Slashdot Mirror
'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.
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.
And every time someone mentions agricultural runoff (specifically from sugarcane), the lobbyists hit up the national party, and we're all reminded that natural resources and agriculture are untouchables.
No, it can't be the farmers, they're all "generational custodians" who couldn't possibly do anything harmful to the environment.
Apologies to those farmers who actually give a crap.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.