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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.'"
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.
> 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.
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.
If atmospheric CO2 increases slowly, ocean pH doesn't change significantly because it's buffered by carbonates and land weathering on long time scales. See Fig. 2 in Honisch et al. 2012 (PDF):
"When CO2 dissolves in seawater, it reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which then dissociates to bicarbonate, carbonate, and hydrogen ions. The higher concentration of hydrogen ions makes seawater acidic, but this process is buffered on long time scales by the interplay of seawater, seafloor carbonate sediments, and weathering on land."
It's incredibly ironic that Jane Q. Public and Lonny Eachus both point to paleoclimate evidence to support their dismissal of ocean acidification. Honisch et al. 2012 also discusses the observed consequences of releasing CO2 more quickly, such as during the end-Permian and PETM.
Paleoclimate evidence shows that ocean acidification depends on the rate of CO2 emissions, not the amount in the atmosphere.
Daily variations can be ~10C or more, but during the end-Permian a ~10C rise in the long term global average temperature coincidentally happened when ~90% of all species went extinct. Furthermore, the marine extinction pattern has ocean acidification's fingerprints on it. Knoll et al. 2007 (PDF) showed that during the end-Permian extinction, ~85% of genuses like coral with aragonite (CaCO3) skeletons went extinct, but only ~5% of genuses like fish with other skeletons went extinct. The rapid CO2 increase during the PETM also led to a similar albeit less severe marine extinction pattern. Again by coincidence?
No Lonny, it's not a scam. Extremely ra
They do work against each other, but our CO2 emissions are so rapid that they overwhelm the solubility effect. Once again, what you're dismissing as "alarmism" is actually mainstream science. Temperatures are going up, and dissolved CO2 is also going up.
I tried to explain this point at WUWT, to no avail: Use Henry’s Law to calculate the CO2 due to the ~0.8C surface warming since the Industrial Revolution. You’ll find that only ~20ppm of the actual ~100ppm rise could even hypothetically be explained by the ocean outgassing
So the reason CO2 in the ocean can increase at the same time surface temperatures increase is because that CO2 comes from our use of fossil fuels, not ocean outgassing. And we're adding to the atmosphere much faster than the warming oceans can lose their dissolved CO2 due to Henry's Law.
"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.
Rapid Acidification of the Ocean During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
Ocean acidification and surface water carbonate production across the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum
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.