posted
I've noticed that local chain restaurants like Taco Del Mar and Skippers have stopped offering cod as their fish of choice. Now it's talapia, or something else; sometimes it's just a generic, nameless white fish.
And then there's salmon. Farmed salmon just isn't as good for you as wild, by many accounts, and there are suggestions that fish farms may actually make things worse for the wild runs: they create areas where fish-unfriendly parasites thrive, and they create less-healty and fit progeny when they crossbreed with the wild strains.
Ebert just reviewed a film called The Cove that covers a place in Japan where dolphins are illegally killed, their meat mis-labelled and put into childrens' lunches despite the high concentrations of mercury in their flesh.
Apparently we should be learning to eat jellyfish. The linked story aside, I know personally they've begun showing up on beaches that have never seen them before. (And I've eaten jellyfish, at a Chinese wedding reception... I'd just as soon not repeat the experience.)
It's scary when something like this hits you in ways you cannot possibly ignore. And it's sad for me, too, because I have a small daughter who may live to see a world with little or no seafood. And she loves salmon.
Many years ago, on witnessing a couple have a loud and unpleasant public fight, a friend of mine commented, "You know... Sometimes I just don't like people."
Sometimes, I agree.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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I missed an important news item from February 5, 2009 -- "The North Pacific Fishery Management Council today decided to close a vast stretch of American waters to fishing that has never been fished actively. This sounds strange initially, but it’s actually a proactive move — focused on Arctic waters above the Bering Strait — aimed at avoiding big ecological disruptions as the expanding summer retreats of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean expose virgin waters."
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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"...chain restaurants...have stopped offering cod as their fish of choice. Now it's talapia, or something else; sometimes it's just a generic, nameless white fish."
They were hoki, but the commercial seiners have managed to nearly collapse that fishery too.
Cod fisheries have collapsed due to over-harvesting to the point that the number of cod allowed to grow old enough to reproduce isn't sufficient to maintain their population. Nor is this the first time. What we have been eating recently were considered a trash species of cod until the '60s or so. ie They useta be tossed back into the ocean as an unwanted bycatch of fishing for the couple-or-three other species considered to be "cod worth eating".
Too bad Pig and Cattle farts are greenhouse gases. We can always get our potein from rats and bugs. I agree with the ethanol/corn comment though. No one really cares about the human cost. Rising grain prices due to ethanol has resulted in more people starving around the world - but we are helping mother earth.
Guess what the greatest killer in the history of mankind is?.....mosquito. DDT saved many lives, for a while. Millions die in the name of bird eggs.
The delta smelt is safe but close to 100k people are out of work and 13% of America's produce crop is cut off.
Rice fields are taking swamp land and natural flood plains that are natural wildlife preserves...how long until rice production is banned to save the birds. What would the human cost be for reduced rice production?
There is no right answer for any of these questions...Green wind turbines kill birds...and preventing controlled burns results in large sections of California burning to the ground uncontollably every year.
I take the unpopular position that people are more valuable. We can adapt, the smelt cannot. 99.9% of all species that ever walked the earth are extinct and only a tiny fraction of 1% of that could be attributed to man. Screw the field mouse, I want my family to eat grain..at least until we get soylent green.
Posts: 1495 | Registered: Mar 2009
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Funny thing about DDT... Or any simple, easy, so-called "common sense", silver-bullet solution: Nature has a tendency to laugh at us.
Case in point... and that doesn't even consider that DDT doesn't break up quickly and easily, and can cause cancer and genetic defects in humans when it leaks into groundwater.
We still don't understand why giant jellyfish are showing up in Japan, or why honeybees are vanishing. If people hesitate to blithely kill off entire species in the name of temporary economic gains or access to limited food sources, it's not necessarily because said species are cute or because of some vague "environmentalism" that irrationally trumps human interest. We are a long way from understanding all the interconnections of such actions, and we're terribly underqualified to play God.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:I take the unpopular position that people are more valuable.
