I hope that the global conversation on ecological protection can evolve from climate change to tangible effects, like pollution and ocean acidification, just as climate change evolved from the use of the term global warming.
Ocean acidification in particular ought to be an issue even climate skeptics can acknowledge is a problem. Unlike climate change, which can be difficult to communicate due to its abstract nature (we had heat last summer and snow last winter so what's changing?), you can plainly test acidification with two cups of water - tap and sparkling - and a pair of litmus slips to show the difference. Then expand on how all the carbon in the atmosphere does that to the oceans, and then demonstrate what that does to life in the oceans, from the algae and plankton to the fish people eat.
Overall I think that focusing on precise tangible issues that people can observe for themselves is a better way to communicate the need for ecological protection than to be completely correct in a large and abstract assessment that people might have trouble following.
Only problem is it's hard to sex up the term "ocean acidification." For something like that we'd need an attention-grabbing shorthand, like "melty fishy death water."
My experience working as a clean air and water advocate in my
early 20s was that people who don't buy into climate change also tend to rationalize away things like potable water, wildlife, and preservation of natural resources. The venn diagram of people who don't "believe in" climate change and would support CO2 cuts to stop ocean acidification is tiny.
Yeah. I think that, while there are people who value some classes of conservation without believing in climate change, climate change is in general a subset of what people don't believe in. Which is to say: Almost anything espoused by environmentalists, any program of environmental regulation, any restraint on resource extraction, etc.
> ...people who don't buy into climate change also tend to rationalize away things like potable water, wildlife, and preservation of natural resources...
This is emergent behavior from a lifetime inculcating conditioned responses to acute challenges in narrow fields of interest, combined with a lack of frame of reference to externalities. People who never plan beyond a horizon of a few decades, and only in very constrained domains, spending the vast majority of their time addressing perceived here-and-now challenges to their social/economic/personal domains are going to find it very difficult to connect with these long-term incubation period threats.
It doesn't help that Upton Sinclair, Jr.'s The Jungle is not widely-read, or reading critical analysis non-fiction is not widespread. Nor does it help that our economic system doesn't account with a high fidelity for where we establish our entropy sinks (at our current technological level, aiming as close to the outer reaches of the solar system as we can is sufficient for now, and we move the aim point higher as we acquire more energy manipulation capabilities).
Impactful stories and imagery can sometimes pierce this veil. Connecting to an imminent threat to personal, individual health seemed to galvanize the food safety and pollution control issues, which again points us back to presenting say, ocean acidification via the lens of an acute challenge to individuals.
I always agreed that pollution should be a higher priority than climate change. The onus is on me to drive a hybrid to reduce my co2 output, but nothing is being done to curb polluting our waterways.
Packaging is a great evil. Most of our waste is packaging. My family recycles a lot, buys glass/aluminum when possible, and still we generate 2-3 bags of garbage each week, mostly food packaging.
The supermarkets discovered they can get you to buy more tomatoes when there are six of them in shiny cellophane, so that's what they do. It's maddening. Not only that, it's nearly impossible not to use plastic packaging if you're not handily located near a co-op (or Unverpackt, if you're in Germany). In many cases I've been looked at suspiciously when I said I didn't need a bag for my two items at the checkout, as though there were something wrong with me. Saying "it just winds up in the back of my car" usually convinced them (never mind that I cycled there...)
Cashiers are sometimes bothered when I have a bunch of veggies not in individual bags, but that bag literally lasts 10 minutes until I get home and put the produce in the fridge. It's a massive waste.
Well for starters the Apostle Paul wrote the 2nd Thessalonian letter condemning this very attitude. Hence, in my experience, comments like this are generally offered by (1) nominal Christians who don't seem familiar with what Jesus and the apostles actually taught; or (2) atheists who use it as a straw-man argument against Christianity proper, instead of an admonishment to the nominals to actually know what they claim to believe.
Or 3) people whose every interaction with said group of people seems to confirm the bias. At what point am I allowed to criticize the culture as a whole?
This sort of thing always seems to descend into some sort of odd "no true Scotsman" argument where people end up debate sincere vs insincere adherents of "X" belief. A lot of people are real pricks, may there is a correlation with belief system "X", but I've yet to see strong evidence that its causal.
