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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
Easy to calculate Coral half-life.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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!
they only look at temperature. Why were there not any chemical samples taken? pollutant studies?
Pollutants are measured in areas where they are a concern, such as where mine tailings flow into the sea. But the GBR is 2300 km (1400 miles) long, and it is implausible that chemical waste or effluent could have so much effect across such a vast area.
ph level measurement?
Rising CO2 causes ocean ph to drop. This is happening worldwide. It is unlikely that falling ph (rising acidity) is the root problem, because acidity is rising everywhere and reefs are surviving and sometimes even expanding in places like Papahanaumokuakea in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, or the Sea of Japan, where temperatures are relatively cool.
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.
Given the "ups and downs" of long term cyclical temperature shifts over the last 10-15,000 years, how can that conclusion be justified?
You just clarified that yourself. Because the changes we observe now happened within the course of a few years, not thousand years.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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...
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.
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
all the news we ever receive on the environment is bad, it sure seems to me that we never do anything right
Do you know why we get all that bad news?
It's because the actual situation is very bad, it is rapidly getting worse, and judging on who we've been putting in charge of policy, we indeed seem to be incapable of doing what's right.
Unless we make major efforts to address these issues soon, future generations may very well judge us to be the worst culture to ever live, and rightfully so.
It is of course true that some corals may do better in warmer water, especially in cooler waters. But even those need more than that.
More to the point, most corals grow in the locations & conditions that best suit them. When the conditions in those locations change rapidly and drastically, a lot of them will die off - as we are already now seeing. And given how slow coral reefs grow, it could take decades or centuries to recover even once conditions stabilise again.
The fact that you're saying "what about now" is precisely what's wrong with climate change denial. Things don't happen immediately, and those kind of things don't have immediate fixes.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Global warming is not just a problem for "Western" countries / cultures. Its a problem for all counties and all cultures. A potential mass extinction of us all.
Pretending its not happening is a big part of the problem. Solving it on the other hand just might reverse that pessimism you are afraid of taking over (if that is really what you are after, my guess is you just want to consume as much as you want, or some other short sighted selfish reasoning).
Unless you are saying that wastern culture has to equal destroying the environment, that this is a defining feature of it. In which case the culture needs to change obviously, and I dont personally believe its impossible.
So basically there is no way your 'philosophy' on the matter is correct. You can admit there is a problem, and try and fix it. But you can't say there is no problem, don't try and fix it, and then complain that people are being too pessimistic. You want them to be happy about environmental collapse such as the one in TFA? You want them to ignore the evidence all around them as you seem to?
thats denial my friend, pure and simple. Any amount of pessimism is better than any amount of denial.
-
There's only one way to find out. But we know for sure it's not going to get better the way we're going.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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!
Given the "ups and downs" ... over the last 10-15,000 years, how can that conclusion be justified? After all, during the last ice age there was no "Great Barrier Reef" as the sea-level was some 50 meters lower than now.
The Wikipedia article on corals would seem to differ on this point: "The Great Barrier Reef is thought to have been laid down about two million years ago."
Care to justify your conclusion?
I wouldn't get too focused on it being dead or not, we can do coral reintroduction, and the healthiest and most biodiverse reefs in the world sit just north of Australia in places like Indonesia, so if we can restore things to the point at which they can sustain reef life, there's a reasonable chance it can recover.
There's this kind of mystique around reefs when we see claims about how incredibly biodiverse they are, and how they're home to millions of unique species. That's true, but the diversity doesn't change drastically across large regions - sure different areas do have unique species, but the common species that build the reefs are continent wide, or even global.
I've recently participated in a coral conservation programme in the Caribbean helping to restore the exact same staghorn spoken about in the article. It's a species of coral that's struggling globally, but the good news is that it's also pretty damn easy to repopulate it, because you can just cut bits off, and grow them for a bit in ocean based nurseries, then just plant them with marine grade putty and similar things and within a few years they'll restore an area to it's natural state. The same is true of many corals.
As someone whose dived globally, one thing you start to realise is that for all those millions of species, there are certain ones you see time and time again - from Florida all the way down the chain of Caribbean islands to Curacao and all the way back up the mainland past Costa Rica, Yucatan and Mexico and back to Florida, you'll see the same species time and time again - the same fish, the same turtles, the same morays, the barracudas, the sharks, the puffers, the rays. Cozumel has it's distinct splendid toadfish, St Lucia has "the thing" and so on, but ultimately, it's clear that there are key species that prop up the reefs and sit widespread. If you go over to Asia the same applies, places like Lembeh like to tout their access to things like the Blue Ringed Octopus, and their nudibranchs and stuff, but you can see these all across tropical Asia - Thailand, the Philipines, Indonesia, Australia Some of those species are common all the way up through the Indian ocean into Egypt and Jordan's Red Sea reefs. Even in the colder regions, you see the same species along Norway's coastline as you do around the UK, and around Greenland and Iceland and to North America's northern coasts.
