5 ms·

Humans 'damaging the oceans': research

15 points by toni 17y ago

DanielStraight 17y ago
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.
- pyre 17y ago
  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.
- Hexstream 17y ago
  And imagine what your encyclopedia would look like if you let anyone in the world put anything they wanted in it at any time! ;) I'm trying and failing to come up with new ways to apply Wikipedia principles to address "real-world" problems...
pyre 17y ago
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.

15 points by toni 17y ago

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.

pyre 17y ago
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.
Hexstream 17y ago
And imagine what your encyclopedia would look like if you let anyone in the world put anything they wanted in it at any time! ;) I'm trying and failing to come up with new ways to apply Wikipedia principles to address "real-world" problems...

pyre 17y ago

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.