It would have been great confirmation of all that he writes about to see some photos from his trip -- specially of the infamous garbage patch.
The Ocean is Broken
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Re: The Ocean is Broken
#12This is nonsense. A classic case of mistaking an anecdote for data.
There's lots of year-to-year variation in currents which affect life in the ocean. In turn, the birds which depend on seafood vary tremendously.
For example, two years ago Pelagic Cormorants had tremendous problems with their food source off of Northern California. So the Cormorants moved around seeking food. Santa Clara County, which normally goes years without seeing this species, saw dozens.
If you want to find out if something is actually going on, go talk to the ornithologists who monitor the nesting sites for the seabirds.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#13Fortunately once we've sucked the earth dry of it's resources and die out ourselves, it should eventually recover.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#14I saw some people comment on a thread similar to this yesterday called, "Sailor says pacific is lifeless form Japan onwards for 3k Miles". I am guessing it is the same gentleman in this article and this is the full article. Some comments there were skeptical and suggested they had been at sea and hadn't caught anything or had not "seen any whales or dolphins". Let me say that there are countless counter arguments but…
Even an entire human lifetime is an eyeblink in the ebb and flow of the ocean environment. No matter what experience a person has, his own observations mean nothing, or rather, are insufficient to assign any causality other than natural variability. Most of the species that have ever lived in the oceans (or anywhere else on the planet) are now extinct, and this happened long before humans had any influence.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#15This was the most depressing bit for me:
"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."
I think that's a fairly neat example of a weakness of modern environmentalism: an obsession with CO2 over everything else.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#16This comment is going to get downvoted for meta-ness and probably because everyone disagrees with me but I just have to speak my mind: I'd like a version of hacker news sans the constant hysteria all the time.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#17It's really really sad, and no less ironic, that in the midst of this government shutdown, particularly with the zealotry from the tea party about the evils of government, that a problem which so obviously needs addressing, and should naturally and probably only can be solved by governments, goes unaddressed like this. Surely we must all be able to agree on this. What is government for at all, if not to harness our c…
It's interesting to see the statement that a problem like this can 'probably only be solved by governments' when governments so far have completely failed to solve it, and the proposed non-government solutions (such as removing the limitations on the liability of polluters, and allowing those whose health or livelihood has been injured by pollution to sue, potentially by class action) have never even been attempted. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and inspecting a different result." After a few large polluters went bankrupt after multi-billion dollar payouts to fishermen, beachgoers and such, I imagine industry as a whole would be more wary about pollution. Without limited liability - limited by government, I should add - BP would almost certainly be bankrupt by now. As would whichever company owned the nuclear plant that leaked in Japan.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#18It would have been great confirmation of all that he writes about to see some photos from his trip -- specially of the infamous garbage patch.
You can't photograph the garbage patch in any meaningful way. It isn't visible. There are more fine plastic particles per cubic meter of water and you are more likely than normal to happen a cross a bit of floating plastic, but a picture doesn't tell the story.
If you have seen pictures of solid garbage on the water, you are probably looking at a large bay in a metropolitan area, say Manila.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#19It would have been great confirmation of all that he writes about to see some photos from his trip -- specially of the infamous garbage patch.
You can't photograph the garbage patch in any meaningful way. It isn't visible. There are more fine plastic particles per cubic meter of water and you are more likely than normal to happen a cross a bit of floating plastic, but a picture doesn't tell the story. If you have seen pictures of solid garbage on the water, you are probably looking at a large bay in a metropolitan area, say Manila.
You're correct about the garbage patch that's typically talked about in the news, but this article mentions:
> "In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.
> "On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.
> "We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.
> "We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.
Re: The Ocean is Broken
#20This is nonsense. A classic case of mistaking an anecdote for data. There's lots of year-to-year variation in currents which affect life in the ocean. In turn, the birds which depend on seafood vary tremendously. For example, two years ago Pelagic Cormorants had tremendous problems with their food source off of Northern California. So the Cormorants moved around seeking food. Santa Clara County, which normally goes y…
This article is definitely lacking data but if you want to get the public's ear, you need anecdotes. Few people perk up with a zip full of spreadsheets.
Anecdotes are fine though they should at least be linked to data supporting the argument.
The problem for me is that after reading the article, I still have no idea if the ocean as a whole is losing its ability to sustain human life.
I'm pretty ignorant in this area and unfortunately this article does nothing to increase my knowledge on the subject.