Has the headline been changed since you commented?
The headline on HN at the moment is "As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer". The headline on the article itself is "As salmon in Alaska plummet, scientists home in on a killer". I don't see any way to read those as suggesting science is killed the salmon.
If you continue just a little bit, when you get to the source, it should make things more clear. Considering the source is important, as is reading the article!
Oh.My.Gosh. "Ich". Have had a home aquarium guy forever. Got a few Ich infestations (always after introducing new, store-bought fish). Although not the same strain (tropical usually is Ichthyophthirius Multifiliis). Sounds pretty much like the same infection progression. Me, and every other tropical aquarium enthusiast, HATES Ich. Now doubly so given a favorable opinion of wild salmon.
What happens when you get Ich in an aquarium: While tendrils start to show up then lengthen on your fish. You try a few treatments, but by the time you see it it cannot be stopped easily. When your fish are covered by pretty long white "shite" strands, they start to die. Worse than any horror film you might have seen. Man do I hate Ich.
I've been fortunate enough to never encounter it with my fish, but it's all over forums and subreddits related to aquaria. Fish get it constantly. If you aren't checking them daily it seems fairly easy to get an infestation that's beyond treatment. I can't imagine. I actually care for my fish quite a bit, and would hate to see them wiped out like that. Each tank I have is a sort of sanctuary, a little ecosystem to steward.
Hey this is off topic, but I filled an outdoor fountain at a rental place with fish, plants— not nearly a self-sustaining ecosystem yet but that’s the eventual goal. All good. However, I’ve grown to realize the responsibility of my little pond project and realize I can’t leave them here with nobody to take care of them if I ever had to move.
What are good options for if I wanted to try to give them away before that event?
There’s about 20-25 at the moment. It’s a mix of common, petco-style goldfish-tier freshwater fish. They would require the taker to have a tank too, so I’m kinda doubting much demand even on something like FB marketplace for free.
Good question! You might check local facebook fish/pond groups rather than marketplace. There are many out there, and us fish nerds tend to be glad to take in some fish who need a new home. Some people have enormous ponds that can handle that kind of biomass without much trouble.
Another avenue could be talking to local fish stores. They will take them as a donation and sell them for you, or in some cases even buy them from you. Since they're common goldfish it's more likely they'd take them as a donation. But yeah, many pet stores are cool with taking on fish you can't home properly anymore.
If you had a few months to move, I'm pretty sure you could find takers before you moved. I sell aquarium plants as a side business and I actually hear from people starting ponds quite frequently (they're hoping they can grow tropical plants), so it's not uncommon. I suspect these kinds of people would love to take at least some of your fish.
Isn’t it funny how these short forms happen? Some friends of mine refer to lactose intolerance as “lactose”; it’s common parlance in the US to have “ejected/arrested for trespassing” be called “trespassing” (“I’m going to trespass you”).
And this disease “the fish destroyer” is now called by the beginning of the word for fish!
I wonder if there is a list of these things somewhere.
It will frustrate me until the day I die the sheer NUMBER of problems directly attributable to human-caused climate change and how every government damn near world-wide simply refuses to do anything.
We know the fucking problem, we know the fucking solution, and we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
> we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
This is at best an oversimplification, and at worse another convenient lie we tell ourselves because then we ("the never rich enough!") can feel righteous anger about nothing happening, while not being responsible for it.
Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
> Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
This is at best an oversimplification, and frankly, it feels like a pretty deliberate one.
Yes, the Yellow Vest protests began because of a proposed fuel tax by Emanuel Macron, which was set to directly impact lower income/rural voters. Which it would, because wealthier people in metro areas don't drive nearly as much. The movement evolved over time to incorporate many rural vs. city conflicts, things like lack of government services in non-populous areas, low minimum wages, and overall income inequality and all the social ills that follow it.
People weren't upset that gas was getting more expensive: they were upset that it was becoming unaffordable in areas in which buying it is not optional. You simply cannot live in the rural areas of any western country without a car. Period. Paragraph. The infrastructure demands a vehicle or you cannot get around. So when people are already struggling and ostensibly green-minded ideas like gas taxes are proposed, with no alternatives for them besides driving: yes, they get pissed off.
Measures like these have been protested far and wide because of things exactly like this, because governments keep trying to offset the costs of green policy on working class voters who are already struggling, because their donors are the wealthy elites who don't want to pay for it despite being eminently able to. And worse still these results are then used to say "see, people don't REALLY want to save the planet" when it's quite bluntly obvious, to me anyway, that what people don't want to do is..... starve.
Well tax the rich a bit more and use that money to build Nuclear plants, why on Earth Jeff Bezos or whatever need a trillion dollars to squat on is beyond me. Once the planet is fucked, they're fucked too, no matter how much they talk about rockets and mars or whatever. I'm starting to think they just tell those stories to keep the plebs hopeful, away from them.
If you asked Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos if we should build nuclear plants, they’d say yes with hardly any hesitation. If you let them build the plants, they would.
But if you ask most people who work as environmentalists they’d oppose them. In fact, it’s a bare majority of Americans who would support nuclear and even as recent as 2015 that was a minority.
The plebs are usually the problem when it comes to these things. Because they are innumerate, stupid, and unable to see the consequences of their own actions. They combine these traits with equal weight in politics in our system - which is a flaw in it but far better than the flaws in any alternative one.
If you asked Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos if we should build nuclear plants, they’d say yes with hardly any hesitation. If you let them build the plants, they would.
I don't "want them to build them and charge me money" I want them to pay their fair share to fund the building of public utilities. Before you say these things are better private, go look at what happened to electricity prices in Australia are privatization.
