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Scientists Race To Save Miami Coral Doomed By Dredging
An anonymous reader writes "Miami scientists are scrambling to rescue a crop of coral at the bottom of one of the world's busiest shipping channels that they say could hold clues about climate change. 'The coral, which may hold clues about how sea life adapts to climate change, is growing in Government Cut. The channel, created more than a century ago, leads to PortMiami and is undergoing a $205 million dredging project — scheduled to begin Saturday — to deepen the sea floor by about 10 feet in time for a wave of new monster cargo ships cruising through an expanded Panama Canal starting in 2015. Endangered coral and larger coral have already been removed by a team hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the dredging work. But the remaining coral, deemed "corals of opportunity" in Corps lingo, can be retrieved with a permit. The problem, scientists say, is they only had 12 days between when the permits were issued last month and the start of dredging, not nearly enough time to save the unusual colonies thriving in Government Cut.'"
Giving 12 days to perhaps save a tiny bit of biodiversity and learn something about doomed nature is too generous, not to mention pointless, such a waste of time. Pave the Earth and be done with it, already! /sarcasm
It's the Army Corps of Engineers, you twit. They oversee/control the work on waterways, dams, levees, canals and flood control all over the country.
And we already know what happens to animal life that's subjected to climate change: it dies out, sooner or later.
You are not a believer in evolution?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
> Save the coral, for crying out loud, but don't pretend that it's being done to preserve evidence of global warming.
It has nothing to do with evidence of global warming and everything to do with how coral adapts to global warming. That is information that we may be able to use to help out other coral reefs which are seeing massive devastation due to global warming.
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Ezekiel 23:20
Though you're a troll, I'll answer. The Army is responsible for security of the nation. To do that, they have to be able to move a lot of stuff from garrison to wherever the war is. That quantity of shit moves 3 ways, truck, train and boat. Now, trucks and trains are clearly mostly for interestate commerce; you move stuff from one place to another inside the country. Therefore, they fit in the constitutional categories of postal service. It's a historical artifact, but federal support of them is justified under the postal clause of the constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 empowers congress ..."To establisht post offices and post roads". But, the federal funding for those is through the Department of Transportation. Navigable waterways and ports, however, are much more an international commerce thing. The army started maintaining them to be able to support the armies out west, and that tradition has continued, since they have the expertise. Believe it or not, the Army has more boats than the Navy. Back to the point, though, having ocean facing ports is very much part of the Army's ability to move men and supplies, so it remains in that interesting mostly-civilian adjunct, the army corp of engineers. So how about hydropower? How is that a military thing? Well, the genesis of that was generating enough to separate uranium for the Manhattan project.
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Save the coral because the coral deserves to be saved.
No, it really doesn't. It deserves nothing.
You can argue that YOU (and other people) want it to survive. You can argue its bad for humans in some way.
What you can not argue is that change can be stopped. The universe IS change. Evolution by definition means the end of species. Humans exist BECAUSE another species ceased, our ancestors.
Species go extinct every day, new ones are created every single day. This is the way of things.
I'm not saying we should say fuck the environment, its in our best interest of the world to stay relatively close to how it is today for the foreseeable future, but people like you really need to stop pretending you can keep the planet exactly like it is forever. All that will happen if you try is your death at the hands of your own starvation.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Evolution takes time. What we appear to be seeing is climate change at a rate far faster than normal. The Earth has seen climate change at this rate before. In those cases life took a step back due to mass extinction.
"but people like you really need to stop pretending you can keep the planet exactly like it is forever. All that will happen if you try is your death at the hands of your own starvation."
Many well informed people would argue the exact opposite is true. The environment is changing, not despite us, but in fact because of us. Right now the world should be in a period of environmental stability. Instead we are seeing easily measured change. Furthermore, in many cases we can measure how this change is causing our own death. Just take a look at the pollution issues in China right now. Also take a look at how bad the smog was in Los Angeles a few decades ago. Without effort the air in and around Los Angeles would be unsafe causing many heath problems, heavy economic loss and early death.
Local change is easy to track. Global change is more difficult to track and not as visible to individuals. Here too we have example of what we can do. One well studied example is the hole in the ozone. We found it. We studied it. We changed our behavior. And now it is getting better.
Well the army has to maintain a staff of competent engineers for use during war time when they need to do things like open harbors, clear beaches, build air strips, build costal defenses etc. Those guys can either just sit around during peacetime or the Government can give them other responsiblities. So the government gets to use engineers, construction crews etc that it is already paying for rather than letting them sit idle and hiring somebody else. Also it keeps their skills up to date by having them work on real projects on a more or less continuous basis.