I found his answer troubling. Certainly we miss cycles in sea storms and fish levels and other parts of complex systems - but he does nothing to actually address the observed phenomenon. The article starts of talking about "many trips" before this one, even though it settles down to contrast 2. The response ignores this.

Debating the level of "is the ocean broken", we can get into countless debates of what "broken" means in terms of symptoms and recoverability. The original author highlights his measure of "broken" as being the inability to travel thousands of miles in a small boat and catch a decent fish every 1-2 days. That's a fine definition for me - I switch cafés when they no longer typically have X number of people at a time I'd visit; I stop going to a beach when it has more than roughly Y pieces of crap in the sand or Z streaks of oil over a walk of 200 yards. No, I don't define these that specifically, but we have gut feelings for things.

The response implies that the change in fish levels is just normal cyclical activity, but he doesn't actually demonstrate it aside from pointing to a cycle without correlating it in any useful way. 

Where the response was useful was introducing me to the concept of "trophic level" [since I don't typically eat fish or never any other meat, I'm quite aware that the issue starts at the grocery store or restaurant]. That trophic reference led me to this article, which highlights human use of ocean productivity in section 2. [that author's point is we should eat more low trophic critters; my takeaway is we've climbed to consuming 8% of the ocean's output, and I'm wondering if that includes the fish & other "productivity" we kill as a side-effect of finding the perfect size tuna or shark-fin, and whether the side effects of mass harvesting and consuming krill or oysters would be less destructive or more destructive than current methods.

And of course the implied original question from Lulu's article, "is this man-made harvesting causing observable changes in fish levels out in open sea?"

Because I have become quickly convinced that the Fukushima radiation leak into the Pacific isn't a huge problem (compared to natural levels and the British Sellafeld dump into the Irish Sea, etc.), even though I don't fault people too much for being concerned enough to verify (but like all these environmental issues, should judge the facts and back off if the fear wasn't warranted). A seemingly balanced article on the matter can be found here, which even addresses the "why a scary graphic shouldn't substitute for sound scientific knowledge or public policy", with illuminating Simpsons references et al.

But that debunking is what Duarte's response doesn't actually do. "These are real problems, as more than three-quarters of the ocean’s fish stocks have been depleted, sometimes beyond recovery, and, particularly, the global tuna fishery can be better portrayed as war on tuna than as a fishery."

Sounds alarming, no? "Yes, Macfadyen is right, there are plenty of problems in the ocean, but it is not yet broken." Oh, so it's a semantic quibble about what "broken" means. "We scientists are to blame, to some extent, as we love bombarding people with trouble and bad news, composing a narrative that is overly apocalyptic, what I refer to as the plagues of the ocean. Depicting the ocean as broken makes the problem seem boundless and eventually deters society from engaging, giving up to an ocean portrayed as already broken."

Okay, got it - 3/4 of the ocean's fish stocks is not an apocalypse (unlike 2/3 of Europe's population dying off in the great plague?). As Monty Python would say, "I'm not dead yet - in fact I think I'll get up now and go for a walk". Call me when it gets to 15/16th?

Because if we say the problem is hopeless, it deters society from engaging, accepting that the system is already broken and beyond help. Which is exactly what happened with global warming. Not. Because engaging with stakeholders globally inevitably gets into special interests who wouldn't acknowledge a dead parrot as being dead. The "it's broken" of course doesn't say we can't fix it - "oops, car's got a busted valve - throw it out, buy another". It's saying it shouldn't be operated like this, that we should fix it. 

If Duarte has direct evidence that this "plague" (as even he names it) is misleading, he should do more than just pooh-pooh 1 obviously anecdotal article due to some piece of relevant but not all-encomappsing/refuting data he published, and instead address whether the plague is real (he seems to think it is) and how critical it is in different areas.

I think that a number of global warming "indicators" aren't correlated at all, but at the same time I'm reluctant to be too harsh towards those who exaggerate warming effects because even in areas where human effects are obvious (we don't have enough local production of oil to sustain our usage, so we have to take on costly destructive self-defeating foreign wars to keep the supply up), our collective high-testosterone exceptionalist shrug is unbelievable ("but no one should tell us how much we can drive, so I'll defend my right to drive a gas-guzzling SUV even if I have to kill 100 Arabs personally and detain the rest in Gitmo. And I'll leave my lights on on purpose") 

Ultimately, Duarte's response is self-promotion:

1) the IMOS program for better analyzing the ocean (which is a good idea, but doesn't warrant the attack on the original article's points - in fact it highlights that a tree falling unobserved in the vast ocean still exists as much as one falling in the woods - that the ocean is broken, and we need quantitative measures), and

2) the dubious idea we can substitute fisheries for ocean production (unlikely those farms will be big enough, and until we can clone shark-fins, there will be poachers heading to the oceans to find a few more - imagine the difficulty getting the Japanese to quit whaling multipled by 10,000)

And it's also doubtful whether the supposedly thinking public will solve this problem with thinking at the restaurant or grocery store - like with gas guzzlers, 1 person's conscientious conservation will be counterbalanced by another 10's selfishness.

PS - all about the great Pacific garbage patch

PPS - why dolphins are assholes