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As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

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Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#61

Post by the_third_wave »

thulle wrote: post #48
the_third_wave wrote: post #24

How did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now, let alone during the previous interglacial periods [2] which were markedly warmer than the Holocene (i.e. the current interglacial period)? If there was a marked reduction in ocean life due to reduced oxygen levels that should be visible in fossil records. If there was no such reduc…

> How did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now From your wikipedia link: ---8 A study in 2020 estimated that the average global temperature during the warmest 200 year period of the HCO, around 6,500 years ago, was around 0.7 °C warmer than the mean for nineteenth century AD. The HCO consisted of increases of up to 4 °C near th…

The same is true for the current warming where the largest increases are seen in the northern winters so that does not affect the comparison.

Instead of picking on one section in a Wikipedia article it would be interesting to know what exactly is different "this time" compared to earlier warmer periods, both the climatic optimum as well as e.g. the Viking and Roman warm periods, let alone those during earlier interglacials. Just stating "now it is different" is not very convincing.

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#62

Post by myshpa »

swsdsailor wrote: post #14

I am very interested in using tech to help the ocean. Does anyone have ideas for technical solutions to this?

Yes.

1. stop overfishing by switching to plant based diets

2. stop fishing ... even fish we don't fish, but decimate (as bycatch) will rebound

3. stop fishing ... there won't be as much plastic to entangle fish, mammals and turtles (49% of great pacific garbage patch is fishing nets)

4. stop animal ag ... minimize agricultural runoff from farms and fields to stop creating dead zones in the ocean

5. stop animal ag ... use technology to reforest pastures and store all excessive carbon in them

6. reform agriculture ... use technology to improve ag methods and improve our soils, storing even more carbon in them

7. stop fossil fuels

8. give nature time to repair itself

9. enjoy healthy ecosystems, saved for future generations

Or explain the scorched earth to your children.

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#63

Post by a2tech »

kuhewa wrote: post #42
a2tech wrote: post #35

My friends who are fishery people (biologists) are all pretty sure we've doomed commercial fisheries in the ocean. It's too late to recover and no one really wants to fix the issues. Enjoy your seafood while you can because they think they'll be gone before our generation dies out.

Perhaps your friends work in a region like the GOM where anoxic zones are a substantial and growing issue or regions where management remains poor so the sentiment would be accurate for their domain, but it isn't even close to holding true globally for all fish stocks, neither effects of low oxygen nor overharvesting etc. There were big improvements in stock assessment and fisheries management around 15-20 years ago…

North Atlantic, Great Lakes, African great lakes, and northern Pacific. Lots of hand waving about improvements but the people who I know that work directly with it and have dedicated their lives to studying such things say the opposite.

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#65

Post by myshpa »

hedora wrote: post #44
swsdsailor wrote: post #14

I am very interested in using tech to help the ocean. Does anyone have ideas for technical solutions to this?

I think the best bet is to figure out how to get desalination plants to also scrub CO2 and lithium from seawater. With government subsidies, it might actually turn a profit, and we'll need to do all three of those things anyway. (Scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere would also work, but would take longer to address ocean acidification.)

We would need an immense number of such factories. Just lookup how much is already in the atmosphere, and how much are those technologies able to capture.

This is a feel-good technology, something to placate the population that something is being done.

We have better factories. They're called trees.

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#66

Post by kuhewa »

a_bonobo wrote: post #56
kuhewa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps your friends work in a region like the GOM where anoxic zones are a substantial and growing issue or regions where management remains poor so the sentiment would be accurate for their domain, but it isn't even close to holding true globally for all fish stocks, neither effects of low oxygen nor overharvesting etc. There were big improvements in stock assessment and fisheries management around 15-20 years ago…

While Ray Hilborn is one of the biggest (most publishing) voices in academic fisheries research, others absolutely hate him: Greenpeace calls him a 'overfishing denier' https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/overfishing-denier/ >As part of their investigation into our appeal, the journal also posted a correction noting that several authors of a paper defending the Marine Stewardship Council were actually employed by…

Ray never denied receiving industry funding, and is pretty transparent about it. It's pretty common in fisheries science.