I am too, that's why I don't act like you and go off of simple pseudo-causal deductions that result in people making gross, consequential degradations to the ecosphere we're reliant upon.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: I take the unpopular position that people are more valuable. We can adapt, the smelt cannot. 99.9% of all species that ever walked the earth are extinct and only a tiny fraction of 1% of that could be attributed to man. Screw the field mouse, I want my family to eat grain..at least until we get soylent green.
First, humans weren't around for a vast majority of those extinctions, so of course it cannot be attributed to humans.
Second, it seems pretty obvious that a non-insignificant amount of the extinctions happening today can be attributed to human activity. Habitat destruction, pollution, toxic chemicals in the water. It doesn't take much to see the obvious.
Third, yes, humans are adaptable. But who knows how far our adaptability extends? You say screw the field mouse, and assume that we do not need the field mouse, and the entire ecosystem that the field mouse represents. Where does your air come from? Where does most of your water come from? Where does your food come from? Where does your medicine come from? Do you not recognize the large, diverse, and potentially fragile systems on which you depend?
I forget who said it (the book is at home), but it was something like: There has never been a time in all of human history where we have not been depleting the earth of it's natural resources. All of this growth and progress comes at the cost of the integrity of the planet. At some point, if we keep taking and keep growing, the planet will cease to be able to provide. It is a closed system, and exponential growth in a closed system is not sustainable.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Although I agree with your overall point, the Earth is not a closed system: It has a huge source of external energy driving it. Now, if you wanted to call it a metastable system which will go into completely unexpected states if pushed, that would be accurate.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Sorry. Closed in the sense of mass exchange. Water and air and nutrients do not leave or enter the system.
As long as our primary energy comes from mass (trees, coal, oil, biofuel, nuclear, etc.), it is a good assumption to call it a closed system. If solar ever really becomes dominant, then I would drop the assumption.
And stability doesn't really mean the same thing as closed. As far as the Earth's energy balance goes, the energy coming in from the sun is just about exactly matched by the outgoing energy (small exception for the imbalance caused by the greenhouse effect). There is stability in the energy exchange. Energy in = Energy out, but it is not a closed energy system.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Dude, you never heard of entropy? Obviously there's energy balance, but that's completely irrelevant to a discussion of anything but black-body radiation! The question is whether we have "entropy balance", to coin a phrase. We get in photons in the visible spectrum, blackbody temperature around 6000K (modulo atmospheric reflection) and radiate in the infrared, blackbody temperature something like 300K. (Roughly.) That's a huge difference, enough in fact to run the entire anti-entropic biosphere. That the one has total energy equal to the other is trivial; the question is whether the entropy (or other measure of useful work) is the same.
Let me point out that your "energy from mass" in fact comes, other than nuclear, from old solar. Put in solar energy and you can make oil from scratch (well, from table scraps anyway) if you like. It's just not economically viable at the moment.
"Metastability" wasn't intended to refer to the energy (or the entropy) balance; the point is that the ecosystem, closed or not, is not in a fully stable equilibrium - push it a little bit, it might or might not come back to the same point. Firstly, it's chaotic; secondly, it has multiple semi-stable equilibria; and thirdly, we have no idea what the equilibria even are, much less of the transitions between them (except for the ones staring us in the face, like the transition from an ocean full of fish to one full of algae, or whatever will take over the energy that fish used to use). But this has nothing to with being or not being a closed system.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Obviously there's energy balance, but that's completely irrelevant to a discussion of anything but black-body radiation!
I do believe that the energy balance is a primary indicator of the temperature of the planet. You look at the solar (shortwave) energy coming in, and look at the terrestrial (longwave) energy coming out, and you can estimate the temperature. If you look at it without greenhouse effects, you get around -15 Celsius. You include a (simplistic) greenhouse effect, and you get around 30 Celsius. Reality is not quite at 30 Celsius, the observations show something more like 16 Celsius. But the energy balance does directly lead to the surface temperature, which is quite relevant.
