Here is a question that I, in my sixties, find myself asking more and more often: how to inform younger generations about the complexity of seemingly intractable problems without either miring audiences in pessimism or false optimism?
Over a summer weekend, a very good friend used a word to describe the zeitgeist to which the question applies: "delamination".
In his spare time, my friend is a woodworker. Since so much of what we value -- take the environment, our air and water and God's creatures -- is held together by glue, delamination aptly describes the pressures tearing these apart. (I'll skip over the fact that industrial glues are held together by formaldehyde, whose manufacture is a key part of the Koch Brothers' industrial empire.)
A certain pessimism goes along with being sixty one.
False optimism is different matter. Another friend, a coral reef activist, pessimist and scientist, wrote recently. First he offered the following from a news report quoting a colleague of his: "Five years ago I couldn’t have looked at you and said we can restore the coral reefs in our life time. Now we can say in our life time, in our lifetime, we can restore these coral reefs." My friend then asked, "Does this kind of thing hurt or help??" knowing full well how the world's coral reefs are under full assault by acidic oceans, a consequence of rapid climate change.
I thought this weekend, again, of false optimism while reading the Miami Herald report about a loose coalition of civic groups organized under the banner of "Engage Miami", fighting to put a new public park on Parcel B, next to the Miami Heat Arena; the promise of a park that county decision makers made in 1996 then promptly broke as soon as the professional basketball arena was built. The image that stuck with me: how a rainstorm at the event washed away the chalk signage earnestly calling for the new park nearly soon as civil obedience was completed.
My coral reef scientist friend, and many of my Everglades warrior friends, would ask "Imagine Miami"; what's the point of false optimism? We have a sixteen year record of delaminated promises, and if the decimation of the coral reef isn't clear enough, how about today's report of ten foot stacks of decaying seaweed at the shoreline across the Caribbean?
If I worked for a newspaper, where selling readers on investing in the next edition was the main goal of the enterprise, views such as "we are so FUBAR" (fucked up beyond all belief)" would be instantly dismissed. But I don't.
All around us, nothing is as usual and yet we are going about business as usual everywhere. False optimism manifests in the political realm, too.
Oddest is Donald Trump's emergence like a first wife from the third wife's wedding cake as the Republican response -- this presidential election cycle -- to delamination within the GOP.
Republican civilians are restless and not inclined to party obedience. Party insiders are optimistic that the Trump phenomenon is mainly about television ratings and the genius of the Rupert Murdoch/ Fox News empire. But the delamination is real and not humpty-dumpty or Karl Rove can put the pieces back together again.
At least so far.
August 10, 2015
Stinking mats of seaweed piling up on Caribbean beaches
Children play as their mother keeps an eye on them at a beach heavily covered with seaweed in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by decaying seaweed that attracts biting sand fleas and smells like rotten eggs.
Children play as their mother keeps an eye on them at a beach heavily covered with seaweed in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by decaying seaweed that attracts biting sand fleas and smells like rotten eggs. Ricardo Arduengo AP Photo
By DAVID McFADDEN Associated Press
The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs.
Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years. The 2015 seaweed invasion appears to be a bumper crop, with a number of shorelines so severely hit that some tourists have canceled summer trips and lawmakers on Tobago have termed it a "natural disaster."
FILE - In this July 15, 2015, file photo, tourists walk past large quantities of seaweed piling up on the beach in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, Mexico. From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico’s Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly 10 feet high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed invasion that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast “Playa Los Machos” in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years. The current invasion appears to be a bumper crop, with a number of shorelines so severely hit that some tourists have canceled trips and lawmakers on Tobago have termed it a “natural disaster.”
Birds are seen on top of a concrete beam covered with heavy seaweed in the east coast “Playa Los Machos” in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The seaweed called Sargassum, which gets its name from the Portuguese word for grape, is a floating brownish algae that generally blooms in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million-square-mile body of warm water in the North Atlantic that is a major habitat and nursery for numerous marine species.
