My mother used to argue in favor of Amazon deforestation because, she said, if we didn’t cut down the forest farmers wouldn’t have a place to grow crops.
The perfidious idea that environmentalists are just big meanies who want to destroy jobs is seriously undermined when it’s peoples’ livelihoods that are threatened by environmental changes.
The pH in his area went from 8.1 to 7.3?!? That’s way more than they’re seeing elsewhere. Right now, most of the oceans are seeing a shift from 8.2 to 8.1. In fact, the wikipedia article on ocean acidification only predicts a pH of 7.8 by 2100CE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
I wonder if something else is going on here? Or maybe he’s full of it?
Avoid scallops, otherwise you may be eating disks of manta ray wings…manta ray tossed back in the ocean to drown.
Are we talking about scallops, or imitation scallops? Because those things are loathsome, not to mention cruel, as @Stephen_Dennis points out. Real scallops… well I’ve never even seen them for sale.
If you care about the well-being of animals, wouldn’t a reasonable enough conclusion be to not eat them?
Two things…
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The whole manta ray, skate, and other wing-like fish thing about being fake scallops is ridiculous. Do to know what a pain in the ass it would be to skin (and you’d have to, because their skin is like leather) a bunch of rays to then punch out disks that would be stacked on top of each other to be passed off as scallops? I do, and it wouldn’t be worth anybody’s time. Plus, the two have completely different textures. It’s BS.
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Can someone explain to me how CO2 is acidifying the oceans? This is a real question. If the oceans are warming, wouldn’t that mean they are not holding as much CO2? Le Chatelier’s principle? Anyone?
and the extensive excessive non-stop pollution in China has nothing to do with either the acid, nor with the excessive storms in NA this year. i’m about to have a kid and i can’t believe he won’t be eating real food as an adult. what’s the term for a deep seated hatred for the obvious ignorance and cognitive dissonance for your own species? i fecking hate us.
It’s true that the solubility of carbon dioxide goes down with temperature, but that doesn’t matter much here; it’s not saturated. What counts much more is that the total amount in the atmosphere is going up, as a cause rather than consequence of warming, and that shifts the equilibrium toward having more dissolve in the water too.
I’ve seen plenty. If it’s still got the frills and the liver, you definitely know it’s real.
Speaking of soon-to-be-gone sea life, abalone are way better than scallops, IMHO.
Totally sympathetic to the environmental aspect, but scallops? Meh. I grew up on Long Island eating fresh local scallops, don’t do much for me. But the plentiful local mussels are awesome in garlic butter, I take a pot and camp stove with me fishing!
If you care about the well being of the planet, wouldn’t a reasonable enough conclusion be to take extra efforts yourself to not derail conversations about climate change, with discussions of vegetarianism?
Ocean acidification is a big deal. It’s THE big deal of climate change.
Not in a 1 to 1 way, no.
Self loathing.
Wow, are we all being fooled. This is not an article about acidic water or CO2, but about a terrible scallop farming business plan that continues to fail. Intensive farming of shellfish by packing them in a tight space and hanging them in baskets in rough waters has never worked. “Acidic water” is just the latest excuse to blame for a failed business that has NEVER made money and has ruined fthe herring fishery as well as the tourist industry for the sake of 10 jobs! This is another Rob Saunder’s excuse, to add on too “toxic algae bloom” in 2010, and other excuses every single tear for a business failure based upon bad science. He borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars government money, never repaid it, then he raised money in a US penny stock promote (check Ocean Smart’s SEC filings), lost all that, and is now looking for more help or handouts. Every year for the past 10 years (at least) there has been another reason for him losing “tens of millions” of baby scallops which had no chance of surviing in the conditions they were placed in . Island Scallops has never made money and never produced more than a couple hundred thousand scallops each year . Against expert advice (check the historical DFO website, where the fisheries department figured that scallops would not survive the rough waters where Island built their massive farm) he put a gigantic floating scallop bed in the middle of the georgia strait (instead of in calmer areas where scallops thrive) where there is far too much wave action, packed his seeds way too tight to try and get maximum yield, and as expected the mortality levels were large and have been since 2005. Check the SEC for the history of Island Scallops (and Ocean Smart, the Nevada company that owns them) - this has been a government funded boondoggle for the last 10 years. Thats right. a Nevada company owns all the rights to all the scallop leases and your BC government did nothing about that! Oysters and Goeducks are doing well up and down the sound.
its been 9 straight years of “catastrophic losses”. Check Ocean Smart on Edgar (this is the US company that actually owns ISL). they stopped filing with the SEC in 2010 since they only had $9,000 in the bank but their 10Ks tell the story of failure. Every year millions of seedlings hatched in fresh water don’t survive the transition to the ocean.
Scallops grow well on their own in the wild in gentle tidal areas on rocks and in areas where they are not all crowded together = not so well crowded together in floating baskets in the middle of an active current zone.
Next year’s failure can be blamed on Fukushima I guess since ISL has already used up “toxic algae bloom” and “acidic water” for the pre-fukushima failures.
Thanks, Gern. I had an inkling something like this was going on.
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