When you talk about "energy from mass" or vice-versa, this does not happen often on our planet. It is not at all common for energy to be converted into mass, or mass converted into energy. So much so that when calculations and assumptions are made, energy balance and mass balance are treated as separate balances. You put in solar energy, and you provide energy for the compound oil to be made from its basic parts. But the solar energy itself does not make oil.
I agree with you with your stability statements. The earth may have several stability points, and we have no idea if we're nearing a tipping point from one to another. But if we ever hope to make a good guess, it's good to understand mass, momentum, and energy. And we know that only very negligible amounts of mass enter of leave the system. For any calculations, you can safely assume that it is closed. That is what I mean when I talk of a closed system.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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White Whale: but, as you've pointed out, if the mass is closed, it doesn't make sense to talk about "depleting" the mass by using it as fuel. All of the mass is still there. And, if enough energy were applied, a lot of it could again become fuel.
Note: I'm not saying there aren't serious conservation issues, but your advocacy is at odds with other parts of your position.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Since an Earth populated by one-celled algae, an Earth containing a flourishing human civilisation, and a flaming radioactive desert all contain the same mass, I fail to see the interest.
quote:I do believe that the energy balance is a primary indicator of the temperature of the planet. You look at the solar (shortwave) energy coming in, and look at the terrestrial (longwave) energy coming out, and you can estimate the temperature.
Right; blackbody radiation, as I said. (And non-blackbody, if you include the chemical effects.) This has nothing to do with whether we have an ecosystem, or Venus, which depends in effect on the biosphere.
quote:When you talk about "energy from mass" or vice-versa, this does not happen often on our planet. It is not at all common for energy to be converted into mass, or mass converted into energy.
I didn't! You're the one who introduced the phrase! "Our primary energy comes from mass", quo' you. No, it doesn't; it comes from the sun, and is stored as high-energy-density forms of matter. This has nothing to do with energy-to-matter conversion. It's a matter-to-other-form-of-matter-mediated-by-energy conversion. That we don't gain or lose any matter is unimportant; we'd have the same oil reserves if you doubled the number of meteorites through Earth's history, but try that trick with solar input.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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fugu13, thanks. I think I'm getting ahead of myself, or not explaining everything clearly. When I'm talking about "our primary energy comes from mass," I mean that the way that we currently get the energy we need is my converting mass from a high-energy state to a low-energy state. We burn it. We burnt wood until we discovered that we could burn coal. We burnt coal until we discovered that we could burn oil. Now we're burning all three.
And for much of this mass, specifically coal and oil, it does not cycle back on any time scale that really matters for us, and it would be quite expensive (energy-wise) to convert it back into coal or oil. It would not make sense to do, although it would be possible. Wood has a much shorter cycle-back time, but providing the energy for 6 billion plus people with only wood is not appealing.
If we're talking about human energy needs over the next 100 years, which I think is something that really needs to be talked about, a good working assumption is that the coal and oil we burn is gone. It is no longer usable. It is not worth talking about methods for turning the byproducts of its combustion back into coal or oil. It is not going to cycle back any time soon. In that sense, it is being depleted.
On geologic timescales, it is not. But geologic timescales are not the timescales on which our current problems exist.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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KoM: sorry about the mix-up with energy to mass. That is my mistake. See my previous post.
