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'Unprecedented' Bleaching Damages Two-Thirds Of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Unprecedented coral bleaching in consecutive years has damaged two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, aerial surveys have shown. The bleaching — or loss of algae — affects a 1,500km (900 miles) area of the reef, according to scientists. The latest damage is concentrated in the middle section, whereas last year's bleaching hit mainly the north. Experts fear the proximity of the two events will give damaged coral little chance to recover.
...by the amount of willful blindness in Australia's government.
I mean, I thought for sure, once serious, real, things started dying on the planet, people would start caring. But I'm proven wrong every year.
It's not so much the cute fishes that the problem here, it's the underlying mechanism of ocean acidification:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/ocean-oxygen-nature/index.html
aka, the Permian Triassic exctinction, the "great dying", where lots of stuff in the sea died, and algae and fungi bloomed, poisoning the atmosphere killing 90% of all spiecies and snowballing the CO2 level to 2000ppi and 8 degree celsius increase.
http://www.newsweek.com/carbon-emissions-could-spark-mass-extinction-321061
It's whether the Trump's and Pajits of this world do enough damage to take pass that runaway point.
The only surprise is that you concede any damage is real in the first place.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
...then you're already too late.
"Shrewd manipulators" can still be stupid/ignorant.
Mostly what you need to 'manipulate' people is a position of power (or money) and to be a bit of a bully. If you're like that then money-grabbing people will try to be on your side. Look at you, you obviously admire any "millionaire set for life" and want a bit of that to rub off onto you.
A healthy amount of sociopathic paranoia helps, too. Don't be afraid to fire/destroy anybody around you who makes you look bad.
No sig today...
I'll bet they'll recover
Oh yes, of course - corals have been around since the Cambrian or thereabouts, but the question is when. And how much of The Great Barrier Reef will be lost? The reef is apparently not incredibly old, but it will take a long time to recover in human terms. Even if we stopped all polluting activity now, there will still be a long period of increasing warming. More heat in the atmosphere means more extreme storms, which mean stronger erosion on coasts and reefs, among other things, and when the coral polyps are not there to rebuild the reef, it will get eroded away. And so on.
Climate deniers always imagine that climate change is only about an small increase in temperature, so what's the fuss? The fuss is because everything is connected in a complex network, of course; if it was only about slightly more pleasant temperatures, nobody would complain, but it isn't. Take the corals - if the reef dies, not only will they get eroded away (leaving the coast exposed to the sea), but the fish that live there disappear; and since a lot of commercial fisheries depend on those fish stocks, a lot of fishers go out of business. Less fish may also mean less predation on jellyfish larvae, which is probably why we see a marked increase in jellyfish washing up on beaches; this also causes real problems for fishing in some areas. Nature is very complex and we are still only beginning to understand the complexities; but we know enough to see how easily we can unbalance the whole thing, and being reckless out of mere spite is simply incredibly stupid - criminally stupid, I'd say.
How come before cigarettes, cancer was caused by radiation?
Let me tell ya, it's a fake new plot by Obama loving scientists to outlaw cigarettes!! That's why!
My logic is undeniable! I've got awards for science stuff, and I say we need to roll back regulation on tabacco that's holding back the American tabacco industry. Those Obama loving lying scientists and their so called 'science', they claim to know, but they don't know, I know, because my twitter feed told me so.
Lets make American the leader in cigarettes again!
"We gotta do something or the corals will be dead!"
"The corals are fine, look, they're thriving."
"The corals are gone, everything's dead!"
"Well, then we can as well continue when it's too late to change anything anyway"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The coral reefs are only the START. Trump has been in office for 3 months and has already caused the total extinction of the human race! And he hasn't even broken out the nukes yet!
That and switching from stone washed Jeans to coral washed Jeans. It's the only thing Kendal Jenner will wear.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Those so called warm periods were localised. They didn't encompass the entire planet.
"The geography and climate of earth are ever-changing."
And? Trees fall down naturally in forests. Does that mean we shouldn't be concerned about illegal logging? And climate generally changes over the course of millions of years, not hundreds. Nature can't keep up.
