During same period Arctic summer sea ice extend also was reduced by 50%, volume shrunk down to 25%. Environmental news do not spark lively discussions here - except a data center opens in the high North. Can only guess about reasons, may be green entrepreneurs are already more impressing at parties or as long as net works there is no need to discuss and in the other case no possibility.
However seeing a colorful reef turning grey is depressive on Sunday and partially explains my mood to get voted down.
It's not even a 'to be fair', this has got nothing to do with programming or startups. Why would it get upvoted or discussed? It's more like to get flagged as OT.
The Hackernews news guidelines define appropriate content as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." [1] It's a personal measure, to be sure, but count me as one curious data point that finds considering major ecological changes in the world intellectually gratifying.
There's thousands of humanitarian discussions that we could discuss - human trafficking, politics, wars, global warming etc. Speaking for myself, it's not that I don't want to discuss these issues - it's just that I come to HN for tech-specific topics. I don't think the community should be judged as having no compassion or care of the environment just because they want to keep the HN topics focused on tech.
But regardless, the story made it to the front page so obviously enough people felt it was relevant.
May be one should put it different: If connection lines get interrupted by tornadoes, storms, what ever, would this topic then qualify your subjective criteria? Or even more to the point, would you support a HTTP error code 456 indicating service interrupted by climate change?
The article divides the cause of the loss as follows, in one of the first paragraphs: 48% due to storms, 42% due to starfish, and 10% due to bleaching.
Of these, only the bleaching is a mostly direct cause of civilization. But reading the last paragraph, apparently coastal pollution increases the starfish growth:
> "But is there really any hope of slowing the Crown-of-thorns? While the adult Crown-of-thorn feeds on coral polyps, its larvae feed on phytoplankton. Phytoplankton, in turn, multiply in the presence of fertilizers and other man-made pollutants commonly found in coastal runoff. Simply by decreasing pollution in these areas would benefit coral growth."
Apparently, removing the starfish would have a recovering effect on the reef:
> "The study shows that in the absence of Crown-of-thorns, coral cover would increase at 0.89 percent per year, so even with losses due to cyclones and bleaching there should be slow recovery"
We should take care not to kill off one species to save another, though. The starfish are very widely spread than the reef, but any intervention should still be carefully considered.
- it is a meta-study based on surveys performed more frequently on damaged areas, by poorly trained observers
- it asserts storm damage is increasing because of increased cyclone intensity, but there is no measured increase in intensity
- the cause and effect of water quality issues are significantly more complicated than presented
It also raises the question of what benefit Australia has received from all its previous GBR management investment. If efforts of previous decades have been so completely ineffectual, why throw more money at it?
Googled around and seems like Anthony Watts is a noted anti-environmentalist. His bread and butter seems to be disputing the validity of -any- study which shows significant impacts and threats to ecosystems and/or the biosphere from human activity.
Not saying that his criticisms are wrong, but it sounds like if anyone were going to wave off bad news about the GBR and say 'oh it's fine, don't worry,' it'd be him.
This is something that has long bothered me - HN is it's own little bubble, despite being dedicated to everything intellectually curious or entreprenuerial
what I would like is perspective - a top down weekly update that works as a complete model - sort of the earth sim in SnowCrash - but for the most important changes - wars, famines, vast new investments, politics and economic pressures.
Something that says each week, the great barrier reef has halved but it ranks only 27th behind ...
I'm not sure - mostly newspapers are context-less - the stories are not placed in a overall explicit model. You have to know the model the newspaper editors have in their head to know if the Royal Wedding on front page is really more important than the floods in $Country on page 9.
I am asking / wanting an explicit model - for example the Treasury in UK govt runs very comprehensive economic modelling software - trying to gauge for example the impact of floods on productive capacity on semiconductors.
Now if you could run such sims on a wiki like basis - that the oil consultancy in Houston could accept inputs and provide outputs and run a more sophisticated model than the base case then there would be a base model to refer to - to help gauge what is more important. And that decision would rest on what you called more important (lives, standards of living etc). And on which models/ plugins you choose - the left wing oil consultancy or the right wing oil consultancy
Basically newspapers tell human interest stories, and the guiding models for that (editor taste and opinion) seems to have dimmed into A/B tested celeb output.
I would like - well, perspective, context and then news
I suspect that list would just form an implementation of Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases. Too many civilizations failed already to recognize the environment as the challenge it is.
That ranking would be highly subjective. For some people, it's the #1 issue. For others, it ranks behind their children, family, property, status, and comfort.
However seeing a colorful reef turning grey is depressive on Sunday and partially explains my mood to get voted down.