You're never going to get nuclear plants so long as you let the plebs choose. Riverkeeper is what you get from plebs: anti-progress, anti-science, anti-nuclear.
It's time to be honest about what stops progress: the common people.
Plebs absolutely do not. That’s such a small fraction of elite people. Plebs barely know how to operate a computer. You have no interaction with a 70th percentile intelligence let alone a 50th.
The plebs are making SQLite make their default extension etilqs so that no one blames them when software that uses SQLite creates temporary dbs.
Years ago the French elites supposedly decided to so solve the global warming problem by suddenly putting a big tax on gasoline, which hit rural France hardest, and in a quick manner. I don't even see it as sincere from the beginning, I think they made to seem like they were doing something so they could seem to do it differently. Mélenchon could implemented the needed measures without any backlash - except from the bourgeoisie.
Sure but there aren't many things that change the climate nearly so quickly, and even when they do like with volcanoes, the effects are dissipate over time. Meanwhile we have no expectation of stopping producing carbon dioxide and other pollutants continuously within anybody living's lifetime and likely far beyond.
The two big differences are 1) the rate of change (a huge amount higher than most planetary systems) and 2) that we have a large and growing population dependent on the many services our planet provides at a stable temperature. Of course, completely neglecting the rest of the natural world.
Warming and cooling would and will happen with people or without people -that's fact. The issue that many people have is about "when" it's happening. It upsets those that it's happening now as induced by people's activities and not by natural cycles or natural causes (eruptions, new species producing/emitting GHGs, etc.)
It is human caused. It simply is. We have decades of research all saying the exact same thing, some of which was funded directly by the energy industry trying desperately to prove it's not.
It is. This is not a debate anymore, if you disagree, you either don't understand or don't want to understand and neither of those is my or anyone else's problem to solve. You're wrong.
Why is it important to you what the cause is? Don't you think it is important to do something about it even if it wasn't human-caused? Should we only solve problems that we cause?
It looks like you have a few similarly confused commenters who think this is relevant to addressing the problem. It's a mystery why you want to derail the discussion to a debate about the cause rather than how to fix it. Maybe you're trying to say that understanding the cause is relevant to the solution, but if you are, you need to say it a lot more clearly.
The thing about human-caused things is humans can choose to stop doing the causal things.
The set of potential solutions would be quite different if the cause wasn't humans. Might even be impossible.
But we have quite a lot of evidence that we have been affecting the climate pretty substantially since the beginning of industrialization and increasingly so since, so it makes sense to work on the human causes.
I disagree. I think if we stop using oil and gas, we fall into a new dark ages pretty fast and half or more of all humans will die. Is that what you intend?
We have more options than just (instantly) stop using oil and gas and those options would have been far more easy to implement had we been doing them for the last 50 years instead of arguing about if climate change is happening, and now, if humans have caused climate change.
These other options require resources and time to implement, and the political capital required to make that happen has been and will be increased because of the aforementioned 'debates'.
Because trapping us in this endless debate of what the "real" cause is has been the go-to strategy for the oil and gas industry, where no matter how many times it is bloody proven, they hem and haw and say "well we need more evidence" but they aren't like, not selling gasoline anymore until we know it's safe are they? They just keep doing exactly what we're pretty damned sure is killing the planet, while endlessly debating whether it is or not.
Sure, but maybe we should have been transitioning our communities 20-30 years ago away from encouraging people to hop in a massive SUV getting 17MPG just to go get a loaf of bread. Maybe we should have been working towards reducing our carbon impact in sane, practical ways many decades ago instead of having our heads buried in the sand for so long.
Why do you care what they say? Shouldn't your response be that it doesn't matter who caused it; we need to fix it regardless. Why do you want to have that argument?
How would you expand "fix it" as used in your post?
What are the generic fixes for global warming, that are applicable to any potential cause?
Would the set of potential mitigating actions look the same between human-caused climate change and something like prolonged increases in solar energy output?
We have a ton of evidence for human-caused climate change. Understanding the factors that contribute to a problem allow you to take more appropriate actions. Without looking at the causal factors, your ability to thoroughly mitigate tends to be limited.
If you were trying to fill a bucket but the bucket was losing water as fast as you poured it in, wouldn't you look into why, maybe see if there's a hole? Or would you just keep pouring and hope for the best?
I would look to see if there was a hole. I'd also consider that I could solve the problem by getting a bigger bucket, freezing the water, or pouring cement into the bucket.
Well unfortunately we only have the one "bucket" - Earth. We don't have the opportunity to exchange it for a bigger bucket.
Your other solutions don't work even in the metaphor's context. Flowing water doesn't freeze easily, so you're either cooling the whole system to insanely cold levels or you're pouring ice cubes into the bucket. But we're moving water in the bucket, not ice. We want liquid water. Are we gonna stand around and wait for it to melt when we get to where we're going? And won't the water just leak out while we wait?
Cement? I can see that going two ways. Either the hole is so big that the unset cement flows through easily, or it does manage to fill the hole. In the first case nothing has changed except you now have a puddle of cement under the bucket, possibly starting to bind the bucket to the ground. In the other, you may indeed plug the hole, but you've substantially increased the bucket's weight and reduced its capacity.
So now that we've both over-extended a metaphor - what are the generic solutions you propose for global warming?
Unsurprisingly, I don't have a novel answer that the world's great minds haven't thought of. I just think it's pointless to keep having the debate about whether the causes are due to human activity, which they almost certainly are.
But since you're hungry for alternatives other than stop doing the things that caused global warming, there are the geoengineering options.
The debate is, indeed, pretty pointless. The data is pretty clear. Human activity is driving global warming.
