Ocean Destruction Continues Apace...

[Big Orange]

I'm sure I've posted this before and we've been destracted by many human political events in the past six months, but impending amageddon in the seven seas waits for nobody:

Protect ‘blue heart’ of our planet now

London: Oceans are facing an extinction crisis because of over-fishing, pollution and climate change, scientists have warned.

A panel of international marine experts said yesterday that marine species are “at high risk of entering a phase of extinction unprecedented in human history”,

The condition is worsening more quickly than had been predicted.

Gathered for a workshop at Oxford University, the scientists warned that entire ecosystems, such as coral reefs, could be lost in a generation.

“Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing – through the combined effects of climate change, over-exploitation, pollution and habitat loss – the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean,” their report added.

The scientists called for urgent measures to cut carbon emissions, over-fishing and pollution.

Dr Alex Rogers, of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, which convened the panel with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said: “The findings are shocking.”

Dr Dan Laffoley, senior adviser to the IUCN and co-author of the report, said: “The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent.”

Link

[SpaceMarine93]

This looks like a serious case of international distraction, general public apathy, Corporate / Right Wing counter propaganda and probably being too late to do anything.

[Chardok]

You know - as a relative layperson, I seem to recall "imminent oceanic ecosystem collapse" being mentioned many many times over the years. what's different about this/why should I be concerned now vs. before?



Or should I just be ready to enjoy delicious Jellyfish diet exclusively?

[Singular Intellect]

You know - as a relative layperson, I seem to recall "imminent oceanic ecosystem collapse" being mentioned many many times over the years. what's different about this/why should I be concerned now vs. before?

Our technological capabilities are rapidly approaching a point in the near future where repopulating entire species becomes a matter of will and allocation of resources, so it's important to acknowledge this problem as dire and irreversible today before tomorrow's solutions are available showing that's actually not the case.

People have, throughout all of human history, consistently demostrated a fascination and obsession with fear mongering and doomsday predictions, with every generation absolutely convinced they were the special people who were going to watch the world fall apart around them. This behavior tends to fall mostly into two groups I've noticed: the rejoicing masses who can't wait for this to happen, and pessimistic doomsayers who can't be bothered to do shit except whine about how the world is going to hell.

Obviously today's generation is living in a very different world than the last generation, so it follows that their perspective and outlook is much more reliable and accurate than previous generations that never held that exact same notion.

Now mind you, I suspect it's important to point out that I'm not suggesting such problems are trivial or not of great importance. I'm simply much more interested in reasonable acknowledgement of existing problems and proposals of effective, practical solutions applied with effort relative to the severity of said problems.

[madd0ct0r]

oh SI, even if you mean well, you do come across as a prick sometimes.

for the record, I've eaten jellyfish. it's nothing special.

[someone_else]

Our technological capabilities are rapidly approaching a point in the near future where repopulating entire species becomes a matter of will and allocation of resources, so it's important to acknowledge this problem as dire and irreversible today before tomorrow's solutions are available showing that's actually not the case.

Technically speaking, it has been doable more or less affordably since the beginning of time by using knowledge and changing some procedures (unless you mean that we start cloning stuff or other equally futuristic magic). It's just that none gave a fuck till now, and the "who cares" attitude will likely remain in the future.

The point that shoud get across is that we shouldn't do it for "nature". It won't care that much. There have been already mass extintions in the past and everything turned out fine in the end.
The real point is that any screw removed from the ecosystem may cause ripples that leave people workless or hungry or both.

But too many people don't give a fuck about that either.

[Simon_Jester]

You know - as a relative layperson, I seem to recall "imminent oceanic ecosystem collapse" being mentioned many many times over the years. what's different about this/why should I be concerned now vs. before?

Our technological capabilities are rapidly approaching a point in the near future where repopulating entire species becomes a matter of will and allocation of resources, so it's important to acknowledge this problem as dire and irreversible today before tomorrow's solutions are available showing that's actually not the case.

SI, how is your assumption that our future capabilities will cross this line fast enough to solve the problems we're creating all that different from saying that it doesn't matter how much environmental damage we do because the Rapture is coming in 2000/2012/203X and will save everyone worth saving?

