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Images Show Further Damage To Great Barrier Reef, But Scientists Assure It's Not Dead (huffingtonpost.com)
New images of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living thing on Earth, are alarming and show the extent of the damage climate change has caused to the coral. But it's not dead yet, scientists have assured, reports the HuffingtonPost citing several scientists. In April, researchers found that more than a third of corals in central and northern parts of the reef had been killed and 93 percent of individuals reefs had been affected by a condition known as coral bleaching (which happens when the water is too warm). New research shows the damage has worsened. A story, however, doing rounds on social media claims that the Great Barrier Reef has died. The viral story has been picked up by many well-read outlets, creating confusion among people. From a HuffingtonPost article: But as a whole, it is not dead. Preliminary findings published Thursday of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority surveys show 22 percent of its coral died from the bleaching event. That leaves more than three quarters still alive -- and in desperate need of relief. Two leading coral scientists that The Huffington Post contacted took serious issue with Outside's piece (the misleading viral story), calling it wildly irresponsible. Russell Brainard, chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, told HuffPost he expects the article was meant to highlight the urgency of the situation. But those who don't know any better "are going to take it at face value that the Great Barrier Reef is dead," he said. The Spokesman-Review, in Spokane, Washington, fueled the myth Thursday, when it published a blog with the headline: "Great Barrier Reef pronounced dead by scientists." Brainard told HuffPost the recent bleaching event was a "severe blow" that resulted in serious mortality. Still, "we're very far from an obituary," he said.
Seems it was politically useful to describe them as "dead", facts notwithstanding.
Not unusual, if highly annoying.
Just amp up the negativity of the description, and if necessary change the definitions of basic words. Worked for "they let you do it".
Yes, well, your entire life span is also ephemeral in such a timeframe, does that mean that anything that happens to you is inconsequential? So I guess we should burn your house down with you in it. It's just ephemeral, we should keep burning houses with people in them.
In this example, the house represents the Earth, you represent all life on Earth, and keep burning houses is the equivalent of spouting pseudo-intellectual emotional rubbish about geological spans instead of acting like an adult.
They should just move further south to cooler waters. Unless they're lowlife corals who wont' get a job and are just leaching off the system, in which case they can rot in their dependency hell until the die and make room for more productive members of society to take over and turn the place into luxury flats.
it's entirely possible that - in geological spans - the GBR is an ephemeral thing,
I suppose we may find that many things are ephemeral during periods of rapid climate change.
Humans take such a short term view of things.
Probably because we don't live very long and can only survive under some very specific environmental conditions.
If human survival is insignificant, then the state of the GBR isn't worth worrying about.
This is true, but the same thing also happens during cooling events which have happened throughout history.
Oceanic acidification is bigger danger really to encrusting animals and plants because if they can't form calcified structures, they can't live. Organisms can adapt fairly quickly to moderate shifts in temperature. It is a lot harder to adapt to having your skeletal structure melt.
Except that this time, climate change isn't happening on geological timescales, it's happening within the scale of our lifetime - and there are billions of people who are too poor to cope.
All it takes is a decade of drought, a little too much sea rise, or an unusually big storm surge salting croplands in a river delta, and hundreds of thousands can no longer live there. The refugees have to go elsewhere, eat something, which results in stress and conflict in neighboring areas.
The Pentagon and other militaries have already predicted this, and you only have to look at Syria to see the results.
You are assume that these climate changes happen overnight such that someone could be caught out in the cold or caught in the desert and actually die.
False.
That is not how it would work.
Of course not. The problem is that nobody knows how it would work. It is you who assumes too much. E.g. that if the current agricultural areas of the world becomes a huge desert, the proper terrain, soil conditions etc. will inevitably appear wherever the climate happens to shift into the correct range.
Your theory requires a constant level of habitable terrain that humans merely need to move fast enough to exploit. It totally ignores the more likely scenario -- The Sahara will remain an uninhabitable dessert, and North America, South America, Australasia and Eurasia will join it.