Now ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and global average temperature rise; thats a good causal relationship!
Are you saying my observation isn't valid because it may descend into a non-sensical debate? If we are throwing around fallacies, I have one too then.
My observation remains though. The Christians who literally follow the scriptures number far far fewer than those that don't. That is NOT a comment about "sincere" vs "insincere" christians. The "insincere" ones seem just as sincere to me.
> Are you saying my observation isn't valid
No. I'm just saying that it's hard to have a constructive conversation about in this forum based on my previous experience. I might also make the argument that to "literally follow the scriptures" is fundamentalism, and isn't necessarily a mark of a "true" adherent of the faith in question. But that is a bit of a tangent, and none of this has much to do with ocean trash so I don't have a lot more to add.
> At what point am I allowed to criticize the culture as a whole?
At the point where you've made sufficient study of the culture as a whole to have a reasonably justified belief that the criticism is valid for the group covered by the label, or, alternatively, to correctly identify the subgroup to which it does apply and direct the criticism appropriately.
Learning to use words like "some", "many", and "most" helps. But, yeah, unwarranted generalizations are easy mistakes to make; accepting that they are mistakes rather than defending them on the basis that you should be allowed to make unsupported negative characterization of broad groups is the appropriate response; the alternative is justifying bigotry with laziness.
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted here. This a legitimate case of the problem of induction, "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy" [1]. That said, it seems like the flaw in your reasoning (and ch4s3's) is the lack of an objective standard. Holding sincere beliefs and referring to oneself as a Christian don't in themselves make a person a Christian. For example, suppose you met a person who said "I'm a Christian. I don't believe in God and I think the Bible is fiction." Instead of "well ok, he's very sincere, he just doesn't follow the scriptures literally", I think we would rightly conclude "despite his sincere beliefs and identity claim, this person is not a Christian." That is, his identity claim is false. In order for a person's Christian identity claim to be true, he must hold and practice true (or approximately true) beliefs about the person, work, and teaching of Christ.
So doesn't this deteriorate into a "no true Scotsman" argument? I don't think so. The hallmark of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy is its ad hocness [2]. Otherwise, no taxonomy of any kind would be possible. But surely it isn't ad hoc to say "Christians follow Christ's teachings, and non-Christians don't." So what are Christ's teachings? That can only be adjudicated by examining scripture to find out what Jesus said. Some statements (e.g. "you shall love your neighbor as yourself") are pretty straightforward. Some are less so. But we shouldn't take the fact that people disagree about some of the interpretations to mean that Jesus had no meaning, or that his meaning in unknowable. Rather, this should prompt us to ask "what are your reasons for thinking that's what Jesus meant?".
Getting back to your question, we're inductive creatures, and to an extent I don't think you can (or should) avoid drawing generic conclusions about cultures as a whole, given a large enough sample. But make sure that you're sampling persons whom you believe to be actual Christians, and not merely nominal Christians. For comparison, here are a couple of Jesus's metrics: "by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" [3] and "if you love me, you will keep my commandments" [4].
Thanks for the response. Admittedly, my pool of christians is very skewed, but it's still the sample of christians that I have to work with.
You said my flaw is a lack of objective standard. How is that _my_ flaw though? If a Christian doesn't want to wear the stereotypes of christianity, then ... they shouldn't call themselves christian? Either embrace the label, shun it, or change it.
What I mean is, Christians don't even agree what the word means. (mormons call themselves christians, but baptists strongly disagree).
I dunno, we have definitely derailed. Thanks again for the reply.
Ah, sorry for the lack of clarity. My point is that many people who refer to themselves as Christians don't actually follow Christ. The flaw I was pointing out was that it seems natural (and even polite) to merely accept a person's claim to be a Christian as valid. The problem is if you do this, you'll end up with false ideas about what Christianity is and what its adherents are like.
Many of them don't believe Catholics are either. Don't even let them know about the Copts or Nestorians. Utter blasphemes they are. The ignorance among protestant Christendom about their own faith is jaw dropping.
> What I mean is, Christians don't even agree what the word means.