quote:Right; blackbody radiation, as I said. (And non-blackbody, if you include the chemical effects.) This has nothing to do with whether we have an ecosystem, or Venus, which depends in effect on the biosphere.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. The temperature of our planet has *a lot* to do with the existence of our ecosystem. Venus does not have a ecosystem (or biosphere, is that what you're saying? because Venus most assuredly does not have a biosphere) for a lot of reasons. A primary one being one that it does not have the right energy balance, and thus the right temperature for water to exist in all three states.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Eh. At this point I think we are, as my advisor puts it, "agreeing violently". The point is, although the ecosystem is a big system, it's also chaotic and multi-equilibric (is that a word?); it doesn't take a stimulus anywhere near the size of the system to provoke a change to a different equilibrium. Further, most changes in equilibrium will be violently bad for humans, quite independent of what happens to fish. If nothing else, our economy has spent a lot of time tuning itself to the current availability of resources - this tuning process is why free markets work so well - and changing the available resources is a bit like suddenly slapping a big tax on a lot of different things. Sure, the economy will adjust, but that takes a while and anyway you can't avoid a price increase. And the process of adjustment is likely to be unpleasant, because unemployment will overshoot.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Any way you slice it, ultimately, in the long run humans will have to make a choice. There are limited resources on this planet. Eventually there will be an us or them choice to be made, perhaps this is the current discussion. Either there is a worldwide mandated form of population control or man will relegate most forms of life, other than our domesticated food crops, to zoos and terrariums. I'm not advocating forced population control but it is an inevitable choice. Humanity or the ecosystem. Maybe its our medical technology and world economy that has made things worse. True pandemics, wars, disasters and local ecosystems once kept our population in check. Is food aid to highly reproductive people who lack the resources to support themselves really a good idea? Eventually, the grain belt of the United States will not be able to feed the populations of the deserts around the world. At least for now, they have oil under that sand to trade. You want to see the middle east decline and starve, move away from oil.
Posts: 1495 | Registered: Mar 2009
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Your analysis is too blunt. You are correct that there is a tradeoff between numbers of humans and amount of biomass dedicated to non-human nature; and people can legitimately have different preferences on the matter. If you prefer, say, a human population of 50 billion, with every piece of ecosystem pressed into producing food for them; and I prefer say 5 billion and quite a bit of nature for them to enjoy - well, this is a difference of opinion, and we can argue about it, vote on it, and ultimately fight over it if we can't reach agreement.
But! There's also this point to be made: That we cannot reach that 50 billion, nor keep the 5 billion, if we simply ignore the ordinary workings of the ecosystem. If you want to have the oceans populated only by algae producing food for humans, that's a policy goal; but you won't get there by just sweeping up the fish, willy-nilly. Such a change must be made consciously, not randomly. If we go on simply pumping out poisons and grabbing every piece of protein in sight, we won't get a world populated only by humans and our commensals; we'll get a population crash, "of the classic two-thirds degree". Surely this is something we can agree we want to avoid, independent of whether we desire a 5-billion or 50-billion steady-state population?
Until we are able to actually engineer the ecosystem in a properly controlled manner, we would be very stupid to continue providing it with random inputs. An unpredictable result, in a chaotic system which you need to produce your food, is with 98% certainty going to be a very bad result.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Any way you slice it, ultimately, in the long run humans will have to make a choice. There are limited resources on this planet. Eventually there will be an us or them choice to be made
The ecosystem is not a sum-styled game where it comes down to either "us winning" or "the ecosystem winning." It's actually remarkably different than how you make it (or are even capable of seeing it). It's "us and the ecosystem winning" or everybody losing.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Although the ecosystem is not necessarily zero-sum, at some level there's a tradeoff between number of humans and amount of non-human biomass.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Sure, but that doesn't mean the existence of humans is sustainable if they significantly increase their percentage of the available biomass.
My personal suspicion, though, is that the percent of biomass present in humans will come nowhere near being a problem by the time resource usage of other sorts would become a problem.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I'm not a vegetarian, but I've been consciously cutting down on my fish and meat intake this year. I don't eat it less often, I just eat less of it. I've eaten fish once this year.
Poverty is a great way to cut down on your meat (and fish, yowch fish is expensive nowadays!) intake.
It can be done. But I know so many people who plow their way through tons of meat. Not that I blame them: we are omnivores and as a protein source meat is invaluable.
