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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.
Gets greedy. Blows own foot off.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/06/australia-must-choose-between-coal-and-coral-the-great-barrier-reef-depends-on-it
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-21/great-barrier-reef-pitched-against-coal-jobs-in-australia-vote
Just since you asked here is 3 scientists actually asked about global warming vs the Great Barrier reef.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In case you don't have 10 minutes to watch it when they address global warming on the Great Barrier reef:
1. In warming climates like Papua New Guinea where there is coral it does better (it prefers warming water)
2. If the sea levels rise it will cause the reef to grow, what limits reef growth is the water level.
Now you may disagree but do go on about needing a scientist or proof or whatever, just say you disagree.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
Fixing a reef isn't an easy task. Fixing a reef 344,400 square kilometres in size is quite another.
The principle problem is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere is basically acidifying the ocean, so to remove the cause of the damage would require some pretty serious geo-engineering. It's practically teraforming.
There are stopgap measures, involving growing coral in nurseries and transplanting them back over the bleached and dead corals (Just glue those puppies back in. Seriously), but due to the sheer scale of the task this might only be practical in some key tourist areas.
More long term solutions might involve generating GMO corals with better resilience against acidification, and higher temperature variation tolerances, because its probably going to take a very long time for the oceans Ph to return to acceptable levels (Im not sure on this point, but it seems fairly straigthforward that without physically adding in billions of tonnes of Ph buffers one must assume the natural mechanisms would be slow, as nature is want to be).
But if we're honest, not a lot other than trying to stop the bleeding at the source and quit pumping shit into the atmosphere and oceans,
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Not at all. There's a ton of good environmental news out there. It's just we never hear about it, because it would disturb the artificial sense of crisis created by stories like these. Good news would take the wind out of their sails, and moreover jeopardize a lot of well-paying jobs. We're not the worst culture to ever live, not even by a long shot. We're the best culture to ever live. Western culture didn't start the African slave trade, Western culture ended the African slave trade.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
CO2 will increase heat in the atmosphere; that's not a question at all. Basic physics and such. However, most AGW models set the feedback sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 at 3K, when in actually seems to be about 1.1 K. That would also explain why most AGW models run hotter than measurements and need to be constantly "retuned" to fit the past (and continue to fail predicting the future).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!