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How Coral Researchers Are Coping With the Death of Reefs (theatlantic.com)
Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic: The continuing desecration has taken an immense toll on the mental health of people like Colton, a director at Coral Reef Alliance, who have devoted their lives to studying and saving these ecosystems. How do you get up and go to work every day when every day brings fresh news of loss? "Are we going to lose an entire ecosystem on my watch? It's demoralizing. It's been really hard to find the optimism," she says. "I think Miss Enthusiasm has gone away." There was a time, just a few decades ago, when this crisis seemed unimaginable, when reefs seemed invincible. This catastrophe has unfolded slowly. [...] But she also recognizes that she and other scientists are privileged. They care about reefs, but they're not like the 450 million people around the world who rely on reefs for tourism revenue, food from fish, and protection against storms. For them, the losses are a daily reality. The last time Bette Willis, from James Cook University, went out to the Great Barrier Reef, the woman who ran her boat "would alternate between rants and depression," she recalls. "She's out there several times a week. She knows each coral. She could see her whole livelihood go down the drain." Everyone I spoke to talked about becoming very good at compartmentalizing -- at acknowledging the scale of the tragedy, but also putting it aside to focus on their work. "I don't find it productive to be angry or depressed all the time. It's corrosive, and it isn't going to solve the problem," says Knowlton. She is perhaps the poster child for ocean optimism, having created a movement called ... Ocean Optimism.
Problem.. Of course you get more research money if you blame climate change..
Has journalism fallen so far from reporting facts that scientistsâ(TM) emotions now constitute the news? Whatâ(TM)s next, interviews with losing politicians on what being rejected by the majority of oneâ(TM)s fellow citizens feels like?
For months, scientists have been reporting the Great Barrier Reef is recovering.
http://www.cairnspost.com.au/n...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
https://www.divingcairns.com.au/reef_crownofthorns
But as xtronics said it is easier to get funding if you blame climate change rather than the fact that we really don't know all that much about the oceans as we think we do. There are so many factors involved in what shapes this world, and scientists often fail to consider that the problem is much more complex than an excess of carbon dioxide that should really be a boon to plant life. While I cannot say definitively that human caused climate change is false at least I don't pretend it is "settled science". To me there is no such thing as "settled science". Gravity in physics seems somewhat settled, but just recently an article pondered the possibility that our sense of physics could be controlled by a far more advanced race of being. Likely, no, but questioning our universe and the reality we hold true is the cornerstone of science.
Far too often science is politicized, and it is nothing new. In our history many suffered greatly for believing that earth was not the center of the universe. Fortunately the majority of climate change zealots aren't violent. To anyone who is concerned with decreasing the buildup of carbon dioxide; perhaps your time would be better spent planting and irrigating land then on slashdot being political.
James Damore? Is that you?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I'll believe that people are taking the saving of the coral reefs seriously when we get over this unfounded fear of nuclear power. If we fear nuclear power more than global warming then we have some seriously messed up priorities.
Can we solve this problem of CO2 production without nuclear power? Perhaps. What we know for sure is that we can solve this problem faster with nuclear power than without. Nuclear power is safe, inexpensive, and has the lowest CO2 output than any other energy source we have available to us today. If the governments of the world don't allow the building of more nuclear power plants then they are, IMHO, denying the threats that global warming pose. I'd think it is possible to erect windmills as well as nuclear power reactors, doing one doesn't mean we cannot do the other.
As of today, right now, nothing is a better solution to reducing our CO2 output than nuclear power. That might change in the future but right now, today, solar, wind, or whatever else someone might pose as a solution is inferior to nuclear power. By not allowing the building of nuclear power reactors, today, they are making the problem worse.
If the governments of the world are not issuing licenses for new nuclear power reactors then I can only assume they are not convinced of the threats the global warming poses to the coral reefs of the world, or they are completely ignorant of how nuclear power works and how it competes with other energy sources. Is there a third option?
Maybe this isn't ignorance but incompetence, that's the third option. Maybe they know about global warming and nuclear power but they lack the competence to issue licenses. Which is it? Incompetence or ignorance? Perhaps it doesn't matter which, we need to replace them with people that are knowledgeable and competent enough to issue new nuclear reactor licenses.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
What seems to be missed in all this negativity is the very positive thing that vast new parts of the oceans are now the right conditions for corals and the corals are moving into them. Part of the biology of corals is they squirt out their gametes into the currents which then for a mobile stage of the coral that floats and eventually settles somewhere in the world. If it settles in a viable spot then the coral flourishes causing the corals to spread.
This is a very good strategy, it works and people are ignoring it.
Probably people ignore this because most people don't know much about corals and it makes better headlines if you say gloom and doom.
Certainly some of the tropical corals that we are losing will move to where the ocean temps at their particular species depth will support them. And in time some species of trees will move further north and adapt to a slightly different light cycle duration. The problem is that the forced evolution is far faster than the rate of adaptation so the diversity of species will plummet dramatically until new species adapted to the individual environments can evolve in diversity. What is happing is much faster than what occurs on the Galapagos, yes some species will evolve and move but the diversity drop will be a major extinction event that is accelerated beyond the capacity of animals to adapt and to a greater extent will be human caused this time around.
I will give you the example of the West Coast of North America. We are currently losing the anadromous variant of Oncorhynchus mykiss and O. tshawytscha south of the 54th parallel and even in river systems north of Prince Rupert to a lesser extent. At the same time some southern species are moving north to sections of the Pacific Ocean where they feed. Humbolt Squid are starting to move north and are washing up dead on the beaches of Vancouver Island this has never in recorded history or in the oral history of our indigenous peoples been seen before. I really like love to eat fried Wzéi but come on, not at the price of losing the once worlds greatest steelhead spey rod fishing on the Thompson River and the Chilcotin.
There is one thing the pseudo scientific climate change deniers all seem to harp at and that is how great it is to suddenly warm the surface of the Ocean and the land... Wake up and look at the evidence and then speak, otherwise STFU
Corals are one of the oldest forms of multicellular life on the planet.
They've thrived when the earth has been both much cooler, and much warmer than it is today.
They've thrived when CO2 was both higher and lower than today.
They've thrived when the climate has changed both more slowly, and more quickly. Sometimes radically quickly.
Seriously, if you're going to pick a poster child for 'most likely to not give a shit about warming' - that would be corals. For every coral that bleaches because of slightly warmer water, another two whole latitudes toward the poles are opened for coral growth and exploitation.
-Styopa
They had a good run.
And they will outlive you little girl.
I'm sorry you missed my point. This is not about evolution of the various species but rather that the species are gaining new environments that were previously not hospitable.
As the northern waters warm a little the motile forms of the young corals drop into those newly hospitable areas and colonize.
This is not about evolution. Evolution's great but this is about how existing species can take on new areas because those areas become hospitable. The environment is changing rather than the species.
Shame on you for reducing to name calling - ref: your last paragraph.
Too bad that they taste like shit and the fish species that rely upon them are not quite as adaptable.
And what exactly prevents fish populations from migrating to an area they prefer, or adapting to slowly changing conditions where they are??
If anything fish are MORE adaptable simply because they have more mobility and generally shorter lifespans (though some fish can grow quite old, but the they usually get so big they do not care about much)..
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, I'm sure you know more about it than the actual scientists who work in the reefs.