Empire of the Iguanadons

So have you been noticing the news lately? All around the world there are huge mass-deaths of birds and fish. Sometimes other animals as well. This isn't your ordinary one-offs though that happen once in awhile and are fairly isolated. These are massive repeats of the same sort of thing all over the world, and all within the last week or so.

In Arkansas, 100,000+ dead fish turned up in a river. Thousands of blackbirds die off, blamed on "fireworks" from New Years Eve. 40,000 dead crabs wash up in the UK. Birds supposedly scared to death in Sweden. Scared of what though? Yet more dead birds in Texas. Thousands of dead fish in Florida turn up. Starfish and jellyfish have turned up dead in South Carolina by the hundreds. In New Jersey, thousands more dead fish. Manatees in Florida. Thousands of fish dead in Australia.

Not enough for you yet? How about 100+ tons of dead fish in Brazil. Yeah, you read that right, 100 tons. Imagine just how many fish that is and how bad that must smell. Not as bad as 150+ tons of dead fish in Cambodia. Still not enough? Here's another 10 tons from New Zealand.

And of course, why not, lets EAT thousands of mysteriously dead fish in the Philippines. Who's going to care, right? We can wash it all away with the green river in Canada.

Now, I don't know about you, but that's just plain werid and it's way too many incidents so close together to be ignored. Hasn't anyone seen The Core? Surely someone out there must have better explanations for all of this than "the fireworks did it", because nobody in their right mind is going to buy that in regions where these birds have been around fireworks for years and NEVER HAD IT HAPPEN BEFORE.

The kinds of reasons I'm seeing given as "scientific" explanations for it ring about as true as "it was a contrail", or "it was a weather balloon". I think most of us are smart enough to realize when we're being lied to. The question is what are we being lied to about?

Anyone perhaps remember talk not too long ago about solar flares and potential shifts in the Earth's magnetic field? Maybe even severe enough to lead to a pole reversal? Did anyone stop to consider what that would look like to us unprofessional laymen? Yeah, you guessed it, one of the possible initial signs of a catastrophe like that would be mass wildlife kills. Kills that would otherwise have no logical explanation because there would be so many of them in so many different parts of the world.

The media so far has been near silent on the issue. The nightly TV news isn't saying a word about this. No reports on the radio outside of passing mentions by talk show hosts doing other things. Not a single article in the LA Times about it beyond the first one that happened in Louisiana. Someone out there is engaged in a cover up and trying to feed us lies to explain it. Either saying it was fireworks, or - get this - secret Chinese stealth fighter technology. As if the Chinese have nothing better to do with their time than kill birds and fish.

One of the listed incidents - the piles of dead fish in Australia - is the only one with a plausible explanation. The epic floods they're having pushing freshwater species of fish into the ocean. The rest is all just plain insulting.

So does anyone care to put forth a plausible theory for all this? All I have is magnetic polar shift.
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RIP United States of America

July 1776 - November 2012.

Sorry about the double post. I have a limited connection. I shouldn't post while downloading.

What can I say, I certainly had hoped that you were also being sarcastic (and I do entirely understand now that you've clarified) but, not knowing you at all being that you are still quite new here, I thought it safest to err on the side of caution.

No worries, it happens all the time (I'm also on a strange connection since I have to connect via satellite) and you did go back and delete the duplicate post once you saw it. Are you on dial-up? What part of Texas are you in?

On the Texas-Oklahoma border. Burkburnett, TX...just south of the Red River divide.

Hmm, Google says that's about four hours north of me... but you really aren't kidding about being on the Texas-Oklahoma border, are you?

Btw, Samson, not to change the subject, but have you been watching today's breaking story unfold about the shooting in Arizona of Representative Gabrielle Giffords??

Woah, you guys have a few misconceptions on the ozone layer...

Firstly, CFCs have a lifespan of fifty years,, and get around quite easily on global air currents. I'm not 100% sure on why the hole formed over antartica (presumably though it is due to the fact that the ozone layer is thinnest there). But to be clear, cfcs get around well and have no trouble getting to antartica.