I'm not hungry for alternatives. I'm hungry for the debate to end and us to move forward towards less polluting energy sources and transportation means.
As we agree there is no true debate to be had about the causes, we should move on to solutions.
Time for another metaphor!
Let's say you live in a big house with a bunch of other people. There's a problem, someone keeps shitting on the floor. You even know who the floor-shitter is!
You could ignore what you know about the cause of the situation and just focus on after-the-fact mitigation. You could put down absorbent pads and hope the floor-shitter chooses to use them. You could establish a shit-watch rotation that attempts to detect and clean up the turds as soon as possible after they're laid. You could remove all carpet and rugs to make the cleanup easier. You could install air filters and fresheners to help with the smell.
Or you could address the cause, and seek ways to stop the floor-shitter from shitting on the floor in the first place.
There is no chance this will be solved by convincing people to stop using fossil fuels. If you somehow were able to convince the Western countries, you're not going to convince China and the rest of world.
The options are nuclear for baseline with solar and wind supplementing it. Or geoengineering. The cost will be astronomical and voters will not be happy to pay for it. Also, bizarrely, countries with nuclear have actually been turning off their nuclear.
Given the incentives that exist, it would probably be a good idea to think seriously about the geoengineering options.
Yeah, all of those things need to happen. And they all require massive investment. They also have a better chance of success if we significantly reduce fossil fuel usage in the meantime and extend the runway a bit.
The debate matters because we don't have consensus as a society that climate change is occurring. The scientific consensus has been consistently and aggressively countered in the public sphere. The interests that have pushed the counter narrative do not push for action regardless of cause. They push for inaction, because action costs them money.
If there was a societal consensus that global warming is a massive problem and we were pouring tons of cash into geoengineering, I'd be on board with your position. But we're not, we're still arguing about whether it's happening at all or whether it's enough to really be a problem or whether it's worth doing anything at all.
The debate matters, and causality matters for establishing the facts in the debate.
It will always be up for debate, though. That's the thing--unless you are an absolutist, you will understand that scientific inquiry is a never-ending process and that all the "it's settled science" people don't seem to understand that at one time humans thought the earth was the center of the universe and that applying leeches to people helped remove the "ill humours" they were suffering form. All of that was also "settled science." Until it wasn't.
I share your frustration, but I think you're blaming the wrong group. The median voter simply does not care about climate change, and is not willing to shoulder any of the short-term costs necessary to address it. They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
> They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
None of that has to change to solve climate change, so that's good news for those voters. If you think those changes are necessary, you are being lied to.
The bad news for them is that not solving climate change will make their gas, food, housing, and healthcare prices skyrocket. The choice for most voters is like deciding whether to spend $0 now, or $10,000 later. Choose wisely...
The culture war bullshit you're referencing is a propaganda effort on the part of corporate media to manufacture outrage around policies their funding organizations and figures disagree with, namely the promotion of clean energy and weaning us off fossil fuels and cars more generally.
You aren't wrong but that block of ill-informed voters didn't simply manifest from the ether. It was created for a purpose and it's working.
Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
third world countries who contributed nothing to the carbon levels should be exempt. USA, europe and china should foot the bill as they profited from it. You might even be able to figure out a rough estimate as to who and how much they profited from CO2, charge their descendants retroactively. It would probably amount to a few tens of thousands of rich people
Just because we should have started something 30+ years ago isn't a reason to not do it today.
I should have started going to the gym before, I'd be healthier today. I guess I'll just never go to the gym. I should have been eating heather food before I got diabetes and high blood pressure. I guess I'll just keep having a terrible diet. Same kind of logic.
It is not the solution because it simply just ignores the problem: coordination. It’s like saying the solution to cancer is to kill cancer cells without affecting the functioning of the body. Well, that’s the hard part.
I wonder if the ones that make it to spawn had something in their genes to help them survive the parasites and warmer temperatures. Hopefully they do, and the overall population adapts.
Ironically, this year has been particularly good for salmon fishing in south-central Alaska, where the large majority of the population lives. But who knows for how long.
Global warming is playing out in AK in a way only as observable down south with perhaps the dwindling skiing and the colo river. Wrapping that all up into how you phrased it is pretty darn close to the ol “greedy undisciplined Native” trope.
But sure, blame the tribes, and make sure it’s done extra strongly on the next sport fishing trip in Ak that can’t offer Kings as you’ll be seen as very aware of the issues by your guide.
I've lived next to two different reservations in WA state and I can confirm the fantastic equipment.
Also, on a random tour of the Leavenworth fish hatchery, we stumbled upon a fishery-management-sanctioned culling of "excess" fish at the Leavenworth fish hatchery into large blue food grade containers as part of tribes "share".
The whole story of where the fish are going is useful, even if it contradicts your preconceptions.
If the worst thing you can say to prove a point is “they have fantastic equipment,” well arguably they could be owed some good equipment in exchange for the total culture, socioeconomic collapse. And fantastic equipment tends to produce less waste.
That’s also ignoring we’re talking salmon run numbers and you’re talking excess at the hatchery. There’s no issues at the hatchery, they can sudo user their way into more fish at that stage. What’s at obvious issue is what happens to the fish when they’re out there and growing and then coming back to spawn.
Also interesting how you can laser in on the natives and ignore… all of the dams in WA, Or, Cali and their documented 50 yr+ impact on west coast salmon.
Like I said, have lived next to rezs myself. The coded language from WA, Idaho, MT, WY non-natives tends to be anything but coded.
Yes, the river system of about 10 others that the US successfully dammed up in the hot passion of 1950’s engineering culture run wild and successfully more or less ended the salmon runs south of British Columbia?