They actually substantially do. There are ~2.2 billion Christians in the world. Of these, about 1.2 billion are Catholic, 0.9 billion are Protestant, and the ~0.2 billion change are Orthodox. Everyone agrees the Catholics are Christian. Pretty much everyone agrees the Orthodox are Christian. Those two groups agree each other are Christian. In Protestantland, things get complicated -- major denominations range from membership in the 85M range to the 40M range, but again, everyone agrees that these major groups are Christian. As the groups get more obscure and more independent, people start to fall back on first principles, but my point is this -- the groups I've named account for something like 98% of the people on the planet who identify as Christian, and they all more or less agree that they all are Christians.
With Mormonism, it is different. Mormons say they are Christians, but Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree they are not. At 14M believers, they are smaller than the smallest of the major denominations, and certainly don't command the sort of numbers such that voting for themselves significantly changes the percentage of Christians in the world who agree they are Christians.
These sorts of things are both communally defined, and reference an objective standard -- and the fact that nobody agrees exactly about what that standard is does not make it subjective.
Sounds complicated and confusing? It's really not. You already are familiar with a community that works this way: science.
Lots of people in the world claim to believe in science, or even to be scientists. Not all of them are. There is an objective standard of behavior, and even if we don't all agree about exactly what it is, we definitely agree that it's objective, and we agree about who meets it the vast, vast majority of the time. The conspiracy crank on the internet says he is a scientist, and they physicist at a major university says he definitely is not. The outsider might just throw up his hands and say, "I'll count whoever claims the term", but to the insider that's very silly. One of those guys really is a scientist, and one really is not.
Organizations help, but are an imperfect standard. Being a professor of hard sciences at a university does not make you a scientist, and being in leadership of a large and well-recognized Christian organization does not make you a Christian, but, well -- these organizations are pretty good at policing themselves, so the folks within them, particularly the farther you go toward the top, are almost always legit.
There are disagreements around the edges. Some will say those folks are doing soft science, and others will say it's not really science. Some will say some obscure denomination has gone too far by rejecting tradition too much, others will say it's fine. But substantially, substantially, the vast majority agree on who is in and out. You will not find a teaching or practice where 30% of Christians think it disqualifies you and 70% think it does not. It's 99% or 1%, almost without exception. (Infant baptism might be the exception that proves the rule here ;) )
If you were an outsider to science, I would say your best bet to determine whether someone was a scientist would be to ask someone from a known safe institution. Find a local geology grad student at a Real University, and ask him if this guy off the internet qualifies. The same test works for Christianity. Find a relatively educated Catholic, Orthodox, or mainline Protestant, and ask them if the person you're wondering about qualifies. That'll give you a pretty accurate answer.
There's a quick and dirty test, too. For science, I would say it is this: does the person you're talking to embrace the doctrine of falsification? They're probably doing science. For Christianity, I would say -- does the person you're wondering about embrace the divinity of Christ? Probably Christian. Not a perfect test, and as an outsider it'll be hard to execute correctly, but it's not a bad place to start.
So in your objective reality, the mormon is a liar. But christianity is about your personal identity. You can't put rules on that for others. I used to be christian, and one that would fall under the "not a real christian" category.
I proseltized. I knocked on doors for years and talked with thousands of people about their beliefs.
Because of my personal experiences, I find your explanation lacking. There is not agreed-upon definition of a christian other than "says they are christian".
Christianity is both personal and communal, and ultimately traces historically back to the nation of Israel, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of the Apostles. Someone claiming Christianity as a personal identity which does not correlate to the communal and historical understandings of Christianity is, at best, using a label in a misleading fashion. (They may be lying, they may be confused, they may genuinely disagree, but ultimately they're using the word in a confusing way -- claiming membership in a community and participation in a history which they reject.)