There are three levels on which you can plan for the future.

On one level, you can plan for what you will do with the capabilities you now have. On a second level, you can plan for what you could do with the capabilities you can easily project that you will have. On the third level, you can plan for what you might do with the capabilities that you imagine that you will have.

The first level is extremely important, the second is still important. The third is not important- you don't really need a plan for "what if I win the lottery," even if you are convinced that you're going to win it in the next few days.

The weakness of your arguments that "the Singularity is coming, we don't need to worry about this, [advance X] will make the problem vanish as if it had never been!" is not that you come across as a prick, even though you do. It is not that you come across as someone with such single-issue tunnel vision that they are literally unable to perceive that things outside the tunnel even exist, although you do.

It is that you use planning of the third type as a substitute for planning of the first and second type. There is no serious attempt to discuss what we can do with the resources we have now, or that we know will be built in the near future. No, instead we are expected to put all our faith and credit into bleeding-edge developments that may or may not have actually happened yet.

The problem with this is that when you talk about dirt-cheap solar power or easy reconstruction of ecosystems, your entire argument has a very important hostage to fortune. If the technology doesn't materialize or (more likely given historical experience) doesn't work as well and cheaply as you planned, everything you say becomes total nonsense.

I mean, imagine that we're talking about the problem of traffic in cities in 1960, with an eye to what will happen over the next fifty years. People say "well, we need more lanes of highway, we need to improve the existing roads, we need a mass transit system, blah blah blah." A few daring visionary types are yelling at everyone and saying that some time in the next 15-20 years oil prices are going to skyrocket and we really need to worry about fuel economy and encourage the country to develop more fuel-efficient cars.

Then someone breezily swoops into the meeting and start trying to shout everyone down about how long before the deadline, we will have flying cars. Which means that all our talk about traffic problems is irrelevant and we're just trying to distract people so that they'll pay attention to our issues before the advance of technology makes them irrelevant. What we should really be worried about is designing an air traffic control network for handling millions of flying cars, which means funding huge advances in computer and automation technology, along with a major expansion of existing pilot training schools so that when flying cars hit the market, our nation will be prepared to use them.

...

In hindsight, from the year 2010 (the end of the period they were considering), the people talking about expanding the highways will look sane, albeit chained to the mindset of their era. The people talking about fuel economy will look like visionary geniuses and everyone will wish that people had listened to them sooner.

But the person who was talking about how flying cars would solve all our traffic problems would look quite different. His insistence that new technology right around the corner would solve the problems projected from existing trends would be totally misplaced. Because everything he said turned out to be wrong, and following his advice would have been foolish.

And that's not even because it's physically impossible to build a flying car. People did real feasibility studies into creating flying cars in the '50s, and concluded that it could be done from an engineering standpoint. No, the problem isn't that they're impossible, it's that they were more expensive than he expected- enough to make it unsellable for mass-market applications.

Even a relative handful of minor issues about engineering and training were enough to take this man's prediction of a glorious Flying Car Revolution in transportation and reduce it to a joke. And so in hindsight, his faith in the inevitable rapid progress of all kinds of technology that he could imagine would make him look like a babbling idiot.

...

I suspect that this is how you will look in 2060, SI. While we may well have a society which has been drastically changed by advances in AI, genetics, and other fields, that doesn't necessarily validate your specific predictions. "The world will change" does not guarantee that the change will make the problems of today easy to solve before those problems become relevant.

[Akhlut]

You know - as a relative layperson, I seem to recall "imminent oceanic ecosystem collapse" being mentioned many many times over the years. what's different about this/why should I be concerned now vs. before?

Our technological capabilities are rapidly approaching a point in the near future where repopulating entire species becomes a matter of will and allocation of resources, so it's important to acknowledge this problem as dire and irreversible today before tomorrow's solutions are available showing that's actually not the case.