Yes, definitely the fishing patterns from tribes, not the 10-15 concrete dams.
I occasionaly imagine a satire skit where "The great mistery of the dissapearing Salmon" episode is done on fishing boat decks, fish plants and the super market fresh and canned fish sections, montyesk AMAZMENT! and OUTRAGE!, whilst the whole industrial mining operation goes on around them
If you’re implying that fishing is the main culprit, I’d invite you to do some further reading. These fisheries are carefully managed to ensure that salmon are able to spawn. Granted, there is the existence of trawling boats which do cause real harm. Yet, almost all commercial fishermen detest the practice of bottom trawling due to the harm it causes.
41 millions pounds of sockeye were caught in Bristol Bay this season. I was up there working on a boat myself. Yet, the rivers were still thick with sockeye at the end of the season. It is not a free-for-all where people are allowed to catch fish in any manner they want, the rules and regulations are there to ensure that fishing is not impacting the long-term viability of these runs.
Well the detesting trawling angle is valid but similar to how you could detect coal mining in West Virginia the mountains/sea bottom is gone either way.
I believe the single most important policy change for fishiers would be to end trawling, second being sort out international regs.
Both very hard, both bad news for kings. But at some point people are going to see the outcomes in their grocery stores and maybe that’ll start change.
Yeah there’s definitely regulatory changes that need to be made, it is insane to see that some practices are still legal. I just disagree with the notion that all fishing is harmful
The fisheries are carefully managed to keep the fishermen happy.
Whether or not that results in collapse of fishing stocks is down to greed and blind luck. When the coin lands heads, you get the Atlantic cod fishery collapse, where all the fishermen were insisting that the existing regulations were already onerous enough, and then one day there was no more cod.
Fisheries definitely can be mismanaged. Furthermore, there are issues like international waters, where regulations are hard to create even when they are desperately needed.
It’s unclear to me what your conclusion is, is it that all commercial fishing is bad? Fisheries are definitely not always managed to keep fishermen happy, they are often frustrated with regulations. If you talk to a crabber, they will complain that they are not aloud to crab anymore due to the biologists saying there is not a sustainable crab population. They might go on to say the biologists are incorrect, but they aren’t able to change the regulations to their liking. Talk to an Alaska salmon fisherman during a poor salmon year and they will complain the biologist is not giving them enough open periods and they are losing make money. Even on a good year, captains will complain about the regulations the biologists set. In general, Alaska fisheries are often regarded as the most sustainably harvested in the world. I’m not saying they are perfect, but that fish can be harvested in a sustainable manner. The biologists DO want to ensure the long term viability of these fisheries.
My point is that:
- we should continue to research when and why fish are struggling
- forgoing fishing completely is most likely not the solution. As long as it is done in a sustainable manner, wild caught fish IS an environmentally friendly sliver of our food supply.
done my "reading" bub, born,raised, spent most of my life within a short walk to the salt water, known fisherman all my life, friends worke boats, and took jobs as "fisheries observers" in Canadian waters,and I respect most of them, but I also know all about draggers and how in the boom years the Captain would hand the boys there checks as the came off the boat, and the coke dealer standing right next to the captain, would get them to sign them right over, and the total fucked up mayhem surrounding all that, 1 in a hundred end up with anything to show for it.
How the gangs have pet drunks who "own" a lobster licence but or course there are a stack of signed documents in a lawyers safe if they get uppity.
Dont pretend that it's a decent business, managed,sustainable, or anything but a race to the bottom.
If we were talking about the inshore fishery from before diesel engines, and powered winches, that was self regulated and seasonal, then it would be a different discussion, but as one inshore fisherman put it "there's no hungry fish to bite the hooks"
we all know it's precarious at best, and NO ONE will be surprised much if the whole thing collapses for real.
Alright bub, I guess the dying Canadian fisheries you have second-hand experience with are exactly representative of everything that’s going on. I’m glad we can give up looking into why fish aren’t doing well, now that you figured it out.
Headline reads like these salmon are being killed by science.
Has the headline been changed since you commented?
The headline on HN at the moment is "As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer". The headline on the article itself is "As salmon in Alaska plummet, scientists home in on a killer". I don't see any way to read those as suggesting science is killed the salmon.
Yes - the submission title used to be
seemingly a goofy copy-paste thing.I was intrigued because I genuinely thought that’s what it said.
It's not? Industrialization, pollution, and climate change are downstream effects of science.
They're all being killed by the big bang.
Entropy gets us all in time...
Yeah this should seriously be re-titled lmao
If you continue just a little bit, when you get to the source, it should make things more clear. Considering the source is important, as is reading the article!
hungmung's comment is alluding to the misleading syntax of the submission title
Oh.My.Gosh. "Ich". Have had a home aquarium guy forever. Got a few Ich infestations (always after introducing new, store-bought fish). Although not the same strain (tropical usually is Ichthyophthirius Multifiliis). Sounds pretty much like the same infection progression. Me, and every other tropical aquarium enthusiast, HATES Ich. Now doubly so given a favorable opinion of wild salmon.
What happens when you get Ich in an aquarium: While tendrils start to show up then lengthen on your fish. You try a few treatments, but by the time you see it it cannot be stopped easily. When your fish are covered by pretty long white "shite" strands, they start to die. Worse than any horror film you might have seen. Man do I hate Ich.
I've been fortunate enough to never encounter it with my fish, but it's all over forums and subreddits related to aquaria. Fish get it constantly. If you aren't checking them daily it seems fairly easy to get an infestation that's beyond treatment. I can't imagine. I actually care for my fish quite a bit, and would hate to see them wiped out like that. Each tank I have is a sort of sanctuary, a little ecosystem to steward.
