A little confused, Who here justifies this hobby?

[SurrealSerenity]

If it were not for this hobby I would not be majoring in marine biology to go into marine conservation and work hard to help the ocean. Yes marine biology has been an interest of mine since I was 5 but it wasn't until I got into this hobby and realized how interesting every detail is and learned so much about our ocean that I decided I wanted to do something about how its being treated. I found my passion through this hobby. I guess you could say I'm a contradiction then by choosing this hobby and yet wanting to go into marine biology and conservation.

 

[SurrealSerenity]

I don't know how to delete a post and I posted my previous post twice on accident so I'm just stating that here since I can't figure out how to delete this.

 

[DanRhomberg]

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/02/11/a-2000-year-global-temperature-record/

QUOTE]

:thumbsup:

I'm not going to go too deep here. I dont have the time.

There is a thing called Nature and Evolution. Nature will overcome all and we will evlove or die. Thats it , end of story.

The world will take care of itself. The impact we have as a species is like a pimple on the butt of mother earth. We really are not that significant in her lifetime.

JMO...:beer:

 

[fortysixandtwo]

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/02/11/a-2000-year-global-temperature-record/

QUOTE]

:thumbsup:

I'm not going to go too deep here. I dont have the time.

There is a thing called Nature and Evolution. Nature will overcome all and we will evlove or die. Thats it , end of story.

The world will take care of itself. The impact we have as a species is like a pimple on the butt of mother earth. We really are not that significant in her lifetime.

JMO...:beer:

Couldn't have said it better. Taking the words right outta my mouth haha

Co2 is a greenhouse gas. This is scientific fact. Can you not accept that?

Life on earth flourishes like it does because of our climate which is regulated by greenhouse gases. So far we have had a warming of 0.75 degrees C this is causing the arctic to melt, seasons to change, species migration, changes in rainfall patterns and many more important ecological changes, that are critical for life on this planet.

First off, I think you could benefit from researching the topic a little more, your cloudy perspective makes me believe you have not done much, if any research about climate change, anthropogenic or natural.

This is a great place to start. Just remember, research as many angles as you can, and come to your own conclusion.

http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW.Science.3.pdf

Secondly, I think everyone should read Michael Crichton's work, starting with Jurassic Park. This is a quote from JP (written in 1990, long before the AGW theories came about) that sums up everything that is happening today perfectly. Highly recommend is work, he was a very intelligent man and way ahead of his time.

"You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us."

 

[greenbean36191]

1.)Yes, I'm sure even a layperson knows what Co2 is. I am even ok to say that over the course of the last 100 years, Co2 emitted from man has increased. It's the little bit about what percentages of total Co2 in the atmosphere is from man, and what, if any, effects are from man, that are up for debate, and are only theories on both sides of the argument.

Roughly 30% of the current CO2 is from human activities. The isotopic signature of the carbon in the CO2 gives it a fingerprint of the source. Measuring the change in O2 and the change in C isotopes gives a clear indication of how much is from us. That was settled 50 years ago.

2.) & 4.) That's the thing with you guys, "the last 10 years were the hottest on record" in what? The last 10 years? It's great when graph get skewed the 'other' way....

Your graph doesn't show what you seem to think it does. It's just a graph of the measured values with some sort of smoothing (LOESS?) applied to remove some of the high frequency noise. The line doesn't show you the trend. This type of representation is extremely sensitive to the choice of endpoints, and this particular one seems to have been cherry-picked to end at a local low and drag the line downward. Had the graph continued up to the most recent values with the same smoothing applied, you would get less of a hump in the mid 2000's, much less of a decline in the late 2000's, and a sharp incline towards 2010. That's a perfect example of why short trends are meaningless.

Choosing a time period for trend determination is NOT arbitrary. Statistics tells you what the minimum time period you can use to get a meaningful result is given the amount of variation in the data. Currently, no trend shorter than about 15 years gives you a significant result. You cannot say whether the trend since about 1995 has been up, down, or flat. However, every time period longer than 15 yrs will give you a statistically significant increasing trend to the present.

It's pretty simple to prove to yourself why short time periods don't tell you anything about the actual trend in noisy data. Just open up Excel and enter a linearly increasing time series. Then overlay that with periodic noise (a sine wave works well) and random noise. Plot the resulting line in two graphs with different time periods, say 10 periods and 50 periods and refresh the randomizer a few times. You should see something like this.