Regarding the bolded part: you're fucking stupid. You cannot comprehend how utterly insane this idea is. You can't just sweep away the impracticality of cloning species and rebuilding ecosystems from the ground up. Let us take the example of the passenger pigeon: oh, how I would love to clone that majestic bird that was prior to European interuption of the North American ecosystem a relatively rare bird. There are problems with cloning the shit out of passenger pigeons that is unrelated to finding a suitable egg donor: lack of genetic material. Yes, there might be hundreds of eggs and skins and feathers of them in museums the world over and perhaps some near-fossils to be excavated with salvagable DNA that can be used for cloning purposes, but even if all of them have sufficient DNA for cloning, there are problems with inbreeding threshholds. We need at least 500 distinct animals to prevent inbreeding and we must ensure that each one of them breeds. This is difficult in and of itself. We'd also have to watch them keenly for decades to stop them from being extirpated by freak occurrences, like falcons or a wildfire (the Heath Hen's extinction was brought about much more quickly because a prairie fire raged through a field where they were nesting and hens and chicks were incinerated, leaving mainly males in the population).

There's also the matter that the habitat itself has changed quite drastically since they died. There are invasive species, a new distribution of native species due to human involvement of the past 500 years, and a load of other intrusions. We don't know if they could survive this world from which they've been absent for a century or if they'd be a horrific pest now.

Yet, you're suggesting that we don't need to worry now simply because "tomorrow's solutions will make it oh-so-easy to solve that people will stop caring"? What the fuck are you smoking? Don't you realize that there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle? If we destroy a species and then resurrect it, things aren't going to go back to how they used to be; yes, it will be good to bring a species back from extinction, but unless one can completely and utterly restore a habitat, there is going to be a loss of diversity and a loss that is, frankly, unable to be recovered.

Yet, here you are, pontificating that all shall be well because we're on the path to finding a universal panacea that can undo our stupidity.

You're wrong. We need to stop being stupid, not hope that we can magically undo it as if we never were in the first place.

[Traveller]

I suggest we all get used to the idea that we will witness the death of the oceans in our liftimes, and live,or not, with its consquences. Now it may be in 2050 there is still 'life' in the ocean, but it be a fraction of what exisited in the past. There will be future disasters, oil, spills, nuclear accidents not yet occured. And our standard over-fishing and useing the worlds oceans as our own private toxic waste dump and toilet. I allready lived to see fisheries shut down on both coasts and can see how health authorities in all 3 N.A. countries routinely issue warnings about the dangers of eating fish caugh from our oceans and lakes. The question is then, what will the next 40 years bring? Nothing good I fear.


http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2011/ ... lypse.html

[Alyrium Denryle]

You know - as a relative layperson, I seem to recall "imminent oceanic ecosystem collapse" being mentioned many many times over the years. what's different about this/why should I be concerned now vs. before?



Or should I just be ready to enjoy delicious Jellyfish diet exclusively?

It is already happening. Coral bleaching, global fisheries are AT collapse, not approaching it. We are talking a level of ecosystem collapse that has not happened since hominids have existed.

Our technological capabilities are rapidly approaching a point in the near future where repopulating entire species becomes a matter of will and allocation of resources, so it's important to acknowledge this problem as dire and irreversible today before tomorrow's solutions are available showing that's actually not the case.

No, they are not. How exactly would we do this? Mass cloning from frozen embryos? Here is a hint: We can do that in tissue cultures because we dont have to worry about horrific inbreeding and cell age in tissue cultures. We cannot, and will not for the foreseeable future be able to do that with whole organisms, and even if we could, we do not have the genetic seedstock to prevent inbreeding, and that is if we can get enough genetic material to do it in the first place, which is a dicey proposition even for things we know very well (Protip: We will only be able to do it for model lab organisms. A species on the brink of extinction or already extinct, generally not so much. In terms of fish... we might be able to do it with Salmon, Trout, and some Centarchids, as well as the lab organisms like zebra fish and sticklebacks. In the ocean MAYBE tuna, but that is about it. The rest, we just dont have the genetic material, and even if we have sequences on file from 500 specimens, we dont have the epigenetic modifications to get successful development. We living cells, and those are even more rare). Even then, if we could do it, we would have to "repopulate" to the point that the population is stable through nothing but lab work and aquaculture, and for many species, we have ZERO experience with captive husbandry with those taxa and/or the species itself is not amenable to captive breeding.