Secondly, the chance of a weakening magnetic field impacting on the ozone layer is zilch. Ozone is formed by oxygen being split by radiation from the sun. If anything, weakening the magnetic field will only facilitate the expansion of the ozone layer by allowing in more radiation, but then, that radiation also breaks up ozone molecules so in all probability it would balance itself out and have no impact on ozone levels.

Finlly, now that CFC levels are falling, the hole in the ozone layer is healing itself. Smehow I don't think that is a coincidence.

As for skin cancer, well, if someone decides not to put on sunscreen it's really just their fault and they need to deal with it. My point itself was more to point out that it isn't really doing anything to scary.

Oh my, prettyfly, you and I almost fully agree regarding the whole ozone hole thing?

We only disagree on the potency of those pesky CFCs, from the sound of it.

Prettyfly , show me the tables, please.

@Conner...we do? Well that doesn't happen very often.

@breezy I will once I've I'm on a computer rather than in iPad and have had a chance to check over the facts on the whole thing to refresh my memory a bit.

Oh, and I just heard about that shooting thing too. Generally people use shoes instead in Australia skit generally doesn't end up news worthy...

They sure don't teach science the way they used to when I was in school

The ozone is highly sensitive to changes in the magnetic field. We did not cause the damage, nor could we, and you more or less already admit as much by saying CFCs take 50+ years to degrade. I'm not 50 years old, and wasn't in the 1990s when the big CFC scare hit and they said we're all gonna die (sound familiar?). So I think it's pretty safe to say the stuff is still up there, somewhere, doing whatever CFCs do, which isn't poking holes in the stratosphere.

I was thinking late 80s, but close enough either way. Oh, I wouldn't really be surprised if all our CFCs did have some impact on the ozone, I just don't think it's measurable compared to the non-man-made impact. As for the earth's magnetic field impacting the ozone, of course it does, but the whole point is that a polar reversal doesn't weaken the magnetic field, it simply alters it confusingly so that after a couple thousand years of shifting position it develops multiple magnetic norths and souths and which stick around for awhile until it resettles into a new position that'll more or less stick until the gradual shift repeats the cycle.

They started in about it in the late 70's, but then it was only a few oddballs; in the mid-80's it became more or less canon among those who have to do something about everything, finally reaching mainstream levels in the early 90's. Like everything else like this, by the time the general population had begun to accept this theory as canon, evidence began appearing that perhaps the ozone depletion might have more natural than manufactured causes. Like several of us have said before, man may have a limited local impact in some areas, but taken as a whole, man has an infinitesimal impact on the environment.
Then, there is also another possibility: the doom-sayers got it exactly backward. What if instead of causing a depletion/hole in the ozone, the man made chemicals caused an increase in the amount of said ozone, and the vacancy over Antarctica is the only "healthy" part of our atmosphere.
Also, some of us may remember that back in the day, air purifiers that "clean the air" by creating ozone were all the rage; and then someone decided ozone was a pollutant. So which is it? Ozone is depleted by the pollution OR ozone is the pollution?

Probably the same doomsayers and busybodies who decided CO2 is a pollutant. News flash: You exhale it with every breath you take, and so does every other oxygen breathing life form on the planet. Yes, you should be worried about the implications of the EPA declaring it a dangerous pollutant in need of strict regulation. Regulating your respiration process isn't what they should be doing but that's in essence what they've given themselves the power to do.

It really is pretty amazing how far some of these nutters will go to claim there simple must be some way we're destroying our world, isn't it? First it was depletion of the forests and mining operations destroying the mountains, then it was the hole in the ozone, then global warming, then breathing causes excessive greenhouse gases... almost enough to make you wonder what'll be next just for the entertainment value. (Yes, I'm sure there were other theories before the late 1800s brought people worried about deforestation and mining, and there have probably been a few other theories in between the others as well, but it's the idea itself and the determination to lay the planet's (natural) woes upon mankind that are most amazing.)

