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."

Comments

Re:Who cares?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

A wake up call

[Gadget_Guy]

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.

Re:A wake up call

[Anonymous Coward]

95% of "sceptics" are not sceptics at all, they are deniers. It doesn't matter what evidence is presented, they will not accept it even if they can't refute it.

Let's turn the question around. Why do you categorise everyone who accepts the evidence as accurate as "unquestioning believers"?

Re:A wake up call

[Anonymous Coward]

At absolute worst, the global warming "true believers" are putting their faith in scientific consensus; why is this some great intellectual crime? Am I a "true believer" for believing in the theory of gravity without extensive experimentation to prove it to myself? Am I a "true believer" in relativity because I haven't built my own atomic clocks and launched them into orbit to verify it? Why is it that in every other aspect of life I can accept prevailing (almost universal) scientific consensus and no one will bat an eye, and yet to accept same in regard to global warming is some sort of heinous act?

Re:A wake up call

[Gadget_Guy]

My claimed "so-called skeptics" are those who are actually denialists but who insist on being labelled skeptics because it sounds more reasonable, considered and open-minded.

They are the people who distrust scientists completely and put all their faith in right wing pundits who say that it is actually getting cooler (who do this by comparing the temperature to the El Nino year of 1998 - which was completely unrepresentative of the average of the time).

Despite wanting to appear open-minded, they will never ever concede that there is a chance that scientists are correct. That is not merely being skeptical. If they argue a point and are shown to be wrong (when it becomes obvious that they haven't read the studies that they are skeptical about), they will never use that experience to change their thinking, but will instead seamlessly move on to the next bit of "evidence" that they found on some conservative blog as if nothing happened.

They will not subject the anti-AGW claims to the same skepticism to which they hold the claims of science. They will question the financial motives of scientists without a shred of evidence that they are "on the take", and yet will dismiss with contempt any suggestion that big business funds the think tanks that churn out the FUD against the science. This is despite those same think tanks of having a documented history of being paid by business to discredit scientists (think back to the smoking-cancer link debate).

I am not claiming that all people who call themselves skeptics are like this, but the real ones are quite rare to find.

Re:Good Grief.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you can drown it out with your manly gunfire?

Re:RT (WHOLE) FA

[Gadget_Guy]

If you want to RT (WHOLE) FA then why did you stop quoting him before the end of the paragraph where he said:

"[But] an important point made by [Caldeira] is that corals have had many millions of years of opportunity to extend their range into low omega waters. With rare exception they have failed. What are the chances that they will adapt to lowering omega in the next 100 years?"

QT (WHOLE) FQ! Did the last note of warning and agreement with the study not fit with your message of excluding the dissenting scientist? What is more likely: that the part about them working together previously was some hidden way of saying that Rau was censored or that he was giving full disclosure of a prior relationship? Conspiracy theory or standard (and best) practice?

Re:Good Grief.

[St.Creed]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, decimated means every tenth soldier executed to encourage the others. Only 10% die.