Here's one thing, though: Americans (and Canadians, and the British...) are fatter than the world average. Whenever I see a photo of a group of Americans, I am always struck by how round they are. Many Americans could cut their calorie intake, including fish and meat, in half or even a third and they wouldn't even be hungry. They would be healthier. I appreciate how tasty food is, but it drives me nuts that certain people talk about how putting restrictions to prevent ecological damage is impacting the starving. You know who else is impacting the starving? People who eat vast quantities of meat that far exceed what they need!
If you have 200 million people eating three times what they need, you have 400 million people who could be adequately fed without improving the efficiency of food production.
Of course, having less people is also a big thing. The Papal insistance that contraception is evil is so problematic, I barely know where to begin. In the past, child death was contraception. Our scientific advances save many children all over the world and in order to not raise dozens of children, a billion people must resist moral blackmail in order to put a leash on their procreation.
I don't have a problem with a few big families, a few big meals and eating meat. I believe that we could have these things on the Earth without any formal restrictions if people would only be more aware.
quote:You know who else is impacting the starving? People who eat vast quantities of meat that far exceed what they need!
I agree with some of your sentiment, but this is just fallacious. If there weren't as many people eating as much meat, less meat would be produced, and the meat produced would cost more. That's econ 101. Poor people would have to pay more when they wanted meat, not less.
We already have more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet at current levels of production. The problems with starvation and hunger are not fundamentally due to the planet not having enough food; they are due to food not being effectively delivered to the people who need it most.
If you want to help starving people, trying to get people in the US to eat less won't help -- indeed, it will be actively counterproductive, though probably not a huge amount (people who are truly starving aren't doing so for lack of meat). This doesn't mean that desiring people to both eat less meat for health reasons and for more food to be available to starving people aren't both good goals that can be held reasonably at the same time, but they're not nearly so interrelated as you think. Learning a little about how markets work will help you in assessing situations like this for likely effects.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Regarding the original post, first, the amount was a 90% drop in catches, not extinction. That's a very different state of affairs. Second, more than half of all seafood eaten in the world is farmed, not caught. Prices might go up somewhat on certain fish, but I suspect farms will keep up with demand on all fish that can be farmed -- its too profitable not to.
I do worry for tuna, though. I love really good tuna.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:You know who else is impacting the starving? People who eat vast quantities of meat that far exceed what they need!
I agree with some of your sentiment, but this is just fallacious. If there weren't as many people eating as much meat, less meat would be produced, and the meat produced would cost more. That's econ 101.
Um... no. Econ 101 would be that if less meat was produced while demand remained the same, the price would go up. If demand and supply both fall at the same rate, the price remains the same.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Does econ 101 cover economy of scale? I think it makes sense that if there's less overall meat being produced, it's going to drive up the average costs of production or distribution.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Econ 101 tells you that if you remove some demand, you get a new balance by some combination of shifts in price and supply, but doesn't tell you which effect will be more important.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Regarding the original post, first, the amount was a 90% drop in catches, not extinction. That's a very different state of affairs. Second, more than half of all seafood eaten in the world is farmed, not caught. Prices might go up somewhat on certain fish, but I suspect farms will keep up with demand on all fish that can be farmed -- its too profitable not to.
I do worry for tuna, though. I love really good tuna.
It took you three and a half years to read the OP? Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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It is true, I'm working under some additional assumptions regarding economies of scale in meat production. In the absolute simplest scenario, a decrease in quantity demanded would result in a decrease in price. I'd expect to see such a scenario with vegetables, for instance.
I'm sorry Teshi, I shouldn't have been quite so blasé about it. Your statement that price would drop has a good chance of being correct.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the correct answer is neither, and the supply curve remains fairly flat.
But, even if there is some price decrease for meat if many people stop eating it as much, it still isn't a solution to the problems of starvation, which are rooted in other things.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I wasn't referring to the price (although good point), I was referring to the availability of food. We were talking about how much food there is vs. how many hungry people there are. If we kept producing the exact same amount of food, but spread it about more evenly, there would be more food for everyone without having to do any more ecological damage to the environment.
