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'Huge Wake Up Call': Third of Central, Northern Great Barrier Reef Corals Dead (smh.com.au)
iONiUM quotes a report from The Sydney Morning Herald: More than one-third of the coral reefs of the central and northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the huge bleaching event earlier this year, Queensland researchers said. Corals to the north of Cairns -- covering about two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef -- were found to have an average mortality rate of 35 percent, rising to more than half in areas around Cooktown. Bleaching occurs when abnormal conditions, such as warm seas, cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae. Corals turn white without these algae and may die if the zooxanthellae do not recolonize them. "It is fair to say we were all caught by surprise," Professor Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said. "It's a huge wake up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean which are closer to the epicenter of El Nino events." The report says, "The northern end of the Great Barrier Reef was home to many 50- to 100-year-old corals that had died and may struggle to rebuild before future El Ninos push tolerance beyond thresholds."
Idiot. They're rising, it's obvious in places like Tuvalu. But the rise is slow - it'll never reach 10 feet any time soon, it's only risen one foot in the last century. But it's got a lot warmer, and that's the real problem. You did read the article, didn't you? Oh no: of course you didn't, you just leapt to make an ignorant comment based on your own stupid belief system. Business as usual, in other words. You should run for office.
Rushing off and blaming every adverse environmental outcome on climate change is in itself a religious belief system.
All sorts of stressors on environment such as polluation from agricultural/catchment runoff. Land surface temp increase of around 0.7c over last 60 years or so + recent El Nino, may or many not be a contributor but no shortage of people falling over each other to lay blame principally at the feet of AGW
The Climate Change deniers will continue to deny it. You can't change their minds – they know what they know, and no amount of science will change their minds. Logic? That's a shibboleth to the deniers. If you use logic on them they just dig in their heels.
Everyone else is already awake.
Rushing off and blaming every adverse environmental outcome on climate change is in itself a religious belief system.
Which is why no-one listens to people like that.
But we do listen to actual scientists.
Cause that unlocked door they have today is going to stop them. This is least thought out attack on a group of people to date. Utterly stupid, much like building a wall between us and a country famous for tunnel digging, simply brilliant in the most painful way possible.
No, we are debating whether letting sex predators and perverts into the ladies room is a good idea or not.
I have grave news for ya Bucky - Sexual predators and perverts have been going into your ladies rooms for a long long long long time before you got to throw a little more hatred of gays and people who aren't the right type of people as you would have it. Google fu shows that as a fact.
And you could burn every transgernder person at the stake and the sexual predators and perverts will still go in to rest rooms. Why? Not many transgenders are that.
Don't for a minute pretend that this isn't just more of the projection based hatred of people who think that restrooms equal sex, and that someone that changes gender is somehow a prevert. Some guy that had his weenie cut off is not much danger to our wimminfolk, considering s/he probably didn't cut it off in order to become a lesbian.
A heterosexual male with bad impulse control and a penchant for sexually assaulting women on the other hand is, and a person like that isn't going to think "I was going to follow that woman into the restroom and rape her, but there's a lat against me going in there, so I better not." And these laws? They don't do a thing about that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A carbon price is a proxy for the missing external costs of coal power, so it helps raise the wholesale price to better reflect its true cost (which is around double current wholesale prices). This alone encourages alternatives - both demand for carbon-neutral alternative power, and investment in further renewable generation.
But of course, the revenue from that didn't vanish; it was funneled back into industry adaption schemes and consumer tax cuts. And it worked, driving emissions down significantly, until it was repealed in 2014 (at which point they immediately started rising again.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Apparently these symbionts didn't adapt quickly enough; much of the coral is dead.
However, it's not unheard of for reefs to recover faster than expected, if the water quality is good enough, so there's still some hope that any remaining symbionts will be more resilient in future. Unless they get hammered again too quickly...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?