The "big three" splits in Christianity can all be traced to genuine disagreements while retaining major agreement over key points. Orthodoxy and Catholicism split over the authority of the Roman leader (the Pope) as either equal to the leaders of the other main centers of Christianity or as supreme over them. Catholicism and Protestantism split over the authority of the Bible relative to the authority of tradition and contemporary church leaders. Various denominations within Protestantism split from each other over disagreements ranging from how baptism should be performed (dunking vs sprinkling) to whether women can be ordained as pastors. But through it all, there is a broad set of agreement -- that Jesus is God (connected to Trinitarian Monotheism), that the Bible is foundational for Christian belief, that fellowship with other believers helps refine and center Christians (consider phrases like "the body of Christ" and repeated references to "The Church" within the New Testament), and the centrality of grace/repentance/forgiveness to life as a Christian. While uneducated laymen from these groups might not recognize one another, among educated laymen, scholars, and theologians, there's like 99% agreement that they're all the same basic religion.
There are fringe groups that don't follow this pattern. Mormonism is one of them -- at its founding, its "prophet", Joseph Smith, claimed that all of Christianity was an abomination, and that he alone held the keys to "Restored Christianity". He introduced three new foundational books which are treated with higher reverence than the Bible (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price). These books introduce "alternative history" -- the new people, events, cities, and technology found in the BoM have no historical or archaeological grounding. And these books (mostly D&C) introduce new beliefs and doctrines that are not found anywhere within Christian history, not in either mainstream or fringe groups. As such, Mormonism is rightly considered to be a new religion. (As an interesting aside, most Mormons did not consider themselves to be Christian up until the last few decades.) Likewise, Joel Osteen is broadly considered to not be teaching Christianity -- he might personally be a Christian, but he doesn't teach the stuff that every major branch of Christianity agrees is critical for being a Christian, like the need for repentance and forgiveness. The same can be said of various other fringe groups, televised preachers, etc.
This matches up pretty well with the above comment about self-identifying as a scientist. The word actually has meaning beyond personal identity. It implies things about your community and about your beliefs/approach to knowledge meeting the standards of that community. And while there are always people on the fringes who claim the label, and always gray areas, you can get a pretty good read by going to a known-good source and then building a sort of network of trust from there.
Just because someone is religious doesn't mean they wear it on their sleeve. There's probably more than 1 Christian on this forum - odds are you've interacted with them and you probably have no idea they're Christian.
A lot of it probably has to do with where you live.
Thinking rationally, the United States is a Christian majority country. If zero Christians believed in e.g. climate change or protecting the environment, it probably wouldn't be an issue that either party would pay attention to.
"just as climate change evolved from the use of the term global warming". Maybe officially, but I hear most people (even those who know better) still calling it global warming (and then making jokes about how its so cold they would appreciate some more global warming). At one point I thought maybe the next generation would call it climate change, but I have teenagers and they and all their friends call it global warming still (and its not due to ignorance - they full know it should be called climate change).
A highly paid political scriptwriter(& a small army of researchers) coined the phrase "climate change" and worked it into all the politicos' speeches of the day to make it stick.
The term "climate change" appeared in research literature long before (resistance to acknowledging) anthropogenic climate change became a significant political issue.
See for example this short 1970 communication in PNAS "Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change"
I think that the term "climate change" is better than "global warming" since it also encompasses localized cooling events that might be caused by anthropogenic emissions, e.g. the hypothesized collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that could lead to colder winters in Western Europe.
I apologize, "coined the phrase" is indeed incorrect. It was a scientific term before it's mainstream usage. He intentionally initiated the substitution from GW to CC in all dialogues from the White House(the entire GOP?) which ultimately led to the mainstream usage in the public forum. After noting the change in language(and the Dems callng foul) I found his interview and how the public dialogue is orchestrated to be quite interesting. Cannot recommend the Frontline video enough.
I don't disagree, Climate Change seens more appropriate/accurate.
I've often heard Conservatives use the term "climate change" as evidence that global warming is a hoax—as if we've conceded that the planet _isn't_ warming, and that we're now just saying it's changing in some unknown way. The globe is warming. I think that term is still perfectly legitimate.
> you can plainly test acidification with two cups of water - tap and sparkling
How are the acidities of tap and sparkling water related to the acidity of the ocean? Don't the people who processed the drinking water exercise basic (no pun intended) control over its pH?
You can look at tap water and sparkling (tap water + CO2 injection) and note that the sparkling water is more acidic. (Because CO2 dissolves in water into carbonic acid)
CO2 + H2O ⇌ H2CO3
CO2 injection to make sparkling water is a lot like CO2 being absorbed by the oceans.
