The Ocean is Broken | Hacker News Reader

The Ocean is Broken

theherald.com.au

174 pointssamdunne43 comments

I 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 try to view it from another angle. Lets say you are a developer and you do that most of your life day in and day out for years and years - just as this man sails the seas. After years you will have certain observations that will be a culmination of your experience and accumulated knowledge for doing that job for many years... And perhaps young developers will not understand it or will question how you came to such a conclusion, although it is evident to you and experienced peers like yourself. You can't put it into a white paper because of several reason's like time, money, and test conducting. This is like that, its experience and years of wisdom that are talking. Maybe a state will fund a study which will cost 10 million bucks and 5 years to do statistical fish and trash sampling to confirm it later on but without doing such things in the immediate term such a keen observation has and should have the weight and impact it deserves, by that I mean not being brushed off as there is not data and " I didn't see fish either", its deeper than that and the approach should be constructing rather than deconstructing.

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.

I agree with you, but this statement has no ethical weight. We still get to choose whether to do something, and if something, what.

"his own observations mean nothing, or rather, are insufficient to assign any causality other than natural variability."

This would be an accurate statement, but the last hundred years have been particularly relevant as human activities have exponentially soared. You are hiding your head in the dirt if you think that our level of influence is insignificant over the course of a lifetime.

I am in favor of environmental causes but you seem to discount at least one possibility. The person could be either exaggerating or outright lying. People love to exaggerate problems. The other day a user told me that a particular synchronization froze for over 45 minutes doing nothing right in the middle of it. I sent her the timestamped log file that showed there was no pause in the synchronization and that the entire process took less than 15 minutes. This type of thing is very common.

In addition to commonly exaggerating problems, some people lie to further an agenda. Maybe an employee thinks their nephew deserves a shot at developing the company website so they become hypercritical of everything you do. Or maybe a sailor with subjective memories just doesn't like what fishing boats are doing.

In any case, anecdotal reports should be taken as a call for further study, not as a call to draw conclusions.

I agree. This is a possibility that should not be discounted as it is exceptionally common.

>>In any case, anecdotal reports should be taken as a call for further study, not as a call to draw conclusions.

Precisely.

This 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.

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.

or it may be the absolute truth - which you are dismissing as anecdotal.

In either case it is worth keeping an open mind, because if it is true, then we are in serious trouble. Sticking your head in the sand and saying "no data, no data" is not useful even if at the end of the day you are correct. When the consequences of being right or wrong (depending on your point of view) are so dire, it is worth investigating further and certainly not dismissing out of hand.

I think it more interesting why some people want to believe such nonsense. The price of fish is all the evidence you need. Glass half empty does not begin to describe such a mind set.

The mindset that it is worth keeping an open mind if the consequences are potentially catastrophic - is that the mindset you are having difficulty with?

Fishing techniques have improved rapidly over the past few decades. The price of fish is only a measure of supply in as much as we can continue extracting fish. It's no indication of how close we are to running out.

This 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.

The US, and other nations, have nuclear powered ships for war. Why not use these ships for peace, and try cleaning the ocean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/...

because nuclear

god

its like you dont even understand clean energy

Have you ever read "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air?" http://www.withouthotair.com/ ... free book written by a cambridge theoretical physicist. Well worth a read. From a C02 perspective at least nuclear is quite a lot better than other things.

I actually do understand clean energy, and these nuclear powered vessels to which I refer have already been built and fitted. What better use for them than to clean our oceans?

(Sarcasm, my good sir/madam.)

It'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 collective will to solve problems that economics deem impossible to solve by individuals?

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.

That insanity quote does not extend into probabilistic life. If we see tails tails tails, but we are reasonably sure what is behind the empirical result is a coin. We can flip a few more times and expext heads.

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.

The mistake you're making here is to think that this is a non-governmental solution. Yes, it is law that is preventing this solution from being enacted, but it is in the context of government that it could happen at all: government runs the courts and forces the loser of a suit to pay the winner.

