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Comment by relax88 | Hacker News Reader

Seems more likely the old mines in the area are causing the contamination with BMAA and that it is being consumed in shellfish. BMAA contamination is often associated with old flooded mine shafts, and there are several in the area where these people are getting sick, most of them upstream.

Not sure why you're assuming this has anything to do with climate change. What could be the link there?

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I do wish that "climate change" was not lumped into every environmental concern. For example, if painting one of the blades black on a windmill means the birds don't fly into it and die, then let's do it! Connecting it to a larger climate battle in order to win that war ("See wind power doesn't have that downside anymore, so more wind power to fight climate change") only gets in the way of solving the immediate problem.

> Connecting it to a larger climate battle in order to win that war ("See wind power doesn't have that downside anymore, so more wind power to fight climate change") only gets in the way of solving the immediate problem.

Personally I feel that splitting up interests that are inherently to do with climate change and ecology into individual issues is detrimental. However, you're probably right that capitalism is inefficient and utterly ineffective at large scale projects, and that splitting everything into isolated issues that cannot be seen to lead to anything bigger is a more "efficient" way to solve the general problem under capitalism, sure.

This is not artificially splitting anything up.

Mines contamination has no relation at all with climate change. Birds death due to impact with windmills have nothing to do with climate change.

It's lumping those things up that is artificial. And if you add noise to your goal, don't be surprised when people start to question if your actions actually lead to your stated goals or if you have a hidden agenda... because you do have a hidden agenda. It's hidden because of bad communication, but people can't tell the difference.

The guy you're talking to views the world through a lens of 'capitalism vs [utopian vision]', capitalism being everything wrong with status-quo economics. Don't waste your time suggesting practicalities.

Cyanobacteria blooms are a cause of BMAA accumulation, and are very much linked to global warming.

Solving the immediate problem is nice but knowing about the root cause is absolutely important.

I'd point out that the mechanism you're proposing is itself an anthropogenic change in the environment. We've altered more than just the atmosphere of this planet. Their overall point, "we've effed this planet, and I believe that's caused this specific problem," would still hold, whether or not they were sufficiently precise with their language.

The ways we've "effed" the planet are so numerous and interconnected that it makes sense, at least to me, to lump them together into an umbrella term everyone is familiar with. There is no clean separation between our mining practices and what has happened to the water and what has happened to the atmosphere - they are intimately related.

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