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Coral Reefs In Grave Danger, Say Climate Simulations
sciencehabit writes "Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue, according to a new review of major climate models from around the world. The only way to maintain the current chemical environment in which reefs now live, the study suggests, would be to deeply cut emissions as soon as possible. It may even become necessary to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, say with massive tree-planting efforts or machines."
So what if all the Coral Reefs die,
Most of the sea life in the ocean will die. The reefs are a critical component of the food chain for fish of all sizes, including plenty that don't directly live on the reef itself.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"There is a very wide coral response to omega—some are able to internally control the [relevant] chemistry," says Rau, who has collaborated with Caldeira in the past but did not participate in this research. Those tougher coral species could replace more vulnerable ones "rather than a wholesale loss" of coral. "
I guess his views were not in line with the study, so his results were not included.
This should make the so-called skeptics pay attention as it represents a very real danger to people. Those broken up bits of dead coral can really cut your face when you bury your head in the sand.
Maybe you can drown it out with your manly gunfire?
I find it very upsetting that there is an abundance of people that are concerned about the CO2 output but very few that take the time to investigate and lobby for solutions that won't drive us back into the stone age. The only solution that we have now, with no need for new technological advancements, is nuclear power. We have not built a new nuclear power plant here in the USA for something like four decades. Those that are still running are undoubtedly reaching the end of their safe and profitable lifespan.
Alternatives like wind, solar, and bio-mass take considerable amounts of land. This land is expensive and competes with other vital needs like food. I recall a solar power plant that could not produce enough electricity to pay it's property taxes. They were allowed a discounted rate on the tax but they still went out of business since they couldn't pay their other bills. Bio-mass is a direct competitor to food as any land that can grow a plant suitable for energy is also land that is suitable to grow food. There just is not enough land, water, and sun to both feed us and provide our power needs. There might be enough to both fill our tummies and our fuel tanks on our vehicles but the biggest producer of CO2 is not our vehicles, it's our coal fired power plants.
Wind might some day be competitive with coal and be profitable. The problem with wind, as well as geothermal and hydro, is that it is highly sensitive to location. Wind power can share land with things like food crops but it shares a weakness with solar power, it is highly sensitive to weather.
There's a part of me that thinks this scare over CO2 output is largely a hoax. There is a part of me that just doesn't care. What I do want to see is all this arguing to stop and people put some real solutions to work. I want them to STFU and build some nuclear power plants already. I can see a perfect spot for one from my front door. It has a rail nearby, a small river flowing by for cooling water, and a ready market in the city that I can see from my back door. My only concern is that a power plant so close might shade my house.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I guess that's why your link says " disease is not considered a major threat to the Reef ."
Although apparently simply reading their own links is too hard for some people...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Alarmist much? The *current* coral reefs will die, but new ones will appear at locations where the CO2 level is currently too low for them.
They are dying much faster than they are growing. It takes decades to centuries to grow a new coral reef from scratch. In the meantime the oceans bioversity would be decimated past the point of no return for many species.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And yet your linked article says that the increase of disease is thought to be due to the water being warmer. Yes, this is going to really put a dampener on the Global Warming campaign. And where did you get the idea that scientists will stop studying the reef just because it is thought to involve climate change?
Science doesn't work that way. The different disciplines don't go take a holiday when another group makes a discovery.
Did you leave your brains at work when you left on friday? If you could just, for a second or two, try to get it in your skull that potentially species-destroying events are not safely ignored and do not go away by wishful thinking, then *maybe* you could accept that there are a lot of people concerned about it. Maybe a tad more than the 100 lunatics you seem to think make up the entire society of "people who think it's a bad thing".
Doesn't it bother you that the news is starting to look like the introduction to Sunshine or similarly apocalyptic movies? That there are very serious issues with our entire food chain? That there are very serious issues with the ability to sustain our current standards of living if we go on like this?
The whole problem is *not* that most people think we need to give away boatloads of money to appease our conscience. That is just your personal straw man. You can keep setting it up and burning it down again, but no one in their right mind will accept your verbal hysteria as an argument. Most people just want to hold on to the standards of living we have. And not see it getting much worse, and see what their children potentially have to live through. If we do not act *now* we will never act until it is too late. And then, draconian measures will have to be implemented.
The geo-engineering measures are opposed by a lot of people because outside of a very small group of techno-fetishists, it does not *solve* the underlying issues (at best it just mitigates them - but even that is questionable), has side-effects that are unknown and potentially as lethal as the current issues we have. Since we have a very well-understood way of dealing with the CO2 issues, which is to stop spewing CO2 in the air, there is no reason to go to unproven options. Reducing CO2 output has no known harmful side-effects, except that old and established industries that cannot change their operations, will go the way of the dinosaurs. Boohoo. That's not a communist plot, that's a consequence of the bed those industries made and now have to lie in.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Wrong, decimated means every tenth soldier executed to encourage the others. Only 10% die.
The first corals were soft bodied, which probably helped.
If instead of relying on The Register you went to the NASA source for that, you'd find this quote:
The issue there is that different corals play massively different roles in a reef and in the growth and survival of reef-associated organisms. You can't just replace coral A with coral B and expect everything to be fine. As the authors themselves put it: "many of these novel coral reef communities are likely to lack contemporary analogs, with unknown but potentially far-reaching consequences for the ecology and evolution of reef organisms". In other words, the coral reefs could change massively but we can't predict what the reef ecology will be like afterwards. Bearing in mind that reefs are some of the most biodiverse habitats and that they're critical for ocean life in general that's something to worry about. For all we know the new reef systems could be dominated by a coral which doesn't support the fish and shellfish which we can make use of.
So....reduced by 10% then?
That's an anachronistic definition. Modern definition, as defined by the OED:
kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Here's a tip, try searching for information at a deeper level than just googling. Maybe ecology monographs and journals on various clades of marine organisms? Did you ever consider that only endangered animals would have layman friendly SEO optimized articles written about their ecological importance, while more mundane species would have just as much if not more data about them, but mouldering away in a university library somewhere, rather than being talked about on the mainstream news sites?
I have a degree in biology from a uni in a tropical island country - there are so many non endangered yet critical species the mind boggles to drill down to specifics, the example I gave of monographs and journals was relayed from actual experience and not speculation; but if I must satisfy your laziness, then I shall provide as my example: the family of crustaceans generally known as krill. They are a cornerstone of the food web in sub-temperate and polar waters, with a diverse array of species feeding directly or indirectly from them, such as salmon, blue whales and penguins. They are also not nearly close to being endangered, yet if they did become endangered, the food security of several temperate and sub-arctic countries could be called into question.