A boat sits abandoned in a heavily seaweed covered beach in the east coast town of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years.
An old abandoned sail boat sits partially sunk in a heavily seaweed covered beach in the east coast town of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. Whatever the reason, the massive sargassum flow is becoming a major challenge for tourism-dependent countries. The algae harm coastal environments, even causing the deaths of sea turtle hatchlings after they wriggle out of the sand where their eggs were buried. Cleanup efforts by work crews may also worsen beach erosion.
Large quantities of seaweed lays ashore at the “Playa Los Machos” beach, in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The seaweed invasion, which appears to have hit most of the Caribbean this year, is generally considered a nuisance and has prompted some hotel cancellations from tourists but scientists consider washed-up seaweed an important part of the coastal eco-system. Some scientists have also associated the large quantities of seaweed this year in the Caribbean region with higher than normal temperatures and low winds, both of which influence ocean currents, and they draw links to global climate change.
FILE - In this July 15, 2015, file photo, tourists walk past large quantities of seaweed piling up on the beach in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, Mexico. From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico’s Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly 10 feet high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed invasion that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.
1 of 7
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed invasion that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms. Ricardo Arduengo AP Photo
From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico's Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly 10 feet high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
With the start of the region's high tourism season a few months away, some officials are calling for an emergency meeting of the 15-nation Caribbean Community, worried that the worsening seaweed influx could become a chronic dilemma for the globe's most tourism-dependent region.
"This has been the worst year we've seen so far. We really need to have a regional effort on this because this unsightly seaweed could end up affecting the image of the Caribbean," said Christopher James, chairman of the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association.
There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed boom that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.
Brian Lapointe, a sargassum expert at Florida Atlantic University, says that while the sargassum washing up in normal amounts has long been good for the Caribbean, severe influxes like those seen lately are "harmful algal blooms" because they can cause fish kills, beach fouling, tourism losses and even coastal dead zones.
"Considering that these events have been happening since 2011, this could be the 'new normal.' Time will tell," Lapointe said by email.
The mats of drifting sargassum covered with berry-like sacs have become so numerous in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean they are even drifting as far away as to West Africa, where they've been piling up fast in Sierre Leone and Ghana.
Sargassum, which gets its name from the Portuguese word for grape, is a floating brownish algae that generally blooms in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million-square-mile (3 million-square-kilometer) body of warm water in the North Atlantic that is a major habitat and nursery for numerous marine species. Like coral reefs, the algae mats are critical habitats and mahi-mahi, tuna, billfish, eels, shrimp, crabs and sea turtles all use the algae to spawn, feed or hide from predators.
But some scientists believe the sargassum besieging a growing number of beaches may actually be due to blooms in the Atlantic's equatorial region, perhaps because of a high flow of nutrients from South America's Amazon and Orinoco Rivers mixing with warmer ocean temperatures.
"We think this is an ongoing equatorial regional event and our research has found no direct connection with the Sargasso Sea," said Jim Franks, senior research scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
Whatever the reason, the massive sargassum flow is becoming a major challenge for tourism-dependent countries. In large doses, the algae harms coastal environments, even causing the deaths of endangered sea turtle hatchlings after they wriggle out of the sand where their eggs were buried. Cleanup efforts by work crews may also worsen beach erosion.
"We have heard reports of recently hatched sea turtles getting caught in the seaweed. If removal of seaweed involves large machinery that will also obviously cause impacts to the beaches and the ecosystems there," said Faith Bulger, program officer at the Washington-based Sargasso Sea Commission.
Mexican authorities recently said they will spend about $9.1 million and hire 4,600 temporary workers to clean up seaweed mounds accumulating along that country's Caribbean coast. Part of the money will be used to test whether the sargassum can be collected at sea before it reaches shore.
Some tourists in hard-hit areas are trying to prevent their summer vacations from being ruined by the stinking algae.
