Don’t believe the lies of “Big Ichthyology”—save our cities from flooding by vanquishing our ancient foes of the briny deep. Maybe the only problem with overfishing was… we didn’t do enough of it???

The issues:

Let us consider two economic / environmental problems that should, in an ideal world, be addressed somehow:

1. Sea level rise (see Figure 1)
2. Overfishing

Obviously no one has any plans to actually address these; the “tragedy of the commons” will sort them out naturally. But what if we did want to make a difference, and we could use the second problem there to solve the first one?

 

Proposal & Hypothesis:

• Fish take up a certain amount of space in the sea.
• This volume displeases a certain amount of water; i.e., if the fish were removed, there would be more room for water.
• What if, by increasing the degree of overfishing, we could make more room for water in the sea, and thus prevent sea level rise?

 

Conclusion:

You should write your representative and tell them to support this new plan instead of funding sea walls or relocation or some other crazy and expensive scheme. FACT: Less volume for fish (especially the skeletons) means more volume for water.

Alternative plans:

It’s always good to have a backup plan for preventing expensive damage to coastal cities, so maybe:

• Everyone just drinks a lot more water?
• Dig a huge hole in, like, Nevada, and then fill it with water?
• Make a huge magnifying glass, and use it to boil the sea, thus lowering the ocean level?

PROS: Provides more jobs for fishing, until we remove 100% of fish. May solve sea level rise.

CONS: It’s possible that fish don’t actually take up a substantial amount of space in the ocean? But I’m no oceanologist.