. > exactly why we need something like seaspiracy. scientists have been preaching this sermon for fifty years. a pithy pop-'science' crypto-vegan documentary is not going to fix this problem. we don't need to disguise complex issues as infotainment.

There are levels. Individuals may need something that seems like "entertainment" to accept and make individual change.

Politicians need something else, eg science and studies, in order to conduct politics and change/form laws and regulation.

Both are needed.

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