"The smell of seaweed is terrible, but I'm enjoying the sun," German tourist Oliver Pahlke said during a visit to Cancun, Mexico.
Sitting at a picnic table on the south coast of Barbados, Canadian vacationer Anne Alma said reports of the rotting seaweed mounds she'd heard from friends did not dissuade her from visiting the Eastern Caribbean island.
"I just wonder where the seaweed is going to go," the Toronto resident said one recent morning, watching more of mats drift to shore even after crews had already trucked away big piles to use as mulch and fertilizers.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article30581289.html#storylink=cpy
Over a summer weekend, a very good friend used a word to describe the zeitgeist to which the question applies: "delamination".
In his spare time, my friend is a woodworker. Since so much of what we value -- take the environment, our air and water and God's creatures -- is held together by glue, delamination aptly describes the pressures tearing these apart. (I'll skip over the fact that industrial glues are held together by formaldehyde, whose manufacture is a key part of the Koch Brothers' industrial empire.)
A certain pessimism goes along with being sixty one.
False optimism is different matter. Another friend, a coral reef activist, pessimist and scientist, wrote recently. First he offered the following from a news report quoting a colleague of his: "Five years ago I couldn’t have looked at you and said we can restore the coral reefs in our life time. Now we can say in our life time, in our lifetime, we can restore these coral reefs." My friend then asked, "Does this kind of thing hurt or help??" knowing full well how the world's coral reefs are under full assault by acidic oceans, a consequence of rapid climate change.
I thought this weekend, again, of false optimism while reading the Miami Herald report about a loose coalition of civic groups organized under the banner of "Engage Miami", fighting to put a new public park on Parcel B, next to the Miami Heat Arena; the promise of a park that county decision makers made in 1996 then promptly broke as soon as the professional basketball arena was built. The image that stuck with me: how a rainstorm at the event washed away the chalk signage earnestly calling for the new park nearly soon as civil obedience was completed.
My coral reef scientist friend, and many of my Everglades warrior friends, would ask "Imagine Miami"; what's the point of false optimism? We have a sixteen year record of delaminated promises, and if the decimation of the coral reef isn't clear enough, how about today's report of ten foot stacks of decaying seaweed at the shoreline across the Caribbean?
If I worked for a newspaper, where selling readers on investing in the next edition was the main goal of the enterprise, views such as "we are so FUBAR" (fucked up beyond all belief)" would be instantly dismissed. But I don't.
All around us, nothing is as usual and yet we are going about business as usual everywhere. False optimism manifests in the political realm, too.
Oddest is Donald Trump's emergence like a first wife from the third wife's wedding cake as the Republican response -- this presidential election cycle -- to delamination within the GOP.
Republican civilians are restless and not inclined to party obedience. Party insiders are optimistic that the Trump phenomenon is mainly about television ratings and the genius of the Rupert Murdoch/ Fox News empire. But the delamination is real and not humpty-dumpty or Karl Rove can put the pieces back together again.
At least so far.
August 10, 2015
Stinking mats of seaweed piling up on Caribbean beaches
Children play as their mother keeps an eye on them at a beach heavily covered with seaweed in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by decaying seaweed that attracts biting sand fleas and smells like rotten eggs.
Children play as their mother keeps an eye on them at a beach heavily covered with seaweed in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by decaying seaweed that attracts biting sand fleas and smells like rotten eggs. Ricardo Arduengo AP Photo
By DAVID McFADDEN Associated Press
The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs.
Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years. The 2015 seaweed invasion appears to be a bumper crop, with a number of shorelines so severely hit that some tourists have canceled summer trips and lawmakers on Tobago have termed it a "natural disaster."
FILE - In this July 15, 2015, file photo, tourists walk past large quantities of seaweed piling up on the beach in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, Mexico. From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico’s Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly 10 feet high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed invasion that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast “Playa Los Machos” in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years. The current invasion appears to be a bumper crop, with a number of shorelines so severely hit that some tourists have canceled trips and lawmakers on Tobago have termed it a “natural disaster.”
