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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, Zebra mussels helped to filter out the lakes. So much for the experts, and alarmists. How do I know? I live on the Great Lakes. Water sometimes in the summer looks Caribbean Blue. Its the clearest in decades. While I agree that more should be done to control the outflow from farms. I propose ending soy bean farms. This would have the added benefit of starving leftist journalists. Especially ones that regurgitate all the cliche talking points.

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I'm kind of in awe at this comment. Not for good reasons, but still.

In case anyone is wondering, no, zebra mussels are still bad. No one was claiming they wouldn't filter water, a feature of all mussels.

"So much for the experts, and alarmists." lol

I believe this is what Ian Danskin coined a "Shrodinger's Douchebag", someone who says dumb and harmful things, then decides if he was joking or not based on reaction.

Dude, I lived through a decade of the "acid rain", and "hole in the ozone" is going to kill us all. I've come to realize that these people are not journalists. They are activists. There's as much science to their claims, as there are genders in the sky.

Ozone depletion was a very serious problem, so in the late 80s there was an international agreement to ban CFCs, halons, and other ozone-depleting chemicals.

It is by no means fixed yet, but now ozone is heading back towards its previous levels, and should be recovered by around 2075. This is a great example of activism working to solve a serious global problem via public policy changes.

You can read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Except, in the same time frame, we went from only the West having Ozone polluting Air Conditioning, to pretty much the whole World having those. In the same time frame, the rest of the world industrialized and are using ozone damaging chemicals on a massive scale. There's no way we actually reduced these chemicals in absolute numbers. Yet the ozone layer is still intact, and apparently its improved. Care to explain?

> the rest of the world industrialized and are using ozone damaging chemicals on a massive scale

I would like to know more about the rest of the world you mentioned, since the Montreal Protocol (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) has been ratified by all United Nations members and the European Union. Based on observed data, it also seems to have the expected positive effect.

They are just now starting to phase out the r22 refrigerant used in ACs with a new one r410, which it self will be phased out. So during the last two decades, the number of ACs used, in places like India and China, has grown exponentially. I've been to India. Window ACs hanging out of windows everywhere. And thats only one of the polluting chemicals. Impossible to measure how much is released in China during manufacturing.

Perhaps, I've died and this is all a dream. But I do believe the world did not end yet. Despite all the articles from blowhards, preaching doom through the last two decades.

r22 has a much lower ozone depletion potential than r11/r12, which were used as refrigerants before. AC use in developing countries is more a global warming issue than an ozone shield issue. A lot of replacements are highly potent greenhouse gases.

The ozone shield had a 4 percent loss since the 70s in average, much larger local losses aka "ozone holes". Fortunately not many people live at the north or south pole.

This sheds some light on what it took to get enough support to actually change regulations:

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/whateve...

Though the CFC and ozone story is inspiring in some ways, it has limitations. It's a very specific problem caused by very specific substances used in a very specific way, for which alternatives are easily found. There isn't a lot of complexity to the problem, relatively speaking.

Yes the lake looks cleaner from a distance, but this isn’t a good thing.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-lake-mic...

“Clearer is not necessarily better,” said Robert Shuchman, co-director of the Michigan Tech Research Institute. “Clearer water means less phytoplankton in the water column, and they’re the basic building block in the food web. The idea is, the little fish eat algae, and the bigger fish eat the little fish.

The problem is with these claims that they sound good.

Its extrapolating from a little scientific study, or observation to bullshit conclusions.

Has this Journalist even considered that more light reaching further down into the lake, would dramatically increase the area over which plants can grow. Plants that support plankton and fish habitat.

Has your speculative scenario actually happened?

And end government subsidized corn vis-à-vis ethanol production.

Two funny things: 1) originally environmentalists thought they could make common cause with midwest corn farmers by backing ethanol as a green fuel; that was back in the 80s; 2) for decades now environmentalists having been arguing that we should remove ethanol subsidies because they don't work as promised and have enormous negative externalities of their own. And regardless of the positions of the environmentalists they remain the boogeymen of the right and thus midwestern farmers. Now they, not the farmers, are the ones responsible for the fertilizer runoff and algal blooms. It's almost as if the actual positions of environmentalists were never the issue for those who hate them.

Except, if not for environmentalism, this mess would not exist.

Another funny thing: in your view of the world the entities that made money off this situation -- the farmers and agribusiness -- and the entities that have continuously fought for the ethanol subsidies since they were introduced bear no blame for their negative consequences. The environmentalists, who were their allies initially and have fought them ineffectually now for decades, are entirely responsible. The environmentalists are simultaneously the only people with agency and responsibility in this scenario and largely ineffectual while the farmers and agribusiness are just a force of nature. They bear no more responsibility for their actions than lightning does when it strikes a tree. They are powerful, dominating even, but blameless.

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