Both graphs are of the exact same data with the exact same linearly increasing trend of 0.25 units/time period (we know the actual trend since it's synthetic data). The top graph is just the first 11 periods of the bottom graph. Notice how the apparent trend in the top graph is not only the opposite direction of the actual trend, but the magnitude is more than twice as much as the actual trend! As you refresh the random numbers the trend in the short graph will flip from positive to negative with magnitudes all over the place. However as you increase the number of time periods, the apparent trend will more closely approach the actual trend. With 100 periods, you almost ALWAYS get an increasing trend and it's always very close to 0.25 units.

With any noisy data like climate data you are guaranteed to get short periods where the apparent trend is downward or flat, even when the actual trend is upwards. Unless they're long enough to be statistically significant then they tell you precisely nothing.

And yes, definitely the last 100 last years was definitely a spike. I would honestly say stop trying to pin the warming spike on the industrial revolution, and step back and look at a longer timeline.

This timeline is from a single paper from a non-academic journal. It plots 30-yr average temps for data that only has +/- 200 yr resolution. That's one hell of a trick. Of a few dozen reconstructions that have been peer-reviewed, none got results anything close to what Loehle got. What specifically leads you to believe his analysis is right and all the others are wrong?

5.) Really? Never heard of Algore/Inconvenient Truth? From whom do you think companies would have to purchase "carbon credits" from?

What does any of that have to do with the science?

 

[greenbean36191]

written in 1990, long before the AGW theories came about

1990 is about 100 years after AGW theories came about. Regardless, the quote has nothing to do with AGW. No one has claimed that we're in any risk of destroying the planet. We are certainly at risk of destroying a lot of the life on it though, and making things very difficult for ourselves in the process.

 

[karaandnick]

I noticed peta has something about this hobby on their website if anyone wants to read it. They were lobbying my wifes work so I looked on the website and there it was.

 

[andrewk529]

interesting that everyone becomes silent when faced with reality.

 

[Vegas.]

There's nothing to justify:

"I'm sure this has been said before: We are keeping living creatures in a "LITTLE BOX" no matter if it's 3g of if it's 1000+g. Their rightful place in in the Ocean, we all still do it because we can." -Vegas, June nTOTM entries

 

[The Reef Expert]

But if you pamper them, they have ample swimming space, and they have no predators, then your are in a way, helping them.

 

[49.35 North]

Reef keeping damages reefs

Reef keeping damages reefs

As this is my first post I think I'll stay away from global warming, except to say that even if you don't care about the planet's temperature or don't think it matters you SHOULD care about ocean acidification, which is a clear and present danger to the world's reefs and which results from increasing CO2 concentrations. (By the way, CO2 isn't a "trace element". It's a compound, and oxygen is the most abundant element in the earth.)

I'm struck by the number of people who have said on this thread that they don't think reef keeping results in damage to reefs. According to a well-documented United Nations Environment Program report (http://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/publications/UNEP_WCMC_bio_series/17.htm), it does - though the report also points out that, if sustainably managed, the industry could be a source of relatively well-paying jobs in poor countries.

It seems to me that everyone with a reef tank or, like me, contemplating a reef tank, should be doing everything we can to minimize the damage the hobby does to the environment, not pretending that it doesn't cause any. As the Marine Industry Council says, "Hobbyists must demand sustainable products from retail shop owners so as top contribute their part to a sustainable trade." But I haven't seen MAC certification or other references to sustainability given much prominence in the thousands of ads for fish, coral and live rock I've seen on the web. And "responsible reefkeeping" has 12,716 threads compared to 942,000 for "new to the hobby."

The sad conclusion I draw is that most reef keepers don't care very much whether their hobby is sustainable or not.

Just my opinion. of course.

 

[DanRhomberg]

..............
I'm struck by the number of people who have said on this thread that they don't think reef keeping results in damage to reefs. According to a well-documented United Nations Environment Program report (http://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/publications/UNEP_WCMC_bio_series/17.htm), it does - though the report also points out that, if sustainably managed, the industry could be a source of relatively well-paying jobs in poor countries.