Birds are seen on top of a concrete beam covered with heavy seaweed in the east coast “Playa Los Machos” in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The seaweed called Sargassum, which gets its name from the Portuguese word for grape, is a floating brownish algae that generally blooms in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million-square-mile body of warm water in the North Atlantic that is a major habitat and nursery for numerous marine species.
A boat sits abandoned in a heavily seaweed covered beach in the east coast town of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed up on Caribbean coastlines, but researchers say the algae blooms have exploded in extent and frequency in recent years.
An old abandoned sail boat sits partially sunk in a heavily seaweed covered beach in the east coast town of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. Whatever the reason, the massive sargassum flow is becoming a major challenge for tourism-dependent countries. The algae harm coastal environments, even causing the deaths of sea turtle hatchlings after they wriggle out of the sand where their eggs were buried. Cleanup efforts by work crews may also worsen beach erosion.
Large quantities of seaweed lays ashore at the “Playa Los Machos” beach, in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. The seaweed invasion, which appears to have hit most of the Caribbean this year, is generally considered a nuisance and has prompted some hotel cancellations from tourists but scientists consider washed-up seaweed an important part of the coastal eco-system. Some scientists have also associated the large quantities of seaweed this year in the Caribbean region with higher than normal temperatures and low winds, both of which influence ocean currents, and they draw links to global climate change.
FILE - In this July 15, 2015, file photo, tourists walk past large quantities of seaweed piling up on the beach in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, Mexico. From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico’s Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly 10 feet high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed invasion that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.
1 of 7
Large quantities of seaweed blanket the beach in the east coast town of Humacao, Puerto Rico, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015. There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed invasion that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms. Ricardo Arduengo AP Photo
From the Dominican Republic in the north, to Barbados in the east, and Mexico's Caribbean resorts to the west, officials are authorizing emergency money to fund cleanup efforts and clear stinking mounds of seaweed that in some cases have piled up nearly 10 feet high on beaches, choked scenic coves and cut off moored boats.
With the start of the region's high tourism season a few months away, some officials are calling for an emergency meeting of the 15-nation Caribbean Community, worried that the worsening seaweed influx could become a chronic dilemma for the globe's most tourism-dependent region.
"This has been the worst year we've seen so far. We really need to have a regional effort on this because this unsightly seaweed could end up affecting the image of the Caribbean," said Christopher James, chairman of the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association.
There are various ideas about what is causing the seaweed boom that scientists say started in 2011, including warming ocean temperatures and changes in the ocean currents due to climate change. Some researchers believe it is primarily due to increased land-based nutrients and pollutants washing into the water, including nitrogen-heavy fertilizers and sewage waste that fuel the blooms.
Brian Lapointe, a sargassum expert at Florida Atlantic University, says that while the sargassum washing up in normal amounts has long been good for the Caribbean, severe influxes like those seen lately are "harmful algal blooms" because they can cause fish kills, beach fouling, tourism losses and even coastal dead zones.
"Considering that these events have been happening since 2011, this could be the 'new normal.' Time will tell," Lapointe said by email.
The mats of drifting sargassum covered with berry-like sacs have become so numerous in the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean they are even drifting as far away as to West Africa, where they've been piling up fast in Sierre Leone and Ghana.
Sargassum, which gets its name from the Portuguese word for grape, is a floating brownish algae that generally blooms in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million-square-mile (3 million-square-kilometer) body of warm water in the North Atlantic that is a major habitat and nursery for numerous marine species. Like coral reefs, the algae mats are critical habitats and mahi-mahi, tuna, billfish, eels, shrimp, crabs and sea turtles all use the algae to spawn, feed or hide from predators.