It's whether the Trump's and Pajits of this world do enough damage to take pass that runaway point.
Designated Shitting Oceans
Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who have a compulsive need to twist everything that ever happens in the world (or on the internet) into a condemnation of Trump. If a minute goes by that they're not reminding everyone within earshot that Trump is literally Hitler, Satan, and Emperor Palpatine all rolled into one, they get restless. I imagine it's quite exhausting.
At least this article is tangentially political, however, though any responsibility or involvement by Trump would imply the existence of time travel.
This is a series of problems that exist at many levels.
- World population is still growing
- There are business reasons to look the other way
- There are political reasons to look the other way
- Much of the problem exists at a compounded micro level which means that each person contributes to the problem but doesn't feel they could contribute to the solution no matter what we do.
- Human consumption is at a level which is frightening.
- Recycling barely has any impact because we simply make too much crap we don't need.
Honestly, I could write 25 pages of items of the problems involved.
Let's be totally honest. No one in a position to actually make a difference can do so in any timeframe which is meaningful to them. Even if they could push through changes, whoever comes after them will just undo them. There is no political or business gain to making a difference.
We don't feel connected to the problem. I consider myself pretty smart and I can't grasp the scale of the problem. I know I am breathing as I type this. I was breathing 40 years ago as well. I admit I am warmer than I was back then, but I live someplace cold so warmer feels good to me and those around me.
I know damn well the problem needs to be solved, but to do so would require a massive shift to the way billions of people live and I know there is no chance in hell of that happening.
So, how do we mitigate the problem in a way that could actually happen?
What did we lose and what is the real impact of the loss?
Can we breed a type of algae that can populate the warmer reefs? Is it more about the coral rejecting it? Can we force the coral to accept a new type of algae without doing far greater damage?
If we can't recover the reef, can we recover otherwise? Can we build something which could replace the function of the reef?
Is there any way we can use resources such as the trash pile in the middle of the pacific as materials to help with the problem?
Is there a way we can build something like greenhouses in the desert wastes to mass produce oxygen?
Is there a way to make it profitable enough to attract interest from people who otherwise would fight against it?
I'm simply making things up now. But I do know we will never alter earth's population to make a meaningful change in time to fix the reef. Even if we could get a new head of the EPA in North America, what about Asia?
Someone has to start thinking creatively to fix this instead of depending on humanity.
> Climate deniers [...] complex [...]
See? There's the problem. Climate deniers and complex don't mix.
Your house won't last the next millennia either, so let's just tell the local fire station not to bother turning up if it happens to catch fire. The neighbourhood is ever-changing, after all.
Oh Bullshit, these rent-seekers did an aerial survey, the coral bleaching is due to a rapid drop in sea level.
You have to get into the water where the corals are bleached and take observations to tell what is happening, for the most part, bleaching occured in upper 15 cm of the reefs before temperatures had reached NOAA’ Coral Reef Watch’s bleaching thresholds.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
looks at the barrier reef as 2/3 dead. An optimist looks at the barrier as 1/3 struggling to stay alive.
Those so called warm periods were localised. They didn't encompass the entire planet.
Yes and every scientist who's income depend on the current warm period being unique and unprecedented, global in scale and perpetual, while warming have to be local and self-limited event agree!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"But the reefs! The ice! The bees! It's all propoganda by liberals for their global warming bs!
This Watts Up With That article (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/falling-sea-level-the-critical-factor-in-2016-great-barrier-reef-bleaching/) gives a much better explanation and addresses the claims that climate change is the reason.
So I guess all the data is faked by The Man, right? FFS. Go back to bashing your bible.
Oh I didn't realise that the Great Barrier Reef was in Indonesia. Thanks for correcting that.
Now a metaphorical causality question. If another man's face hurts due to a sinus infection and I show you this through a peer review study, does that mean we get a free pass at punching you in the face?
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that an entire body of scientists think that you are.
phantonfive is not trolling. They always do recover.... but we do need to understand the mechanism that causes the bleaching. If it's human-induced, we need to curb that!
Bleaching is normal to some extent. Corals recover if they get a break. Problem here is they get 2 years - back to back of high temperature bleaching which lowers the chance of recovery.