It seems to me that everyone with a reef tank or, like me, contemplating a reef tank, should be doing everything we can to minimize the damage the hobby does to the environment, not pretending that it doesn't cause any. As the Marine Industry Council says, "Hobbyists must demand sustainable products from retail shop owners so as top contribute their part to a sustainable trade." But I haven't seen MAC certification or other references to sustainability given much prominence in the thousands of ads for fish, coral and live rock I've seen on the web. And "responsible reefkeeping" has 12,716 threads compared to 942,000 for "new to the hobby."

The sad conclusion I draw is that most reef keepers don't care very much whether their hobby is sustainable or not.

QUOTE]

Reefkeeping will not effect our oceans...case in point???.. http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/global/story.asp?s=11904793

 

[GhostCon1]

It seems to me that everyone with a reef tank or, like me, contemplating a reef tank, should be doing everything we can to minimize the damage the hobby does to the environment, not pretending that it doesn't cause any. As the Marine Industry Council says, "Hobbyists must demand sustainable products from retail shop owners so as top contribute their part to a sustainable trade." But I haven't seen MAC certification or other references to sustainability given much prominence in the thousands of ads for fish, coral and live rock I've seen on the web. And "responsible reefkeeping" has 12,716 threads compared to 942,000 for "new to the hobby."

The sad conclusion I draw is that most reef keepers don't care very much whether their hobby is sustainable or not.

Just my opinion. of course.

Tank bred, captive grown. ORA, others.

Reefkeeping will not effect our oceans...case in point???.. http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/global/story.asp?s=11904793

Did you read that? Those are fish that were stored, frozen, and then dumped all at once.

And I don't think you understood what 49.35 North was saying

 

[49.35 North]

DanRhomberg: The case you cite is tragic, but there are lots of others that don't get as much publicity because they happen in developing countries, where cyanide is still being used to "collect" reef fish.

GhostCon1: Good suggestions. ReefsUK ( www.ReefsUK.org ) has some others - for example, donate an amount equal to a small percentage of each livestock purchase to reef conservation. I'd like to build a reef tank that I knew was built on sustainable principles, and the MAC certification program seems like a good way of ensuring that livestock that claims to be sustainably bred or captured actually is. But there is a grand total of 4 LFS in the entire US that have bothered to get MAC certification. Canada isn't any better. The industry, by creating the Marine Aquarium Council, seems to be a long way ahead of most hobbyists, who seem more or less indifferent to the problem.

 

[The Reef Expert]

As this is my first post I think I'll stay away from global warming, except to say that even if you don't care about the planet's temperature or don't think it matters you SHOULD care about ocean acidification, which is a clear and present danger to the world's reefs and which results from increasing CO2 concentrations. (By the way, CO2 isn't a "trace element". It's a compound, and oxygen is the most abundant element in the earth.)

I'm struck by the number of people who have said on this thread that they don't think reef keeping results in damage to reefs. According to a well-documented United Nations Environment Program report (http://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/publications/UNEP_WCMC_bio_series/17.htm), it does - though the report also points out that, if sustainably managed, the industry could be a source of relatively well-paying jobs in poor countries.

It seems to me that everyone with a reef tank or, like me, contemplating a reef tank, should be doing everything we can to minimize the damage the hobby does to the environment, not pretending that it doesn't cause any. As the Marine Industry Council says, "Hobbyists must demand sustainable products from retail shop owners so as top contribute their part to a sustainable trade." But I haven't seen MAC certification or other references to sustainability given much prominence in the thousands of ads for fish, coral and live rock I've seen on the web. And "responsible reefkeeping" has 12,716 threads compared to 942,000 for "new to the hobby."

The sad conclusion I draw is that most reef keepers don't care very much whether their hobby is sustainable or not.

Just my opinion. of course.

You have all of two posts all "Ruining reefs" related. If you are here to bash on the hobby please do it elsewhere

 

[49.35 North]

Sorry Expert, I really didn't mean to bash the hobby and I apologize for leaving that impression. My bad.

And you're right, I'm a complete noob. I wouldn't know an ocellaris from an ocelot. My judgment will no doubt mature as my post count rises.