Hey this is off topic, but I filled an outdoor fountain at a rental place with fish, plants— not nearly a self-sustaining ecosystem yet but that’s the eventual goal. All good. However, I’ve grown to realize the responsibility of my little pond project and realize I can’t leave them here with nobody to take care of them if I ever had to move.
What are good options for if I wanted to try to give them away before that event?
There’s about 20-25 at the moment. It’s a mix of common, petco-style goldfish-tier freshwater fish. They would require the taker to have a tank too, so I’m kinda doubting much demand even on something like FB marketplace for free.
Good question! You might check local facebook fish/pond groups rather than marketplace. There are many out there, and us fish nerds tend to be glad to take in some fish who need a new home. Some people have enormous ponds that can handle that kind of biomass without much trouble.
Another avenue could be talking to local fish stores. They will take them as a donation and sell them for you, or in some cases even buy them from you. Since they're common goldfish it's more likely they'd take them as a donation. But yeah, many pet stores are cool with taking on fish you can't home properly anymore.
If you had a few months to move, I'm pretty sure you could find takers before you moved. I sell aquarium plants as a side business and I actually hear from people starting ponds quite frequently (they're hoping they can grow tropical plants), so it's not uncommon. I suspect these kinds of people would love to take at least some of your fish.
Have "been" a home... Sorry for the typo.
Comments are editable for two hours. :)
Isn’t it funny how these short forms happen? Some friends of mine refer to lactose intolerance as “lactose”; it’s common parlance in the US to have “ejected/arrested for trespassing” be called “trespassing” (“I’m going to trespass you”).
And this disease “the fish destroyer” is now called by the beginning of the word for fish!
I wonder if there is a list of these things somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyophonus
https://archive.ph/2025.08.19-010419/https://www.science.org...
"Chinook in the Yukon River appear to be particularly vulnerable to a common parasite—and warming waters may be abetting the infection"
Different stories, same culprit everytime.
It will frustrate me until the day I die the sheer NUMBER of problems directly attributable to human-caused climate change and how every government damn near world-wide simply refuses to do anything.
We know the fucking problem, we know the fucking solution, and we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
> we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
This is at best an oversimplification, and at worse another convenient lie we tell ourselves because then we ("the never rich enough!") can feel righteous anger about nothing happening, while not being responsible for it.
Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
> Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
This is at best an oversimplification, and frankly, it feels like a pretty deliberate one.
Yes, the Yellow Vest protests began because of a proposed fuel tax by Emanuel Macron, which was set to directly impact lower income/rural voters. Which it would, because wealthier people in metro areas don't drive nearly as much. The movement evolved over time to incorporate many rural vs. city conflicts, things like lack of government services in non-populous areas, low minimum wages, and overall income inequality and all the social ills that follow it.
People weren't upset that gas was getting more expensive: they were upset that it was becoming unaffordable in areas in which buying it is not optional. You simply cannot live in the rural areas of any western country without a car. Period. Paragraph. The infrastructure demands a vehicle or you cannot get around. So when people are already struggling and ostensibly green-minded ideas like gas taxes are proposed, with no alternatives for them besides driving: yes, they get pissed off.
Measures like these have been protested far and wide because of things exactly like this, because governments keep trying to offset the costs of green policy on working class voters who are already struggling, because their donors are the wealthy elites who don't want to pay for it despite being eminently able to. And worse still these results are then used to say "see, people don't REALLY want to save the planet" when it's quite bluntly obvious, to me anyway, that what people don't want to do is..... starve.
Well tax the rich a bit more and use that money to build Nuclear plants, why on Earth Jeff Bezos or whatever need a trillion dollars to squat on is beyond me. Once the planet is fucked, they're fucked too, no matter how much they talk about rockets and mars or whatever. I'm starting to think they just tell those stories to keep the plebs hopeful, away from them.
This is pretty funny. In fact it’s these environmentalists who get nuclear plants shut down.
https://www.riverkeeper.org/news-and-events/news-and-updates...
If you asked Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos if we should build nuclear plants, they’d say yes with hardly any hesitation. If you let them build the plants, they would.
But if you ask most people who work as environmentalists they’d oppose them. In fact, it’s a bare majority of Americans who would support nuclear and even as recent as 2015 that was a minority.
The plebs are usually the problem when it comes to these things. Because they are innumerate, stupid, and unable to see the consequences of their own actions. They combine these traits with equal weight in politics in our system - which is a flaw in it but far better than the flaws in any alternative one.
If you asked Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos if we should build nuclear plants, they’d say yes with hardly any hesitation. If you let them build the plants, they would.
I don't "want them to build them and charge me money" I want them to pay their fair share to fund the building of public utilities. Before you say these things are better private, go look at what happened to electricity prices in Australia are privatization.
The plebs are usually the problem
Sure mate.
You're never going to get nuclear plants so long as you let the plebs choose. Riverkeeper is what you get from plebs: anti-progress, anti-science, anti-nuclear.
It's time to be honest about what stops progress: the common people.
Let’s be honest, you’re just a very cynical person.
Plebs build open source software, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Plebs absolutely do not. That’s such a small fraction of elite people. Plebs barely know how to operate a computer. You have no interaction with a 70th percentile intelligence let alone a 50th.
The plebs are making SQLite make their default extension etilqs so that no one blames them when software that uses SQLite creates temporary dbs.