Oh, I completely missed the point of the demonstration! I though there was going to be some way in which one of the kinds of water had changed from its historical pH due to indirect effects of human activity (which didn't make sense to me).
Presumably showing them that these little pieces of paper are cheap and effective tests make it easier to believe that people elsewhere are performing tests reliably.
If I showed someone how to use these paper tests and showed how reliable they were, then showed a video of someone testing ocean water they, just might, just barely, hopefully might be more likely to believe me.
I gotta say, that experiment would not convince me.
I own a sodastream. To get fizzy water, I need to inject CO2 under pressure into water to get it to become fizzy.
Wafting some pure CO2 over a glass of water would not make it fizzy or change its PH
Wafting some pure CO2 over a kilometre-deep flask of water would definitely not change it
Considering we're talking about increasing the level of CO2 from 0.000002% to 0.000004%, and then wafting it around the surface of a vast ocean, I don't think the experiments can be compared at all...
My point is that nature is not bubbling pure CO2 through the ocean to make it fizzy or acidic. Using fizzy water to demonstrate the acidity of the ocean is just bad science.
well we've gone from 200ppm to 400ppm. I might be a couple of zeroes off because it's a percentage, but the point is that this is trace gas, not pure CO2 which is what my sodastream uses
Given that polychlorinated biphenyls are so much more abundant in the deep sea trenches than even "In grossly polluted areas, like the Liao River in China" the scientist in me suspects that something other than pollution might be at play.
Perhaps deep sea organisms synthesize polychlorinated biphenyls as an adaptive response? (weirder things are known...) Or perhaps the chemical degradation of polychlorinated biphenyls is inhibited by the environment?
I had that thought as well, however when you look at the differences of the two systems I don't think it holds up well. Consider that every other tested source mentioned has a natural diluting mechanism, whether it is a river receiving runoff rainwater or a tidal area. The trench on the other hand represents a global minimum. Nothing really comes "up" from the trench in quantity so it is in some ways a perfect 'sink'. As such it may be in the process of simply getting more and more concentrated.
There chemical inertness would make them extremely long lived under the conditions of the trench.
I assume it's present in low concentrations in heavy trash or perhaps the flesh of creatures that sink to the bottom after death, slowly building up over time.
I'd like some more information on how much this occurs in nature.
..and yes, to start forming accurate correlation and causation arguments, we'd ideally need to know how much was present in organism 20, 30, maybe even 50 ~ 100 years ago.
Precisely why the Mariana trench has such elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls remains unclear. Dr Jamieson suspects it has to do with the trench’s proximity to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a whirlpool hundreds of kilometres across that has amassed enormous quantities of plastics over the years, and which has the potential to send the pollutants that bind to those plastics deep into the ocean as the plastics degrade and descend.
I think that this guess is likely to be right. It would take a very long time for fluid convection and diffusion to transport these pollutants to such depths. But particles of plastic that are higher-density than water will collect a lot of these strongly hydrophobic pollutants on their surfaces and sink deeply much faster than convection/diffusion operate.
There is a "missing plastic" question in environmental science. We see a lot of plastic trash near the surface in oceans, but the visible amount is much less than the amount humans seem to be adding to the ocean each year.
Where is the "missing" plastic? It seems likely that some of it is sinking to the ocean floor, either because the plastic itself is denser than water or because it builds up denser-than-water growths on its surface. Finding polychlorinated biphenyls and brominated ethers concentrated at such depths is, IMO, pretty convincing evidence for plastics and the pollutants concentrated on their surfaces sinking into the benthic zone.
(Another part of the missing plastic may be gone due to colonization and digestion of plastics by natural hydrocarbon-eaters; see "Life in the “Plastisphere”: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris" for a really fascinating paper about this phenomenon.
It's rather alarming to find such concentrated pollution so far away from its human sources. But at the risk of sounding callous, it's kind of good news for humans and our critical ecosystem services: these very deep ocean regions are relatively isolated from most seafood eaten by humans, and from the photic zone whose photosynthesis is an important part of the carbon cycle. If persistent pollution has to partition somewhere, partitioning into the deepest parts of the ocean is about the best case scenario for surface life.