Your argument is akin to the people who shout "keep your government hands off my medicare," or the politicians who insist that government can't do anything right, and to prove it they get into office and do everything wrong.

Yes, government in America is broken and ineffectual. It will only be fixed when we as a people decide that it's time for a government that responds to the needs of the people rather than only the wealthy; when we decide to stop being afraid and end the police state we're living in, and replace it with a government that works. Yes every government has its problems, but not all of them are as broken and destructive as ours. Saying government can't solve problems is part of the problem -- it keeps us from focusing our efforts on the kind of collective action that could actually make a difference.

What say you, brothers? Who is with me?

[crickets]

> 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

That might work in special cases, like the BP oil spill, where you can make a strong case that a specific source contributed to specific harm to specific plaintiffs.

Unfortunately, such incidents are only a very small part of overall pollution. Pollution gets emitted from multiple sources around the state, country, or even world, mixes chaotically in the oceans and atmosphere, and causes damage possibly hundreds or even thousands of miles away from its source, often contributing small amounts of damage at hundreds of places.

Good luck trying to figure out who to sue, and then proving that any of your named defendants actually emitted pollution that caused damage to any particular plaintiff.

First of all, the shutdown ended so we are not in its "midst". Second of all, what does the US shutdown have to do with the waters of coastal Japan?

This is extremely unsettling and sad. The question is, is there anything we can do both on micro and macro level?

I would guess on a micro level the best thing you can do is recycle, reducing the amount of refuse that ends up in landfills and often times out at sea. A lot of it from coastal areas ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it's not like storing it on land is awesome either.

The problem really is that even decently sized macro action can be largely negated by economic freeriders. Unless some body like the UN or US sets out to enforce universal cooperation with agreements on pollution, or fishing, whole states that don't follow the regulations will continue to take advantage. Witness the failed Kyoto Protocol, which had 191/192 nations in agreement, but the very worst polluters (read: the US) who refused to be party to it.

As the other person who replied only really addressed pollution, I'll add that you should stop eating fish. And if that's asking too much, catch it yourself. And if that's asking too much, there are definitely operators out there who are concerned about sustainability, you should insist on purchasing your fish from independently certified sustainable sources

Fortunately once we've sucked the earth dry of it's resources and die out ourselves, it should eventually recover.

Why oh why do interface designers ever think it's a good idea to hijack the browser's keyboard controls, especially if it's only to make them do nothing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579760

Noticed right after I posted. Gave it an upvote

Cool. Suggest we delete the submission and this discussion, although if you don't, it doesn't matter. I'm just a bit obsessive about tidiness. Born from working on the C2 wiki, I guess.

Edit: Although I see now that this submission has a few upvotes, so maybe we'd better not delete it. <shrug>

Glad I didn't

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.

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.

All those mentions still probably talk about pieces of debris of which only single or a couple would fit on the same photograph.

I believe the article is talking about ephemeral debris that was sent into the ocean from the 2011 tsunami. What will happen to it in the next 10-20 years is anyone's guess, but factory chimneys aren't something that get thrown overboard or stuffed into municipal landfills.

What this does demonstrate is how one natural disaster can spread signs of human influence and decay for thousands of miles, and it will likely take decades for this stuff to degrade or disperse.

There is no such thing as the garbage patch[1]; any such pictures[2] you may have seen are of other areas that are certainly far more polluted (it doesn't change the tragedy of it or the disgusting nature of such things, but it does change the premise of the argument).

There is, however, a significant problem with regards to the micro-plastics and other such small particles floating about in great number. The problem is that no one knows how these are affecting the ecology of the oceans on a large scale[2].

[1] http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/how-big-gre...

[2] http://io9.com/5911969/lies-youve-been-told-about-the-pacifi...

The good news is that apparently the Japanese aren't having sex anymore, so maybe the ocean around Japan will soon get a bit of a break:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579294

It was like sailing through a garbage tip

As an individual, what are the things we could do (other than using less plastic), so we don't contribute to this mess?

The ocean is broken? Sounds like aliens to me...

This 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com