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Since 2016, Half of All Coral In the Great Barrier Reef Has Died (theatlantic.com)
A new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reports that the Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals since 2016. The authors inspected every one of its reefs, surveying them on an almost species-by-species basis, and found the damage to be widespread across the entire ecosystem. "Two of its most recognizable creatures -- the amber-colored staghorn corals, and the flat, fanlike tabular corals -- suffered the worst casualties," reports The Atlantic. From the report: "On average, across the Great Barrier Reef, one in three corals died in nine months," said Terry Hughes, an author of the paper and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, the Australian government's federal research program devoted to corals. "You could say [the ecosystem] has collapsed. You could say it has degraded. I wouldn't say that's wrong," Hughes said. "A more neutral way of putting it is that it has transformed into a completely new system that looks differently, and behaves differently, and functions differently, than how it was three years ago."
In the summer months of 2017, warm waters again struck the reef and triggered another bleaching event. This time, the heat hit the reef's middle third. Hughes and his team have not published a peer-reviewed paper on that event, but he shared early survey results with me. Combined, he said, the back-to-back bleaching events killed one in every two corals in the Great Barrier Reef. It is a fact almost beyond comprehension: In the summer of 2015, more than 2 billion corals lived in the Great Barrier Reef. Half of them are now dead. What caused the devastation? Hughes was clear: human-caused global warming. The accumulation of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere has raised the world's average temperature, making the oceans hotter and less hospitable to fragile tropical corals.
In the summer months of 2017, warm waters again struck the reef and triggered another bleaching event. This time, the heat hit the reef's middle third. Hughes and his team have not published a peer-reviewed paper on that event, but he shared early survey results with me. Combined, he said, the back-to-back bleaching events killed one in every two corals in the Great Barrier Reef. It is a fact almost beyond comprehension: In the summer of 2015, more than 2 billion corals lived in the Great Barrier Reef. Half of them are now dead. What caused the devastation? Hughes was clear: human-caused global warming. The accumulation of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere has raised the world's average temperature, making the oceans hotter and less hospitable to fragile tropical corals.
I think you might have read the wrong article. If you were to read the paper published an Nature that the Atlantic article was reporting on and read all of the papers cited by it you'd realise that the research into the causes of corral bleaching were identified a few years ago by scientists who did take into account other factors like pollutants, ph levels, bacterial blooms etc. The point of science is to assume that multiple peer reviewed studies all coming up with the same concussions are in fact correct. If every study needed to go back to first principals science would never move forward!
I hate mixing seeing political agendas thrown in with science.
Then stop doing it?
You're the one setting up the straw man argument here. I'd prefer to listen to actual scientists - experts in their field who probably understand long term climate models as well.
Well, since all the news we ever receive on the environment is bad, it sure seems to me that we never do anything right. If the news ever reported that things were getting better, there wouldn't be a persistent sense of crisis and environmental NGOs would lose that most precious resource: money. People would lose their jobs. They have a conflict of interest in generating as much "the sky is falling" rhetoric as possible. This is very harmful. It feeds pessimism in Western countries and you get a lot of people firmly convinced that instead of being the best culture to ever live, we are the worst culture to ever live.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So which news source do you believe
The one given with the article ; where is yours?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
You could argue some of the big Hurricanes last year were caused by global warming but you couldn't prove it. This may go down in history as the first $multi-billion casualty directly tied to global warming. No way it can recover before the next bleaching decimates it further.
Glad I went snorkeling on the reef 9 years ago.
It was a special experience.
So sad, too bad if you didn't see the reef in all it's glory.
Man is really good at making lots of living things dead.
Go well
"What caused the devastation? Hughes was clear: human-caused global warming."
The Great Barrier Reef is NOT dying cause of global warming. In fact, many of the issues attributed to global warming are NOT due to global warming (Case in point, Redwood trees are not being burned up cause of global warming as touted. They are burning, because we have allowed other trees usually destroyed by seasonal fires to grow to maturity. Redwood bark is so thick it is nearly fireproof. Redwood branches are so high up, flames usually cannot reach them. However, allowing oaks and other lesser trees to reach maturity, has also allowed those flames to jump from the lesser tree branches to the higher branches of the redwoods, resulting in the death of many age old trees which had survived numerous prior forest fires.)
See this is the #1 problem with Global Warming. EVERY environmental issue is blamed on Global Warming, and issues that were commonly discussed in the 90's are now ignored. Global Warming basically absconded environmentalism.
Do your research on the barrier reefs. You'll find there are scientists who have tested the reefs, and what they have discovered is extremely high levels of pesticides and herbicides from Australian agricultural runoff. This is the main culprit. These toxins build up and disrupt the balanced relationship of coral. They also weak its immune system, which has made the coral susceptible to a herpes-type virus.
THIS IS THE REAL CAUSE...and as long as you are STUPID enough to allow every environmental issue to be blamed on "global warming" than you are going to doom the planet by allowing the actual causes of these problems to go unheeded. Many of which are due to big industries, and love that global warming is getting the blame for all their pollution.
Before Global Warming was blamed for it, the Crown of Thorns starfish was identified as the culprit. It's not clear to me why temperature is now the cause with no mention of the starfish.
According to research by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, coral cover on surveyed reefs between 1985 and 2012 declined by about 50 per cent over that 27 year period. Crown-of-thorns starfish were responsible for almost half of this decline.
Research estimates that if crown-of-thorns starfish predation had not occurred over the past three decades, there would have been a net increase in average coral cover.
because the Sun itself is still not well understood, and in particular, we do not even know what happens to the solar plasma which enters into the Earth's ionosphere.
Not this bullshit again. We've been measuring everything about the suns output for 50 years now. Sure, maybe the sun just started farting out magic sky fairies in the 5th dimension. Now until that technology is developed to catch them, maybe tell us why the OBVIOUS cause of AGW that has a mountain of evidence, theory, experimentation and is based on the same science that makes the thing you use everyday work down to the quantum level, is wrong.
An easy test for bullshit is to ask if the potential bullshitter requires you to reject everything you can learn and observe in favor of their extraordinary and unproveable alternative.