The "missing plastic" cannot be explained with birds and fishes even more "eating" i.e. swallowing it?
And consequentially when dying taking it with them to the oceanfloor? Seems rather unintuitive.
That thought has already crossed their mind. I have an old textbook on energy that shows people pushing 50 gallon drums of nuclear waste into the ocean.
"If Mount Everest were flipped upside down into it, there would still be more than 2km of clear water between the mountain’s base and the top of the ocean"
This statement always bugs me, the elevation at Everest's base is already ~14,000ft. Its prominence is not its full elevation. When you try to have someone imagine "flipping it upside down", a person wouldn't typically consider including the surrounding terrain, but simply ignore the fact that it's already at great elevation.
I get what you're saying, but the definition of the term 'prominence' doesn't help you, because by definition, Mount Everest's 'prominence' equals its actual height above MSL. This special case is necessary to give the recursive definition of 'prominence' a base case.
However, it's true that Mount Everest's "relief above local terrain" is not equal to its actual altitude above MSL, but this is just informal empirical footballing and no rigorous technical definitions exist.
Climbers have a definition: how far is it from base camp to the top? In other words, the mountain starts where "walking" becomes something more difficult than a gravel path.
Another version of this is distance between the parking lot and the top, at what point are wheeled vehicles no longer an option?
> If only the Earth were a perfectly featureless sphere how simple things would be.
<rant>
Blah, boring. I remember a girl describing how nice everything would be if everything was symmetrical and deterministic, from language, to language, to numbers, to nature, to math... In the end she went on describing heaven as such a place... Man, for the first time in my life I thought that if heaven is like this, I'd like never go there :-)
When Homer described Helen, he wrote "The most beautiful woman in the world", he left the details to the reader. Now imagine if he had added the slightest hint of determinism...
the point is, what's living at these pressures is not human, so you cannot ascribe to them a human-relative definition of "crushing". it's obviously normal and not "crushing" to them.
Most of the plastic in the ocean comes from street litter in coastal cities. If you smoke, that includes cigarette butts (the filters are not natural cellulose anymore), as well as the plastic wrapped around the package that so many let fall to the sidewalk.
I think this is my only zero vote, ever. I'm amazed that a useful and practical (for our environment) suggestion was downvoted here; whereas I'd expect that if Brietbart had a forum (which maybe they do, I rarely if ever visit the site.) Did someone not google and assume natural cellulose was obviously still used in filters? It isn't, it's synthetic, a polymer that doesn't degrade.
From the paper: "The traps were baited with ~100 g of mackerel that was enclosed in a mesh bag to allow the development of an odour plume, but prevent the amphipods consuming any of the bait that might otherwise affect POP levels in downstream assays."
So even if the mackerel did contain the pollutants, they weren't transferred to the amphipods.
Some day it would be awesome to build swarms of autonomous deep-sea robots. Ahhh... imagine if they ate tiny plastic like plankton for whales haha.
I know just bs, not a novel idea, until you do it just spewing smoke.
So much to learn still, I'm currently oriented to web dev not hardware programming but I have a hardware friend though, math friend, pieces will fit someday perhaps.
The ocean is such a mystery/entrancing.
Just imagine if you had a bunch of robots just out there doing there thing and you could "ssh" into them by satellite haha would be nuts.
Ocean acidification in particular ought to be an issue even climate skeptics can acknowledge is a problem. Unlike climate change, which can be difficult to communicate due to its abstract nature (we had heat last summer and snow last winter so what's changing?), you can plainly test acidification with two cups of water - tap and sparkling - and a pair of litmus slips to show the difference. Then expand on how all the carbon in the atmosphere does that to the oceans, and then demonstrate what that does to life in the oceans, from the algae and plankton to the fish people eat.
Overall I think that focusing on precise tangible issues that people can observe for themselves is a better way to communicate the need for ecological protection than to be completely correct in a large and abstract assessment that people might have trouble following.
Only problem is it's hard to sex up the term "ocean acidification." For something like that we'd need an attention-grabbing shorthand, like "melty fishy death water."