In fact, we are having these exact difficulties with the 1/3rd of frogs which are going extinct. We dont have the natural history data to replicate the conditions required for them to breed. The same problem happens with fish. We know most of these animals from two places. Our dinner plate, and museum collections, with the species themselves, their natural history, how they actually live, being more or less completely unknown because they are nearly impossible to study in their natural environment. We cannot make up that data. Technology, will also not permit us to gather it more quickly, we have the technology to do it, we lack the money, time, personnel, and logistics to do it.

Cloning and raising rats is far the fuck different from cloning and raising half the world's fish.

You need to shut the fuck up before your foot goes so far into your mouth that it comes out of your ass.

People have, throughout all of human history, consistently demostrated a fascination and obsession with fear mongering and doomsday predictions, with every generation absolutely convinced they were the special people who were going to watch the world fall apart around them.

And generally, that is based on arbitrary prophecies from religion, not precise and well tested mathematical models of population collapse.

Technically speaking, it has been doable more or less affordably since the beginning of time by using knowledge and changing some procedures (unless you mean that we start cloning stuff or other equally futuristic magic). It's just that none gave a fuck till now, and the "who cares" attitude will likely remain in the future.

No. It has not been. we can do it with animals we essentially created, and thus know everything about. We cannot do it with wild species.

[Shroom Man 777]

The mindset that we shouldn't be worried about our ecological shits today because our descendants will have awesome singularitoid technology that can resurrect all sorts of extinct animals thanks to some spaceship called Titan that'll fly around After Earth is shit. So, just because our descendants can fix the problem - maybe - then we should neglect it entirely and let them do the hard work, instead of doing something now so the problem won't get worse in the future? That's really stupid. Irresponsible. And unfair to our future generations.

Unless like ole Singular Intellect, you happen to think that our descendants will be nothing but organic meatbags and that we shouldn't have descendants in the first place, because the process of creating descendants is an inferior biological process compared to technological methods(!), that we should instead upload our consciousness into bloop-bloop-bloop robot bodies in the future, and since we won't have lungs or bladders to fill with air and water, then there'd be no point at all in preserving the environment anyway, lol. If we destroy the ecosystem today, but upload an entirely identical ecosystem tomorrow in the future, would it be a different ecosystem? No, it won't! It's exactly the same one! Therefore, the ecosystem was never destroyed, and that same ecosystem will continue to exist in the future! Singularity Intellectoids! Bloop-bloop-bloop!

In the future, there will be robots! The Manatee, and the lasers! And skin - tight - pants.

[K. A. Pital]

So, just because our descendants can fix the problem - maybe - then we should neglect it entirely and let them do the hard work, instead of doing something now so the problem won't get worse in the future? That's really stupid. Irresponsible. And unfair to our future generations.

I'm reminded of the Falloutesque attitude to nuclear energy, where funny captions and posters tell the onlooker that filling Earth with toxic shit and radiation is okay, because future tech will clean this all up.

I find it ironic that SI, an outspoken opponent of nuclear energy because of environmental dangers thereof, if suddenly having such a light attitude towards overfishing and pollution of the oceans.

[U-95]

The mindset that we shouldn't be worried about our ecological shits today because our descendants will have awesome singularitoid technology that can resurrect all sorts of extinct animals thanks to some spaceship called Titan that'll fly around After Earth is shit. So, just because our descendants can fix the problem - maybe - then we should neglect it entirely and let them do the hard work, instead of doing something now so the problem won't get worse in the future? That's really stupid. Irresponsible. And unfair to our future generations.

Unless like ole Singular Intellect, you happen to think that our descendants will be nothing but organic meatbags and that we shouldn't have descendants in the first place, because the process of creating descendants is an inferior biological process compared to technological methods(!), that we should instead upload our consciousness into bloop-bloop-bloop robot bodies in the future, and since we won't have lungs or bladders to fill with air and water, then there'd be no point at all in preserving the environment anyway, lol. If we destroy the ecosystem today, but upload an entirely identical ecosystem tomorrow in the future, would it be a different ecosystem? No, it won't! It's exactly the same one! Therefore, the ecosystem was never destroyed, and that same ecosystem will continue to exist in the future! Singularity Intellectoids! Bloop-bloop-bloop!

In the future, there will be robots! The Manatee, and the lasers! And skin - tight - pants.

Agreed.