Years ago the French elites supposedly decided to so solve the global warming problem by suddenly putting a big tax on gasoline, which hit rural France hardest, and in a quick manner. I don't even see it as sincere from the beginning, I think they made to seem like they were doing something so they could seem to do it differently. Mélenchon could implemented the needed measures without any backlash - except from the bourgeoisie.
Wouldn't it still be a problem if it wasn't human-caused?
Sure but there aren't many things that change the climate nearly so quickly, and even when they do like with volcanoes, the effects are dissipate over time. Meanwhile we have no expectation of stopping producing carbon dioxide and other pollutants continuously within anybody living's lifetime and likely far beyond.
The two big differences are 1) the rate of change (a huge amount higher than most planetary systems) and 2) that we have a large and growing population dependent on the many services our planet provides at a stable temperature. Of course, completely neglecting the rest of the natural world.
Warming and cooling would and will happen with people or without people -that's fact. The issue that many people have is about "when" it's happening. It upsets those that it's happening now as induced by people's activities and not by natural cycles or natural causes (eruptions, new species producing/emitting GHGs, etc.)
It’s not just about when, it’s about the _rate_ at which it is happening. That’s the destructive factor.
Sure, but that's not what's happening.
It is human caused. It simply is. We have decades of research all saying the exact same thing, some of which was funded directly by the energy industry trying desperately to prove it's not.
It is. This is not a debate anymore, if you disagree, you either don't understand or don't want to understand and neither of those is my or anyone else's problem to solve. You're wrong.
Why is it important to you what the cause is? Don't you think it is important to do something about it even if it wasn't human-caused? Should we only solve problems that we cause?
It looks like you have a few similarly confused commenters who think this is relevant to addressing the problem. It's a mystery why you want to derail the discussion to a debate about the cause rather than how to fix it. Maybe you're trying to say that understanding the cause is relevant to the solution, but if you are, you need to say it a lot more clearly.
The thing about human-caused things is humans can choose to stop doing the causal things.
The set of potential solutions would be quite different if the cause wasn't humans. Might even be impossible.
But we have quite a lot of evidence that we have been affecting the climate pretty substantially since the beginning of industrialization and increasingly so since, so it makes sense to work on the human causes.
I disagree. I think if we stop using oil and gas, we fall into a new dark ages pretty fast and half or more of all humans will die. Is that what you intend?
We have more options than just (instantly) stop using oil and gas and those options would have been far more easy to implement had we been doing them for the last 50 years instead of arguing about if climate change is happening, and now, if humans have caused climate change.
These other options require resources and time to implement, and the political capital required to make that happen has been and will be increased because of the aforementioned 'debates'.
> Why is it important to you what the cause is?
Because trapping us in this endless debate of what the "real" cause is has been the go-to strategy for the oil and gas industry, where no matter how many times it is bloody proven, they hem and haw and say "well we need more evidence" but they aren't like, not selling gasoline anymore until we know it's safe are they? They just keep doing exactly what we're pretty damned sure is killing the planet, while endlessly debating whether it is or not.
There isn't going to be a time when humans don't use oil anymore until there is literally zero oil left on the planet.
Sure, but maybe we should have been transitioning our communities 20-30 years ago away from encouraging people to hop in a massive SUV getting 17MPG just to go get a loaf of bread. Maybe we should have been working towards reducing our carbon impact in sane, practical ways many decades ago instead of having our heads buried in the sand for so long.
Why do you care what they say? Shouldn't your response be that it doesn't matter who caused it; we need to fix it regardless. Why do you want to have that argument?
How would you expand "fix it" as used in your post?
What are the generic fixes for global warming, that are applicable to any potential cause?
Would the set of potential mitigating actions look the same between human-caused climate change and something like prolonged increases in solar energy output?
We have a ton of evidence for human-caused climate change. Understanding the factors that contribute to a problem allow you to take more appropriate actions. Without looking at the causal factors, your ability to thoroughly mitigate tends to be limited.
If you were trying to fill a bucket but the bucket was losing water as fast as you poured it in, wouldn't you look into why, maybe see if there's a hole? Or would you just keep pouring and hope for the best?
I would look to see if there was a hole. I'd also consider that I could solve the problem by getting a bigger bucket, freezing the water, or pouring cement into the bucket.
Well unfortunately we only have the one "bucket" - Earth. We don't have the opportunity to exchange it for a bigger bucket.
Your other solutions don't work even in the metaphor's context. Flowing water doesn't freeze easily, so you're either cooling the whole system to insanely cold levels or you're pouring ice cubes into the bucket. But we're moving water in the bucket, not ice. We want liquid water. Are we gonna stand around and wait for it to melt when we get to where we're going? And won't the water just leak out while we wait?
Cement? I can see that going two ways. Either the hole is so big that the unset cement flows through easily, or it does manage to fill the hole. In the first case nothing has changed except you now have a puddle of cement under the bucket, possibly starting to bind the bucket to the ground. In the other, you may indeed plug the hole, but you've substantially increased the bucket's weight and reduced its capacity.
So now that we've both over-extended a metaphor - what are the generic solutions you propose for global warming?
Unsurprisingly, I don't have a novel answer that the world's great minds haven't thought of. I just think it's pointless to keep having the debate about whether the causes are due to human activity, which they almost certainly are.
But since you're hungry for alternatives other than stop doing the things that caused global warming, there are the geoengineering options.
The debate is, indeed, pretty pointless. The data is pretty clear. Human activity is driving global warming.
I'm not hungry for alternatives. I'm hungry for the debate to end and us to move forward towards less polluting energy sources and transportation means.
As we agree there is no true debate to be had about the causes, we should move on to solutions.
Time for another metaphor!