But some scientists believe the sargassum besieging a growing number of beaches may actually be due to blooms in the Atlantic's equatorial region, perhaps because of a high flow of nutrients from South America's Amazon and Orinoco Rivers mixing with warmer ocean temperatures.
"We think this is an ongoing equatorial regional event and our research has found no direct connection with the Sargasso Sea," said Jim Franks, senior research scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
Whatever the reason, the massive sargassum flow is becoming a major challenge for tourism-dependent countries. In large doses, the algae harms coastal environments, even causing the deaths of endangered sea turtle hatchlings after they wriggle out of the sand where their eggs were buried. Cleanup efforts by work crews may also worsen beach erosion.
"We have heard reports of recently hatched sea turtles getting caught in the seaweed. If removal of seaweed involves large machinery that will also obviously cause impacts to the beaches and the ecosystems there," said Faith Bulger, program officer at the Washington-based Sargasso Sea Commission.
Mexican authorities recently said they will spend about $9.1 million and hire 4,600 temporary workers to clean up seaweed mounds accumulating along that country's Caribbean coast. Part of the money will be used to test whether the sargassum can be collected at sea before it reaches shore.
Some tourists in hard-hit areas are trying to prevent their summer vacations from being ruined by the stinking algae.
"The smell of seaweed is terrible, but I'm enjoying the sun," German tourist Oliver Pahlke said during a visit to Cancun, Mexico.
Sitting at a picnic table on the south coast of Barbados, Canadian vacationer Anne Alma said reports of the rotting seaweed mounds she'd heard from friends did not dissuade her from visiting the Eastern Caribbean island.
"I just wonder where the seaweed is going to go," the Toronto resident said one recent morning, watching more of mats drift to shore even after crews had already trucked away big piles to use as mulch and fertilizers.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article30581289.html#storylink=cpy
9 comments:
Could the sargassum bloom be due to el nino? Not sure. The stuff makes great compost and is minerals that plants love. I also read somewhere that it is edible though not very tasty. I'm sure one could make it palatable with the addition of some bacon.
Despair is unwarranted: "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."
I am in Tulum, Mexico, where the sargassum washes up thick every high tide. It's not a "bloom", in the conventional sense, rather it's a wind borne redistribution of sargassum which grows hundreds of miles offshore in the Sargassum Sea. The cause is almost certainly a shift in the wind currents, perhaps a southward shift in the Bermuda High. After the sargassum washes ashore, locals rake it up and bury it in pits, which has the benefit of stabilizing the dunes (no smell, either).
Maybe you can inspire young people to act by not being a relentless pessimist. You haven't changed things as much as you would have liked so therefore everything other people do is "false optimism"
Seaweed? The EPA just dumped lead and arsenic into the Animas River in Colorado. You went ballistic over BP, rightly so. Where is the outrage over Obama's EPA?
Do Republican insiders really think that the Trump phenomenon is mainly about television ratings and the genius of the Rupert Murdoch/ Fox News empire. That's interesting. Someone should tell Chuck Todd. He was whining like a baby yesterday on meet the press.
Correction: a northward shift of the Bermuda High stops steering the sargassum and the regular trade winds can bring some of it shoreward. Some have speculated that the northward shift of the Bermuda High is related to extra ice melt off Greenland. Maybe. It does shift around from year to year. In 2005 it moved west and steered hurricanes into South Florida. In 2012 it moved south. So here in 2015 it moved north.
Sargassum algae needs food to grow. The best food is nitrogen, which is being dumped into the ocean worldwide in the form of human sewage. In South Florida we dump more than a billion gallons of partially treated human sewage daily, much of it underground where it flows into the ocean. Those billion gallons a day add up to three cubic miles of human sewage every year, and we've been dumping it into the aquifers here in South Florida for more than 20 years. If we clean the waste until it is clean water again, like they do in Orange County California, we will stop this over-feeding of the algae.
The engage Miami activists need to go to city and county commission meetings with their pastels.
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