The problem with the "small increase in temperature" line is that it doesn't take into account the actual sheer amount of energy required to raise mean surface and lower atmospheric temperatures even a fraction of degree. Climate pseudo-skeptics and the idiots that follow them don't acknowledge, because it kills their entire line of reasoning, that upping global mean temperature even a quarter of a degree means the atmosphere is trapping vastly greater amounts of solar radiation.
And of course, for ocean-life there's a double-whammy, in that not only are ocean temperatures increased, but the oceans begin to absorb more CO2, altering pH levels. In the short term, the oceans can act, both due to their capacity to absorb heat and CO2, to mitigate rising temperatures, but it's only short term, and the costs to marine ecosystems is huge.
At any rate, even the deniers are beginning to end the denialist game. Now it's all about "Oh sure, the Earth is warming, but what can we do, and what about those funny little brown people, why does Al Gore hate them so much?" They've entered the whole "eat drink and be merry for tomorrow will shall die stage", simply because they want to eke a few more years or decades of profits out of fossil fuels before the game is up.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What happens when fuck up the planet so much that it fucks us up? Do you think some H. sapiens is magically immune to climate change and pollution?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All that counts is an objection was made. For the denier, it is irrelevant if the objection is sensible, rational, or even has anything to do with the topic at hand. So long as they raise their hand and making some vaguely intelligible sound, apparently a whole field of scientific inquiry comes crashing down.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Those so called warm periods were localised. They didn't encompass the entire planet.
Can you point to the studies that prove that?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Oh I didn't realise that the Great Barrier Reef was in Indonesia. Thanks for correcting that.
Different reefs, very close to each other and water tends to be at common levels. The same winds and currents from the El Niño that push water from the west pacific toward the east pacific effects both Australia and Indonesia.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The next "ice age" was due in dozens if not hundreds of millennia, not in 1000 years.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Those so called warm periods were localised.
No they where not. How would that physically even possible?
We know since 20 or more years that at the same times were "warm periods" in regions like China and Japan. It is just so that Wikipedia articles get updated slowly.
It was never really disputed anyway, the tenor was: "we have no evidence", but evidence is found meanwhile. The question remains "how global" it was, because finding written evidence from south african tribes is a bit difficult ... or nordic Runes, or Etruscan inscriptions ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Great story, but this year there is no el-nino, last year there was an el-nino.All 4 known bleaching events have occurred since 1980, 3 since 2000, the last two back to back. Also, Indonesia is several thousand kilometers NW of the GBR, so they are "close" in the same way alaska and florida are "close"
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There are no such studies, in fact we have studies that imply that this is false.
However the scientists who wrote books about it treated it like local phenomena as they e.g. only gathered data in Europe and did not look for Africa or Asia.
Hence around the time when e.g. Wikipedia got filled with articles about it, the writers "assumed" it was a localized phenomena. However book authors like Hubert Lamb (https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home) believed that the period between 1100 - 1300 AD it was mainly focused around the north Atlantic, combining warms with enough rain fall (so we have the grow rings e.g. to estimate temperature). However he never gave a plausible reason why e.g. China, Japan, Africa was not affected.
Meanwhile we know: they were effected. Because plenty of old history records about those times in China and Japan and India are discovered meanwhile. The question of those where affected at the exact same time. The man idea of Hubert Lamp are shifts in the Arctic Vortex. "The same thing" that caused the "unusually harsch (facepalm)" winter around the great lakes a few years ago.
He thinks about the vortex shifting farer south. That is a bit surprising, as "how should that work?" The main thing that is interesting for our weather/climate about the vortex is: the count of wiggles in that sinuous line which circumflexes the pole. Has it one wiggle more, then it has a localized changed weather as e.g. at the great lakes as mentioned above.
However those wiggles don't last long ... perhaps 3 to 6 month, and the slowly wander. So the question if we have such an wiggle going far south over central Russia (influencing German weather, because then we get lots of cold air moved from there to Germany) arises every few years again. In my eyes it is not rally plausible that changes in the Arctic Vortex last 200 years. BUT: I'm not a climate scientist ... I only have a good overview about weather phenomena.
