[bbllee]

A dead commenter said, "Any startup ideas on cleaning the Ocean? I guess no country wants to pay for this yet?" and I had two thoughts in response:

There's a reason for the word "tragedy" in the phrase, "the tragedy of the commons"; "cleaning" probably isn't going to cut it; ocean warming and acidification will quite possibly cause mass extinctions.

[rosser]

ocean warming and acidification will quite possibly cause mass extinctions.

There's no possibly about it. As soon as the oceans become too acidic for corals to form, whole ecosystems will collapse.

[Someone]

But will they become too acidic so fast that no coral can adapt?

I know we are really good at changing the environment, but the oceans are huge.

[scarmig]

The oceans are huge, but we've already managed to decrease pH by 0.1 in the past century.

A pessimistic but plausible scenario has ocean pH decreasing by an additional 0.7-0.8 by 2300.

That's pretty fast. It's hard to predict how and how fast coral might adapt, but those are short time scales to expect evolution to act on.

[ble]

Pardon the profanity, but fuck! On a logarithmic scale, a decrease of 0.1 on the pH is a 25% increase in H+ concentration...

... and a decrease of 0.7 is a 500% increase in H+ concentration. That sounds apocalyptic, at least for ocean ecosystems.

Warming and acidification are increasing jellyfish blooms, right? Do you know any good recipes for grilled jellyfish?

[jmpe]

Complex question, but there are a few aspects that work against them:

- coral typically takes several years before reaching sexual maturity. Adaptability to a changing environment strongly depends on this.

- corals typically occupy ecological niches.

- acidification directly interferes with a key part of their metabolism and habit. It's like asking whether mammals can't evolve to a life without skeletons.

Corals are an extremely diverse group of organisms that interact with other organisms through complex relationships. Take them away (or reduce them to a select few species that fulfill a fitness) and you're going to see lots of damage to other populations.

[RyanMcGreal]

> There's a reason for the word "tragedy" in the phrase, "the tragedy of the commons"

Small but important clarification: as Garrett Hardin later said, he should have called it the tragedy of the unregulated commons. The problem is not the fact that the ocean doesn't have a private owner but rather that the legal framework does not presently cover its responsible access and use.

[ble]

True, so let's be even more exact: "presently" is the wrong tense; present acidification and warming are consequences of actions taken over the last several decades.

[Gravityloss]

The concept of laws were invented thousands of years ago to prevent just these tragedies. So we already have a solution. Now we only need to create such laws that pollution is greatly diminished.

This will naturally lead to creation of lots of ecological niches for new startups, that will find the most efficient means to achieve these reductions. Naturally government funded long term research will also play a part in finding good solutions.

The end customer will naturally pay for these changes. For example, it is cheaper to run transport ships with residue heavy fuel oil, the use of which has been banned almost everywhere else already. If we want to prevent that, we make laws that make it illegal. Then the ships will use some other, naturally more expensive fuel. The transport costs will go up and whatever you buy that was imported costs more, or whatever you export potentially pays less.

[ble]

Laws are better at protecting individual rights and maintaining public order than protecting future generations from the unintended consequences of present and recent economic history.

[Gravityloss]

There are quite a lot of anti-pollution and other laws that work very well. Why wouldn't they? You have to protect the society as well. If someone does damage to your property, I assume you'd think it's ok to protect you against that? What if the property is owned by the state? Or is an important natural resource that is not owned by anyone, but depended on by millions, or even billions?

Also, where do the laws come from? Many environmental laws enacted by nations are influenced by international treaties - this is required because many environmental problems don't respect borders. Take for example waste water cleaning and the Baltic Sea.

It is hard to create such treaties. But it has been done and can be done in the future.

[dredmorbius]

That's where custom, tradition, and taboo come to the fore. They're somewhat stronger in terms of social signalling over time than mere laws.

Jared Diamond's Collapse explores this, both in positive aspects (Japan and several successful adaptations in Pacific Island and Borneo populations), as well as negative ones (Greenlander's insistence on raising cattle and not adopting Inuit practices).

[ble]

I liked Collapse, but I really liked "The Collapse of Complex Societies." Written by an archaeologist, addresses many other scholars' theories of collapse, and provides an excellent economics / complexity argument.

http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...

(not an affiliate link)

Also, the idea of "diminishing marginal returns on added complexity" suggests a lot about why maintenance, extension, and management of software systems becomes harder over time.

[dredmorbius]

Joseph Tainter. Very familiar with it, and it's excellent.

You'll find that Diamond cites Tainter and draws much from his model of collapse.

The funny thing is that I'd started evolving a theory of systems complexity before running across Tainter. It runs basically like this:

⚫ Proof of concept. Works for the creator.

⚫ Refinement: Incremental improvement of concept in function, reliability, efficiency, and utility.

⚫ Embellishment: Layering complexity on top of an initial design. Though initially well intentioned, the end result is fragility, impediments to usability, and eventually, rot. A baroque era.

⚫ Recaptitulation or replacement: An overly complex design may find itself refined back to a more functional one (e.g.: the car tailfin era recaptitulated into today's econo-box and performance sedan market, though SUVs perpetuate the meme of ostentatious nonfunctional embellishment). Or it may find itself replaced entirely by a more appropriate technology, as may be happening now with PCs being supplanted by tablets and mobile devices offering much of the functionality required by users.

Posted to G+ here (and yes, that's before I encountered Tainter). The idea had actually been percolating for at least a year prior.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/NFEFMZdk...

It's not specific to any particular technology, and I've seen examplars across a wide range of cases: software (utilities, GUI apps, Web design, OSes), cars, audio equipment, aircraft, architecture, etc.

I think that what Tainter has to say corresponds strongly with this, though his point is also that complexity is undertaken, when it is, because it adds value and/or capability.

He also notes that complexity generally isn't undertaken for its own sake -- that there's a resistance to it.

Another correspondence with this is noting that a great many technical tools (high level programming languages, IDEs, revision control systems, etc.) are all effectively means for coping with complexity and that in the IT world, people are constantly working at the complexity frontier -- the reason software still has bugs isn't because we're not getting better at it (though sometimes I wonder) but because when we do get better, we make ever more capable -- and complicated -- systems. With more failure modes and hence bugs.

[tolmasky]

Maybe a better strategy is convincing one of these guys who seem more likely to be forward thinking: http://givingpledge.org .

[bradleyjg]

Still orders of magnitude off. Several billions of dollars can do many things but halting and reversing global climate change isn't one of them.

If it's going to happen at all, which it probably won't, it'll take the coordinated effort of at least all the G-20 nations.

[ateevchopra]

I guess UN should fund such people.