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.
>>In any case, anecdotal reports should be taken as a call for further study, not as a call to draw conclusions.
Precisely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_Gyre
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/...
god
its like you dont even understand clean energy
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]
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.
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.
Edit: Although I see now that this submission has a few upvotes, so maybe we'd better not delete it. <shrug>
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...
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.
> "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.
:(
As an individual, what are the things we could do (other than using less plastic), so we don't contribute to this mess?