Anyway, Hubert Lamp wrote an influencing book, but focused on Europe and "hypotized" that the MWP affected only both sides of the north Atlantik and not the Pacific (Korea, China, India, Japan) but: never even tried to seek evidence. At least he did not write about it (his seeking for evidence, I mean).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I see the moron anti-AGW mod points are out in force.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't think it's controversial that there are too many humans on the planet (and mosquitos, ticks, flies, jellyfish, rats, roaches, spiders!!). How to reduce the population size humanely and in a way that certain ethnic groups don't fear they're being wiped out is the challenge. Previously, mother nature and wars helped keep the population in check. Now, being highly developed helps, but countries that aren't at this stage are still growing.
I'll bet they'll recover
Oh yes, of course - corals have been around since the Cambrian or thereabouts...
True, but.
One type of coral or another has been around since the Cambrian, but species of corals have, in the past, been wiped out wholesale-- the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, in particular, (the "great dying") wiped out very close to all the reef-forming species, apparently due to the combination of anoxia and ocean acidification. In fact, 96% of all marine species were wiped out in that event.
It took about eight million years before corals are re-established in the fossil record. That's eight million years with no reefs; a period much longer than humanity has been around.
Most of the reef-forming coral species also went extinct at the K-T extinction. (The non-reef-forming corals were, for some reason, less affected.)
Extinction happens.
The "fake news" meme is neither retarded nor hypocritical. What it is, however, is overused.
There was actual, fake news being spread around: "fake" meaning stuff that wasn't merely in error, or poorly researched, but completely made up: whole websites devoted to spreading "news" items with no connection to reality at all, for no other purpose than trolling for eyeballs.
But then the "fake news" thing got to be a meme, and people started applying that tag to refer to anything that disagrees with their worldview. Once Donald Trump started applying it to stories about him in the actual news media, it had turned around 180: it was no longer about discrediting news that actually was fake, but about discrediting news that actually was true.
Thanks for your insight. I will continue to go with the well funded scientists studying the reef in question, rather than a few studying something else and extrapolating.
too many mosquitos, ticks, flies, jellyfish, rats, roaches, spiders!!
Don't forget when St Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, they moved to Australia.
Also, we should convince the Chinese that jellyfish are an aphrodisiac. Probably starfish, too.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Take a look, Indonesia and Australia are only 186 nautical miles apart.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Sure, blame Trump, because the US is the great satan... GTFO.
If you are really worried about pollution and destroying the planet, you need to talk to China first (BTW, they are a lot closer to the GBR than the US as well.)
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
China has over 4x the population of the USA. They emit less than half the carbon per capita of the USA.
That's not just shit, that's pure, unadulterated bullshit.
China has over 4x the population of the USA. They emit less than half the carbon per capita of the USA.
Not only that, China is working on reducing their CO2 output. Trump is working on increasing it massively.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Take a look, Indonesia and Australia are only 186 nautical miles apart.
Yeah, but the the two reefs are over 2000 miles apart
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Don't play silly semantic games when you're clearly clueless. Nature can't keep up means that natural selection can't keep up since it depends on the reproduction rate of the individual species. Bacteria can keep up with man made climate change, elephants and oak trees can't. Now run along and go play with your little school friends and let the adults continue the discussion.
Scientific American article about acidification (from CO2) contributing to Permian Extinction...
Overview:
https://www.scientificamerican...
Full Article:
http://burro.case.edu/Academic...
The thing you're missing is that the rate of change is a primary factor in how damaging global warming has become. Deniers say "we'll adapt", and aside from ignoring all the other life on this planet, downplay the fact that ecosystems we rely on are getting slammed.
Most complex life forms can only adapt so far and so fast.
I would assume that we die and the world lives on as if nothing ever happened. It's called natural selection and it will eventually kill all us humans or we will evolve into something quite different before it kills us all.
And before you start wining about the world you are leaving for your children, why the hell would you have children if you believe they will just be inheriting a world of misery? That's fucking evil.
Don't forget, for maximum damage send the women to war so the population cannot rebound as soon as the war is over.