2d ago

Save the whales

69 comments

I remember saving the whales. When I was a kid in the early 90s they had several cartoons that at least had one episode where they needed to save some whales, and they did. The first that comes to mind is Widget the World Watcher.
Just like saving the ozone layer. That was another great success. Due to banning CFCs and other ozone destroying chemicals, the hole in the ozone layer has been repairing itself for around 10 years now. It'll take a while to fully close up, but it is a success.
- Not every Boomer is a villain, but EVERY VILLAIN in Captain Planet was a Boomer.

Shoot the seals. The seals eat all the fish.

“Gotta nuke somethin’!”

Don't let trump see this or there's going to be mandatory whaling operations at all offshore drilling locations

Glad to see the whales are doing well

Is it really the biggest story in conservation? I would have guessed fixing the hole in the ozone layer would've held that spot.
- Those two can't really be compared. Ozone is likely more relevant to humans on the whole (less skin cancer ).
  My main issue with this study is that it's based on public sightings (no I don't know how else they would do it). During the height of whaling when they were hunted for oil they would have changed behaviors to avoid public sightings. Is it possible this rebound was not a rebound in their total numbers but just them not being terrified to go near human activity anymore since the decline of whaling? Whales live for a long time. In the 50s there could have been whales living that survived the peak of human whaling activity.
  Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything.
- The ozone layer hole situation is another great case study in something that was fixed by humanity being proactive.
  ETA: This post I made here feels good to read but it's not really true, unfortunately. Check out seefin's post in this same thread for more info.
- That is somethi8ng different than conservation, but is the other massive success story.
  
  It is a massive success, primarily because by the time the Montreal Protocol was fully ratified it was more profitable to not use CFCs.
  However, speaking as someone who lives at the bottom of the world in the country with the highest melanoma risk in the world we didn’t actually fix it. We stopped the holes in the ozone layer growing and saw some recovery, with the hole over the Northern Hemisphere predicted to close by 2030-ish and ours by 2060-ish, but it’s nowhere near fixed.
  And since about 2013 we’ve seen a massive increase in CFC emissions again, so the Southern Hemisphere hole is probably pushing out to 2070-ish. Not that any scientific research has definitively stated that yet, it’s mostly non-committal. The majority of these new emissions have been traced to countries that didn’t have to get rid of those specific CFCs until 2010, so it’s a good indicator that those countries may view the Montreal Protocol differently in the new millennium than they did in the 80s. Or it indicates that it’s taking them longer to cease usage than predicted. Hard to tell really.
  So to say “It’s fixed!” is a little hopeful. The problem still exists, and effects are still being felt, but there’s nothing you or I can do - hence the common narrative, especially in the North, that all the hard work was done in the 80s and we’re good now.

I can't say I've ever seen "save the whales" used pejoratively.
- In the 80's and 90's there was strong undercurrent that activism couldn't actually change anything. It was the end of history, all outcomes are and always were inevitable, voting with dollars was the only vote that really matters. Hippy punching was in it's full flower. Environmentalism was seen as self indulgent and meaningless. "Save the whales," was spit out as a sort of, 'go waste someone else's time,' dismissal.
  The 4th Dilbert collection from 94' was Shave the Whales, which already struck me as a passe gesture at hippy punching at the time, though I couldn't tell if Scott Adams was engaging in hippy punching or mocking the hippy punchers.
  
  Seeing how Scott Adams seems to have fallen off the deep end of the far right in recent years, I would have to say it's likely the former.
- I definitely did, maybe think of it in context like a sneering "don't you have some whales to save?" kind of way.
  
  Same, similar context to 'bleeding hearts' (edit: just reread the post and saw this was already mentioned)

Deilig hvalbiff 😋

Why the fuck is anyone using twitter still?
At this point if you're on twitter you support Nazis, plain and simple. The line was drawn and crossed.
- Social media platform addiction is a helluva drug.
  Apparently, for quite a lot of people, its hard to quit when you're so used to getting your fix, no matter how bad it fucks up your head, ruins your relationships with other peoole, no matter how much of a shitbag your dealer is.
  Err... I mean...
  -insert babbling infantilizing corpospeak about network effect and broad market trends-
  
  That's why the government should step in and ban it
- X axis times out at 2019. I'm guessing this was before Elon read mein kampf

We saved em just in time to see them die off again in the great Anthropocene. Drill baby drill, until we can't support life in the Oceans or on the entire planet!
- The whales are doing their part. Fills me with hope to hear they’re destroying yachts.
  
  Yeah, are they still doing that? I was preparing for the human vs. Orca war in 2025...
- Maybe we'll get lucky and a whale probe will show up to deliver us post scarcity tech.
- Exactly, only a temporary stay of execution
- Hopefully, the volcanic vent bacteria will be able to reseed the planet...

Humpback means so many things in this post.
- ehehehe whalecuck, that’s awesome
- Humpbacks are mormon? Looks like aquatic jump-humping to me.
  
  Mormons think that native Americans are Jewish because some Jewish people made an airtight submarine out of wood and took it across the ocean. I always thought of that airtight submarine as a fake whale when I was growing up.
- Look at the bottom whales smug face

That chart specifically says "sightings". So does that actually mean there are more whales or does that mean there are more humans than ever and specifically more humans with cameras than ever before?
Not saying it's lying I'm just curious if the wording is being used to be intentionally misleading or if the real data doesn't look so peachy.
- You got me curious and I wasn't satisfied with any of the existing responses to this. I agree that public sightings would certainly be correlated with whale population, but it would have plenty of other compounding factors, so it's a pretty poor way to estimate population.
  The Internation Whaling Commission will do sighting surveys do get an actual population estimate. This is with groups of specific people going out in boats and/or planes to spot them and using those numbers to extrapolate population number with certain confidence intervals. I'm not sure how they do the extrapolation, but I can't be bothered looking into it further.
  I did also find this plot using population estimates, including a projection to 2030 (made in 2019)
  
  https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/humpback-whale-population-hunted-to-near-extinction-recovers/11609318
  I'm guessing we would have the capability to gather more accurate measurements, but there's probably just no funding for that and the current sighting surveys are good enough for what we need...
- More whale sightings is a good indication that there are more whales. Cameras have nothing to do with sightings.
  
  Wait does "sightings" literally just mean someone says they saw a whale?
  So that could just be one whale that got into a shipment of cocaine and went on a breaching spree. /s
  I get that there's not much incentive for people to lie about having seen a whale, but I feel like we have the technology to have a more accurate number than just "Ted said he saw one".
- More sightings means more whales. It's a concept similar to bird banding
  
  I mean it seems economical, but I don't know if it's particularly scientific. Usually in science they want specific numbers. Values. Things they can measure directly.
  What specifically constitutes a single "sighting"? What if a whale surfaces multiple times around the same group. How would they know if that's multiple different whales breaching or just one whale that's breaching multiple times? Either one of those scenarios seems like an opportunity for data to get skewed doesn't it?
  I'm not asking because I think I know any better. I am genuinely curious how they quantify a "sighting".