But Reef Central describes this as a forum for discussion of "environmental and ethical issues," and the impact of the hobby on reefs seems to me to fit that description. In saying that reef keeping damages reefs, I wasn't voicing my opinion or slagging the hobby; I was quoting from a number of what seem to me to be reputable authorities. Here's what the Marine Aquarium Council says:

"... the earth's oceanic environments are at risk from an unregulated and uncontrolled aquarium trade ..."

MAC is an aquarium trade industry group, so I don't think they can be accused of bashing the hobby.

 

[fortysixandtwo]

1990 is about 100 years after AGW theories came about. Regardless, the quote has nothing to do with AGW. No one has claimed that we're in any risk of destroying the planet. We are certainly at risk of destroying a lot of the life on it though, and making things very difficult for ourselves in the process.

Okay, good catch on the origin of AGW theories, however the theories of 100 years ago are in no way, shape or form comparable to the modern equivalent (and its current political agenda), so your point is mute. The quote has EVERYTHING to do with AGW. If you can prove to me the modern movement isnt based on "saving the planet" then I am all ears. :spin1:

Andrew529k you are absolutely correct. When faced with the reality that science is an ever changing endeavor and yesterdays news is todays disproved science, there isn't much to say.

"Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other."

 

[andrewk529]

Okay, good catch on the origin of AGW theories, however the theories of 100 years ago are in no way, shape or form comparable to the modern equivalent (and its current political agenda), so your point is mute. The quote has EVERYTHING to do with AGW. If you can prove to me the modern movement isnt based on "saving the planet" then I am all ears. :spin1:

Andrew529k you are absolutely correct. When faced with the reality that science is an ever changing endeavor and yesterdays news is todays disproved science, there isn't much to say.

"Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other."

I totally agree with you; however from an objective standpoint the multidisciplinary consensus on this issue is very clear. Simple logic would dictate an appreciation for running an uncontrolled experiment on our one and only Earth.

 

[greenbean36191]

Okay, good catch on the origin of AGW theories, however the theories of 100 years ago are in no way, shape or form comparable to the modern equivalent (and its current political agenda), so your point is mute.

They're the basis of the modern theory! They're not separate entities. The modern theory is what it is because of the work accumulated over the past 100 years. It didn't just spring forth de novo in the mid 1990s or something. Regardless, virtually all of the basics of the modern theory were already well-established by 1990.

The Dept. of Energy asked the JASON advisory group to review the science on the issue, and in 1979 they published "The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate." That same year the White House asked the National Academy of Sciences to do their own report. In 1983 another report commissioned by congress was published. All 3 had virtually identical findings that CO2 is rising, we're causing it, it will likely double by the middle of this century, and that doubling will result in a warming of around 1.5-4.5 deg C. The 1979 NAS report is still cited by virtually every modern review because they had already arrived at the modern value for sensitivity 31 years ago.

You can read the report here: http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~brianpm/download/charney_report.pdf

From the foreward- "We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are steadily increasing, and these changes are linked with man's use of fossil fuels and exploitation of the land. Since carbon dioxide plays a significant role in the heat budget of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to suppose that continued increases would affect climate.

These concerns have prompted a number of investigations of the implications of increasing carbon dioxide. Their consensus has been that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with different distributions of climatic regimes."

In 1985, the World Climate Program held a conference in Austria where they determined that there was a consensus that anthropogenic CO2 was increasing and that it would warm the planet. They recommended that world leaders take take policy action to negate these impacts.

In 1988 we passed the National Energy Policy Act of 1988 with the intent "to establish a national energy policy that will quickly reduce the generation of carbon dioxide and trace gases as quickly as is feasible in order to slow the pace and degree of atmospheric warming... to protect the global environment."

Even the IPCC had published their first assessment by 1990.

The quote has EVERYTHING to do with AGW. If you can prove to me the modern movement isnt based on "saving the planet" then I am all ears.

You posted the passage with the implication that people are concerned about saving the planet rather than the ecology of the planet. You show the evidence that that's the case. That's how the burden of proof works. It's a lot easier for you to prove the affirmative claim that that's what people are concerned about than it is for me to prove the negative.

 

[GreshamH]

Okay, good catch on the origin of AGW theories, however the theories of 100 years ago are in no way, shape or form comparable to the modern equivalent (and its current political agenda), so your point is mute.

Moot, not mute