I'm not an economist/financially minded and rarely remember to think in terms of cost when making grandiose statements.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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The price is the availability. Meat at a dollar for a meal does you no good if you have ten cents, even if the butcher's desk is overflowing with the stuff.
quote:but spread it about more evenly, there would be more food for everyone
You cannot have thought this sentence through. To spread something about more evenly, you must by construction take some from those who have a lot and give to those who don't have so much. Now this may be the right thing to do, but it absolutely can not produce more for everyone!
[ May 16, 2010, 03:19 PM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Again, there is already more than sufficient food for everyone on earth. Reduced food usage for people with a lot of food will not increase the food for those who desperately need it. Starvation is primarily caused by failed institutions (for instance, price controls have caused several famines), not a general lack of food.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Cynical me thinks that it might be possible that cutting back on the amount that North Americans eat might reduce the amount of money we sent abroad for processed food products from the third world*, thus causing more poverty and more of the very under-nutrition or starvation that we are trying to avoid in the first place.
* (or the number of immigrants, legal or otherwise working in the agricultural industry, sending back remittances)
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Yo that link is dead right now but I'm already going to predict that it says that there's currently sufficient food reserves for everyone on earth; food production is already deficient and cannot be sustained at its current levels anyway so even if we were able to feed the current world population for the next 2-4 years it's already irrelevant.
The human species is pretty much too stupid to manage institution of an effective population growth control system and/or otherwise prevent africa and other parts of the world from having a massive starvation event by 2025 anyway, so it's also an academic issue; it's gonna happen, it's just a question of when the phosphorous famine / soil collapse hits and how quickly the crisis ramps up.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Samprimary: I'd be more than willing to bet on the occurrence of such a starvation event (subject to reasonable definition of the parameters). $100 to the winner's favorite charity?
We'd need an independent adjudicator to eliminate starvations caused by wars, price controls, or other political institutions. It should be fairly easy, as in your scenario every African country of similar per capita income should experience famine, whereas in other scenarios famines should only occur in African countries with badly formed institutions.
Heck, since you seem to be saying that it is only possible for maybe 2-4 years, perhaps you'd be willing to make the bet based on a sooner time period?
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Sterling: ... And I've eaten jellyfish, at a Chinese wedding reception...
I on the other hand, love food at Chinese wedding receptions, jellyfish included. One of the few reasons to look forward to a wedding if you don't know the guests/couple that well personally.
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: ... reasonable definition of the parameters ... badly formed institutions
If you two go through with this, it might be helpful to name precisely which countries and/or institutions are subject to "badly formed institutions" now before waiting for 2-4 years and then arguing over whether X famine counts because of Y institution.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Samprimary: I'd be more than willing to bet on the occurrence of such a starvation event (subject to reasonable definition of the parameters). $100 to the winner's favorite charity?
Let's just assume I'm donating the cash either way.
basically we have two factors:
- rising world population - unsustainable, nearly capped food production
the latter of which is itself is a combination of
- running out of cheap phosphorous - soil exhaustion
and other things.
If you read the wikipedia article on overpopulation, for instance, it says pretty much what I say. that we largely agree we can cover NOW, but that issues of sustainability mean that even if we kept the world population at where it is, there would still be famine not too long from now. And our population will not maintain at its current levels. it will continue to go up, to a wholly and inarguably unsustainable level. Assuming that the research isn't WILDLY off to an astounding degree, and no miracle self-regulation of world population, there is only one possible outcome.
My scenario doesn't even necessarily have to hit all of similar per-capita african nations equally. All it necessarily entails is severe net population reduction.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: rivka said, ten minutes later
It worked for me earlier in the day as well. Or are you saying it was just for a few minutes, just when you were trying to view it, that it didn't work?
posted
In the 60s, Paul Erlich wrote a best-selling book predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve during the 70s and 80s due to unsustainable population growth. It didn't happen.
It seems to me that usually the people that make these types of pessimistic claims are not adequately allowing for human ingenuity and resourcefulness.
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