Let's say you live in a big house with a bunch of other people. There's a problem, someone keeps shitting on the floor. You even know who the floor-shitter is!
You could ignore what you know about the cause of the situation and just focus on after-the-fact mitigation. You could put down absorbent pads and hope the floor-shitter chooses to use them. You could establish a shit-watch rotation that attempts to detect and clean up the turds as soon as possible after they're laid. You could remove all carpet and rugs to make the cleanup easier. You could install air filters and fresheners to help with the smell.
Or you could address the cause, and seek ways to stop the floor-shitter from shitting on the floor in the first place.
There is no chance this will be solved by convincing people to stop using fossil fuels. If you somehow were able to convince the Western countries, you're not going to convince China and the rest of world.
The options are nuclear for baseline with solar and wind supplementing it. Or geoengineering. The cost will be astronomical and voters will not be happy to pay for it. Also, bizarrely, countries with nuclear have actually been turning off their nuclear.
Given the incentives that exist, it would probably be a good idea to think seriously about the geoengineering options.
Yeah, all of those things need to happen. And they all require massive investment. They also have a better chance of success if we significantly reduce fossil fuel usage in the meantime and extend the runway a bit.
The debate matters because we don't have consensus as a society that climate change is occurring. The scientific consensus has been consistently and aggressively countered in the public sphere. The interests that have pushed the counter narrative do not push for action regardless of cause. They push for inaction, because action costs them money.
If there was a societal consensus that global warming is a massive problem and we were pouring tons of cash into geoengineering, I'd be on board with your position. But we're not, we're still arguing about whether it's happening at all or whether it's enough to really be a problem or whether it's worth doing anything at all.
The debate matters, and causality matters for establishing the facts in the debate.
It will always be up for debate, though. That's the thing--unless you are an absolutist, you will understand that scientific inquiry is a never-ending process and that all the "it's settled science" people don't seem to understand that at one time humans thought the earth was the center of the universe and that applying leeches to people helped remove the "ill humours" they were suffering form. All of that was also "settled science." Until it wasn't.
People are still debating if the Earth is round. You might think your spherical, heliocentric ideas are "settled science". Until it isn't.
I share your frustration, but I think you're blaming the wrong group. The median voter simply does not care about climate change, and is not willing to shoulder any of the short-term costs necessary to address it. They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
> They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
None of that has to change to solve climate change, so that's good news for those voters. If you think those changes are necessary, you are being lied to.
The bad news for them is that not solving climate change will make their gas, food, housing, and healthcare prices skyrocket. The choice for most voters is like deciding whether to spend $0 now, or $10,000 later. Choose wisely...
The culture war bullshit you're referencing is a propaganda effort on the part of corporate media to manufacture outrage around policies their funding organizations and figures disagree with, namely the promotion of clean energy and weaning us off fossil fuels and cars more generally.
You aren't wrong but that block of ill-informed voters didn't simply manifest from the ether. It was created for a purpose and it's working.
Wait, we know the solution? What is it?
Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.
The solution is not easy. But it is known.
> The solution is not easy. But it is known.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
third world countries who contributed nothing to the carbon levels should be exempt. USA, europe and china should foot the bill as they profited from it. You might even be able to figure out a rough estimate as to who and how much they profited from CO2, charge their descendants retroactively. It would probably amount to a few tens of thousands of rich people
But would that reverse our current problems?
Just because we should have started something 30+ years ago isn't a reason to not do it today.
I should have started going to the gym before, I'd be healthier today. I guess I'll just never go to the gym. I should have been eating heather food before I got diabetes and high blood pressure. I guess I'll just keep having a terrible diet. Same kind of logic.
If that’s the solution, then go ahead and do it.
It is not the solution because it simply just ignores the problem: coordination. It’s like saying the solution to cancer is to kill cancer cells without affecting the functioning of the body. Well, that’s the hard part.
Different stories, same funding agencies. Or at least same global goals for the funding agencies.
I wonder if the ones that make it to spawn had something in their genes to help them survive the parasites and warmer temperatures. Hopefully they do, and the overall population adapts.
Ironically, this year has been particularly good for salmon fishing in south-central Alaska, where the large majority of the population lives. But who knows for how long.
anthropogenic climate change?
obviously
The Salmon should stop being cannibals.
The killer is as always side effects and direct effects of global warming. Meaning humans are the killer.
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Wait until you find out about Native American's unrestricted fishing rights and their use of modern commercial fishing ships and equipment.
Rich comment, but a an old one.
Global warming is playing out in AK in a way only as observable down south with perhaps the dwindling skiing and the colo river. Wrapping that all up into how you phrased it is pretty darn close to the ol “greedy undisciplined Native” trope.
But sure, blame the tribes, and make sure it’s done extra strongly on the next sport fishing trip in Ak that can’t offer Kings as you’ll be seen as very aware of the issues by your guide.
What if it's rich, because it's true.
I've lived next to two different reservations in WA state and I can confirm the fantastic equipment.
Also, on a random tour of the Leavenworth fish hatchery, we stumbled upon a fishery-management-sanctioned culling of "excess" fish at the Leavenworth fish hatchery into large blue food grade containers as part of tribes "share".
The whole story of where the fish are going is useful, even if it contradicts your preconceptions.
Have lived next to 2-3x reservations myself.
If the worst thing you can say to prove a point is “they have fantastic equipment,” well arguably they could be owed some good equipment in exchange for the total culture, socioeconomic collapse. And fantastic equipment tends to produce less waste.
That’s also ignoring we’re talking salmon run numbers and you’re talking excess at the hatchery. There’s no issues at the hatchery, they can sudo user their way into more fish at that stage. What’s at obvious issue is what happens to the fish when they’re out there and growing and then coming back to spawn.