Greenpeace's big gotcha was rather feeble in my opinion. As you said he is prolific in the field. Yet the best Greenpeace could do was get a correction published on a minor paper to say he received industry funding in the five years prior — but that didn't support that particular research [1]. He also received funding from WWF in that period, so is he also a environmentalist shill along with a fishing industry shill?

Note that Greenpeace can't manage to critique, nor find someone to critique, the actual science.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#67

Post by ClumsyPilot »

goatlover wrote: post #51
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there has ever been a time in all of human history with so many existential threats. Between catastrophic climate change and resource depletion, AI, the danger of nuclear war, COVID and other potential pandemics, economic insecurity for most of the population, and farmed irrational extremist political movements, we seem to have quite a lot to deal with. Might as well just have Carrington Event 2.0 and b…

COVID was never an existential threat. I'm not aware of any pandemic being that, even smallpox or the black death. Where existential means threatening the existence of the human species.

Even a global nuclear war would not kill every single human being, so by that logic there are no existential threats.

However many of these threats can collapse organised civilisation and push us back to medieval level of development.

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#68

Post by ClumsyPilot »

pirate787 wrote: post #38
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there has ever been a time in all of human history with so many existential threats. Between catastrophic climate change and resource depletion, AI, the danger of nuclear war, COVID and other potential pandemics, economic insecurity for most of the population, and farmed irrational extremist political movements, we seem to have quite a lot to deal with. Might as well just have Carrington Event 2.0 and b…

Actually, the world has never had greater economic security than it does in 2023.

I am pretty sure someone said that like 5 minutes before the WW2 began.

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#69

Post by harry8 »

minsight wrote: post #41
pirate787 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the world has never had greater economic security than it does in 2023.

Hope you can eat that.

Ok this conversation can get pretty silly, let's try to avoid that.

Now at 2023 we have lifted more people out of poverty and ill-health in both raw numbers and as a percentage of the population than any time in the planet's history.

Without prescribing anything in so far as dealing with the world's problems, be careful flippantly trading that off. It may not be you, your friends and your family that previously watched their children die and now don't but I don't see that as making this quite frankly stunning achievement as an irrelevance.

https://www.gapminder.org/fw/world-health-chart/

Re: As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future

#70

Post by bruce511 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36
Apofis wrote: post #3

Aside from Ocean Acidification, uncontrollable Algae Blooms, and Melting Sea Ice, we now have Ocean Deoxygenation on our plates. We also have unprecedented droughts on land as well. Humans really will be the next mass extinction event on this planet. So incredibly selfish.

I don't think there has ever been a time in all of human history with so many existential threats. Between catastrophic climate change and resource depletion, AI, the danger of nuclear war, COVID and other potential pandemics, economic insecurity for most of the population, and farmed irrational extremist political movements, we seem to have quite a lot to deal with. Might as well just have Carrington Event 2.0 and b…

I know I being picky, but nuclear war is the only existential threat there.

It's unlikely that any pandemic would make humans go extinct. Covid showed that isolating population groups is possible, especially if bounded by water (Australia, new Zealand etc). Mass death sure, but not extinction.

Climate change will probably reduce livable spaces (although people already live in extremes like Alaska and Sahara) but humans are adaptable and certain parts will still be temperate. Again huge impact, but not existential.

Sure there's a lot of "other stuff" going on, but honestly it has always been thus. Two world wars for example caused several daily concerns for most of Europe, and much of Asia. Throw in revolutions in Russia and China, and independence for India, plus the technology booms, and life in 1950 was different to 1910.

I could write a whole comment on economics, but again a 2 year blip in inflation (it's down again now) is not going to end anything. Given the economic improvements in Asia over the past 50 years (China, S Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc) "most" of the world is better off than before. There's a long way to go, but its been an upward trend for a long time.

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