The stories from the silver carp and pub fish get into my areas. She apparently doesn't know that silver and grass carp sell for more per lb in the Asian supermarkets in So. California than most US fish species. What is spent on pup fish is OPM (other peoples money) and that isn't the same as your own money.
As someone making a living selling 20 million small fish plus other aquatic organisms per year in a recycled hatchery with no discharge, producing endangered pup fish or fairy shrimp is easy. However, once they call it endangered, people who actually know something about fish culture are cut out making it illegal. I was threatened by law when I wanted to mass produce an endangered species of fairy shrimp using samples I collected from a shovel full of dirt from a dry pond where they said they didn't exist. I was mass producing another species being used around the world for water testing.
It appears she didn't check on Long Beach Calif. that sunk a lot from oil and water removal in the 1920's to 1970's they they pumped water back in the oil fields and elevated the land by up to 3 ft. Testing CO2 injection for long term storage (CO2 is a liquid at just 100 atm pressure) also showed land elevation in Algeria and we could elevate New Orleans by deep injecting liquid CO2 under the important areas making CO2 removal from the air profitable, if their was a carbon tax. You could get paid both by the city and for CO2 removal from the atmosphere.
The comment about ocean pH of 7.8 is related to the carbonate alkalinity and the supersaturation of CaCO3 in normal seawater. It is a good old non-equilibrium thermodynamic situation created by cold water sinking and CaCO3 being more soluble at low temperatures and high pressures being turned over and warmed up at the surface creating supersaturation. For shellfish/corals to create shell just means make an atomic pattern and let the crystal grow on it own. They are extracting energy from the supersaturation for shell growth.
The title asks, "Can human technology solve unintended consequences of human technology?"
The answer is clearly yes in some cases. We've already successfully addressed many unintended consequences.
It seems scale is the crucial issue. As the scale of powers available to us approach existential scale (collapse of civilization) it's no longer sufficient to solve just some of the challenges. A single failure a single time with a single existential scale technology may be sufficient to crash the system as a whole, thus ending the opportunity for renewal well past our lifetimes. Nuclear weapons are the easiest example of this. And we seem determined to create more powers of vast scale as quickly as possible.
With smaller powers we can continue the longstanding pattern of invention, mistakes, correction, and further advancement. At this scale I would answer yes to the question presented.
At existential scale I would answer no, because in order for technical solutions to be successful at this scale it is required that they work every single time for every challenge presented. Existential scale challenges require a level of perfection which just isn't a part of the human condition.
If I'm right about existential scale, then what happens at the smaller scales may not matter that much as whatever it accomplished by technological solutions is likely to be swept away in a tidal wave of chaos.
The stories from the silver carp and pub fish get into my areas. She apparently doesn't know that silver and grass carp sell for more per lb in the Asian supermarkets in So. California than most US fish species. What is spent on pup fish is OPM (other peoples money) and that isn't the same as your own money.
As someone making a living selling 20 million small fish plus other aquatic organisms per year in a recycled hatchery with no discharge, producing endangered pup fish or fairy shrimp is easy. However, once they call it endangered, people who actually know something about fish culture are cut out making it illegal. I was threatened by law when I wanted to mass produce an endangered species of fairy shrimp using samples I collected from a shovel full of dirt from a dry pond where they said they didn't exist. I was mass producing another species being used around the world for water testing.
It appears she didn't check on Long Beach Calif. that sunk a lot from oil and water removal in the 1920's to 1970's they they pumped water back in the oil fields and elevated the land by up to 3 ft. Testing CO2 injection for long term storage (CO2 is a liquid at just 100 atm pressure) also showed land elevation in Algeria and we could elevate New Orleans by deep injecting liquid CO2 under the important areas making CO2 removal from the air profitable, if their was a carbon tax. You could get paid both by the city and for CO2 removal from the atmosphere.
The comment about ocean pH of 7.8 is related to the carbonate alkalinity and the supersaturation of CaCO3 in normal seawater. It is a good old non-equilibrium thermodynamic situation created by cold water sinking and CaCO3 being more soluble at low temperatures and high pressures being turned over and warmed up at the surface creating supersaturation. For shellfish/corals to create shell just means make an atomic pattern and let the crystal grow on it own. They are extracting energy from the supersaturation for shell growth.
The title asks, "Can human technology solve unintended consequences of human technology?"
The answer is clearly yes in some cases. We've already successfully addressed many unintended consequences.
It seems scale is the crucial issue. As the scale of powers available to us approach existential scale (collapse of civilization) it's no longer sufficient to solve just some of the challenges. A single failure a single time with a single existential scale technology may be sufficient to crash the system as a whole, thus ending the opportunity for renewal well past our lifetimes. Nuclear weapons are the easiest example of this. And we seem determined to create more powers of vast scale as quickly as possible.
With smaller powers we can continue the longstanding pattern of invention, mistakes, correction, and further advancement. At this scale I would answer yes to the question presented.
At existential scale I would answer no, because in order for technical solutions to be successful at this scale it is required that they work every single time for every challenge presented. Existential scale challenges require a level of perfection which just isn't a part of the human condition.
If I'm right about existential scale, then what happens at the smaller scales may not matter that much as whatever it accomplished by technological solutions is likely to be swept away in a tidal wave of chaos.