Also interesting how you can laser in on the natives and ignore… all of the dams in WA, Or, Cali and their documented 50 yr+ impact on west coast salmon.
Like I said, have lived next to rezs myself. The coded language from WA, Idaho, MT, WY non-natives tends to be anything but coded.
>arguably they could be owed some good equipment
No
>The coded language
There isn't any coded language here. PNW Indian tribes should not be given extraordinary fishing rights.
dont thinks hes blaming them, hes just pointing it out
True on the Columbia river too
Yes, the river system of about 10 others that the US successfully dammed up in the hot passion of 1950’s engineering culture run wild and successfully more or less ended the salmon runs south of British Columbia?
Yes, definitely the fishing patterns from tribes, not the 10-15 concrete dams.
Both things can be true
Yes, this is the narrative, supported by the funding agencies.
Also, I'd like to add that it's almost always humans of European descent who are committing the dastardly deeds.
I occasionaly imagine a satire skit where "The great mistery of the dissapearing Salmon" episode is done on fishing boat decks, fish plants and the super market fresh and canned fish sections, montyesk AMAZMENT! and OUTRAGE!, whilst the whole industrial mining operation goes on around them
If you’re implying that fishing is the main culprit, I’d invite you to do some further reading. These fisheries are carefully managed to ensure that salmon are able to spawn. Granted, there is the existence of trawling boats which do cause real harm. Yet, almost all commercial fishermen detest the practice of bottom trawling due to the harm it causes.
41 millions pounds of sockeye were caught in Bristol Bay this season. I was up there working on a boat myself. Yet, the rivers were still thick with sockeye at the end of the season. It is not a free-for-all where people are allowed to catch fish in any manner they want, the rules and regulations are there to ensure that fishing is not impacting the long-term viability of these runs.
Well the detesting trawling angle is valid but similar to how you could detect coal mining in West Virginia the mountains/sea bottom is gone either way.
I believe the single most important policy change for fishiers would be to end trawling, second being sort out international regs.
Both very hard, both bad news for kings. But at some point people are going to see the outcomes in their grocery stores and maybe that’ll start change.
Yeah there’s definitely regulatory changes that need to be made, it is insane to see that some practices are still legal. I just disagree with the notion that all fishing is harmful
The fisheries are carefully managed to keep the fishermen happy.
Whether or not that results in collapse of fishing stocks is down to greed and blind luck. When the coin lands heads, you get the Atlantic cod fishery collapse, where all the fishermen were insisting that the existing regulations were already onerous enough, and then one day there was no more cod.
Fisheries definitely can be mismanaged. Furthermore, there are issues like international waters, where regulations are hard to create even when they are desperately needed.
It’s unclear to me what your conclusion is, is it that all commercial fishing is bad? Fisheries are definitely not always managed to keep fishermen happy, they are often frustrated with regulations. If you talk to a crabber, they will complain that they are not aloud to crab anymore due to the biologists saying there is not a sustainable crab population. They might go on to say the biologists are incorrect, but they aren’t able to change the regulations to their liking. Talk to an Alaska salmon fisherman during a poor salmon year and they will complain the biologist is not giving them enough open periods and they are losing make money. Even on a good year, captains will complain about the regulations the biologists set. In general, Alaska fisheries are often regarded as the most sustainably harvested in the world. I’m not saying they are perfect, but that fish can be harvested in a sustainable manner. The biologists DO want to ensure the long term viability of these fisheries.
My point is that: - we should continue to research when and why fish are struggling - forgoing fishing completely is most likely not the solution. As long as it is done in a sustainable manner, wild caught fish IS an environmentally friendly sliver of our food supply.
> is it that all commercial fishing is bad?
Bingo.
Is commercial fishing the only culprit? No.
Should we address all causes of declining fisheries? Yes.
Will we address even a single cause? Nope.
The cash cow cod is gone but small amounts of fishing still take place. Cod still exists but not in large enough numbers to employ 30,000 people.
What moved in was shellfish. Snow Crab...
done my "reading" bub, born,raised, spent most of my life within a short walk to the salt water, known fisherman all my life, friends worke boats, and took jobs as "fisheries observers" in Canadian waters,and I respect most of them, but I also know all about draggers and how in the boom years the Captain would hand the boys there checks as the came off the boat, and the coke dealer standing right next to the captain, would get them to sign them right over, and the total fucked up mayhem surrounding all that, 1 in a hundred end up with anything to show for it. How the gangs have pet drunks who "own" a lobster licence but or course there are a stack of signed documents in a lawyers safe if they get uppity. Dont pretend that it's a decent business, managed,sustainable, or anything but a race to the bottom. If we were talking about the inshore fishery from before diesel engines, and powered winches, that was self regulated and seasonal, then it would be a different discussion, but as one inshore fisherman put it "there's no hungry fish to bite the hooks" we all know it's precarious at best, and NO ONE will be surprised much if the whole thing collapses for real.
Alright bub, I guess the dying Canadian fisheries you have second-hand experience with are exactly representative of everything that’s going on. I’m glad we can give up looking into why fish aren’t doing well, now that you figured it out.
I cannot stand withholding headlines. single-celled fish parasite called Ichthyophonus
Especially on paywalled content.
The headline clearly says that 'Science' is the culprit.
without reading the article it must be humans.
Or the "global warming left the environment more hospitable to some horrible parasite/disease".
you missed the gory parasite details
Root cause is still humans. Parasite is thriving because of warming waters, caused by anthropogenic climate change.
if its bad, and ecological, humans did it