@Fury...have you been to the Australian skeptics site? They've got a brilliant '10 signs of pseudo-science'. Meanwhile, I'd better get out the weather makers again (when i get back home in a week). I don't remember the number of Ozone molecules each CFC molecule destroys during its fifty year lifespan, but it was very large....

While that list is amusing, Fury, no one in this thread so far had actually claimed any conspiracies, just that folks who go preaching about how terrible the hole in the ozone layer are or how terrible Global Warming is or that we're polluting the planet by breathing are basically just doomsayers and busybodies. Which leads me to question what your post was about. Oh, wait, you're one of those who preaches the horrors of Global Warming. Let me guess, you also feel the ozone hole is a threat to all mankind and that CO2 is a deadly planetary poison which needs regulation. In short, perhaps the conversation struck a bit too close to home? I wonder, were you feeling threatened by being essentially labeled a doomsayer or a busybody?

By the way, speaking of weathermakers, who ever sent us the snow this weekend, you missed!
It passed right by us and they got snow to the north and east of us but we just got a bunch of rain.
Please do try again, but maybe you could improve your aim just a bit.

@ Conner: I would imagine prior to the 1400's the doom-sayer went around saying God is punishing us for (whatever the latest disaster was); but then they'd at least be blaming someone who actually has the ability to cause the doom. Then we collectively discovered that our causes have effects with no supernatural intervention being involved; so now we have to be the root-cause of "everything" . Newsflash: we're not.
@ Fury: That would seem to refute your prior arguments. Have you come to your se...ur I mean changed your mind?

Oh i remember doing this in first year chemistry, if i remember right it was something in the order of 100,000.

UV + CFCl3 --> CFCl2 + Cl UV liberate chlorine.
Cl + O3 --> ClO + O2 Chlorine reacts with ozone to form chlorine monoxide and oxygen molecule
ClO+ O --> Cl + O2 Chlorine monoxide reacts with oxygen atom to form Chlorine and Oxygen molecule and the cycle begins over again.

So 1 CFC can take out 6 O3, initially but then the formation and reduction of chlorine monoxide goes on and on for a long time.

Doom sayer? I think fury is someone who reads a lot of scientific texts news material and gets fed up with reality it. I'll tell you what Conner, find me a peer reveiwed scientific paper substantuating that CFCs aren't acutally responsible for the hole in the ozone layer and that the magnetic feild is actually responsible. I'm going to say right here that no such papers exist, but if you can produce one it might change my attitude.

Fury, your conspiracy theory list is exactly the kind of thing the doomsayers about AGW and CFC destruction need to pay attention to because both of those false disaster scenarios fit entirely within the description of nearly every item in the list. Rather amazing, that.

While both global warming and ozone depleation are very big problems, I am no doomsday preacher of these things. See over the time we have been discussing these things and as i have learned a lot more about the science and probibilities of posible outcomes, i have come to the conclusion that doom and gloom senarios are not really worth much and all they do is get in the way of the general public getting an understanding of the issues.

Further more, a confused public is hardly going to support research and development into technologies that will have an effect or impact on the subjects.

Unlike Samson and yourself who have the attitude of FUCK IT, we didnt do it so lets let it all go to shit and die, I see it as an oportunity for human inventivness to find a technological solution to the problems.

I kind of agree with you. Specifically,



Are we not all guilty of this, lets think about our debates on global warming as an example, i think we are both totally guilty of this point, and as such we are both conspiracy theorists? Food for thought, tho.

I think you need to have a look at your own beliefs in the mirror Samson. The scientific AWG theory does none of those things.

The sceptical argument that 'scientists support climate change to make money' does a what heap though, including:



(thats right the climate science communtiy that has only existed for the last thrity years has duped the entire world).



(well, duh. This requires the participation of huge numbers of scientists and the rest to just keep quiet).



(well, it doesn't really do any small events, but it does claim the IPCC is a massive conspiracy- back to point 2).



(well, not really, but what they do do is constantly misrepresent facts and drip feed mis-information to the public).



(bleedingly obvious).



(global warming stopped in 1998, even though this is the warmest year on record, for example).