So even if we can't save say, the barrier reef in time to solve the warming problem, if we can at least keep some reefs going we can restore others to productivity. We will lose some localised distinctive species, which may mean we lose unique treatments for cancers and so forth, so it's not cost free for us as a species, but it needn't also be catastrophic for the oceans, because if we do lose the reefs, with lose the hatcheries and nurseries, and if we lose them, we lose 20%+ of the world's global food supply.
Ideally therefore, we want to limit the impact as fast as we can to protect food supplies, and to protect unique species that have led to groundbreaking medical research and other scientific advancement, but if we can't, there's still at least some hope. As with everything though - your backup plan should be just that, your backup plan, because if you don't even bother to try your primary plan, and fall straight through to the backup, then what happens if that fails? The harder we try for plan A - saving the reefs as they are, the easier and more likely it'll be we can succeed with plan B, if we absolutely end up having to fall back on it, so giving up because we might fail most definitely should not be an option we even begin to consider.
So true. I don't understand all the pessimism *and anger* in America. Go skydiving and clear your mind. It's a great place!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This news isn't exactly new.
There is a fantastic documentary Mission Blue about the ocean that discusses the coral dying back in 2014.
Other great documentaries include:
2. End of the Line
3. The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans
4. Sushi: the Global Catch
5. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
--
Main St. built America
Wall St. destroyed it.
http://www.pbs.org/video/decod...
They mentioned since the 1970s, half the coral over the whole planet has been destroyed. Fucking not cool. One possible hope is that this lady with her team in Hawaii are trying to "speed up evolution" and introduce hardy coral types all over the world. 25% of sea life is around coral reefs... if we lose all of them I'm pretty sure it's going to cause a lot of problems.
I'll say that 15 years ago I was skeptical about the global warming thing. Then as more and more scientists became more sure, I realized there was absolutely something to it. This episode of Nova shows you tons and tons of evidence of why the majority of scientists seem to have no doubt. The worst thing is that we are now at atmospheric CO2 concentrations that are about double what the highest has ever been in the last 800,000 years as measured by air trapped in 2 mile deep ice in the arctic (or was it antarctic?). CO2 going up so violently quickly and heating going up so violently quickly is the real problem... we don't have a 10,000 years to adapt, we have a decade. Anything without a quick reproduction cycle is going to struggle in some areas. Don't worry, insects don't have this problem so you can bet no matter what we do there will be bugs left to eat our rotting corpses.
They say it has been estimated how much extra carbon we have put in the atmosphere from fossil fuels, and of that about 25% is absorbed by the ocean and another 25% is absorbed by trees on land. The other 50% is good old greenhouse gassing it up. The majority of the heat is absorbed by oceans too, which for now is keeping the atmosphere from changing as rapidly. Only problem is they predict by the year 2100 we'll have anywhere from 1 to 8 feet of higher ocean levels, which will screw up a lot of places along the coasts.
The only good news I got from this show was that wind and solar is cheaper than what anybody thought possible at this point in time, and usually cheaper than creating new coal operations. So at least the greedy types won't have more excuses to screw us over even more.
Here is a more informative source: https://www.theaustralian.com....
"Dr Reichelt said maps accompanying the research had been misleading, exaggerating the impact. “I don’t know whether it was a deliberate sleight of hand or lack of geographic knowledge but it certainly suits the purpose of the people who sent it out,” he said.
“This is a frightening enough story with the facts, you don’t need to dress them up. We don’t want to be seen as saying there is no problem out there but we do want people to understand there is a lot of the reef that is unscathed.”
Dr Reichelt said there had been widespread misinterpretation of how much of the reef had died.
“We’ve seen headlines stating that 93 per cent of the reef is practically dead,” he said.
“We’ve also seen reports that 35 per cent, or even 50 per cent, of the entire reef is now gone.
“However, based on our combined results so far, the overall mortality rate is 22 per cent — and about 85 per cent of that die-off has occurred in the far north between the tip of Cape York and just north of Lizard Island, 250km north of Cairns. Seventy-five per cent of the reef will come out in a few months time as recovered.”"
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
The pattern of the environmental movement somehow continues to go unnoticed by the public: Environmentalists start paying attention to X, notice that their expectations for what X is like were wrong, then suggest that X is in danger from humans. But, in each case, the decision to announce a catastrophe can be shown to either be technically questionable, or simply premature.
Here's an example:
1979: First satellite measurements of ozone
1983: Ozone hole first detected
1985: Ozone hole declared a threat to the world
In terms of process, it is historically important to observe that the ozone hole was declared an emergency before a full solar cycle was observed with satellite.
Similar critiques have been made about these coral claims:
Similar arguments can be made about climate change arguments, 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. In fact, Piers Corbyn's successes at predicting long-range extreme weather events is highly suggestive that environmentalists have failed to understand certain crucial solar, plasma and magnetic parameters which may be externally altering climate parameters in ways that are difficult to untangle:
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.
In terms of process, it is historically important to observe that the ozone hole was declared an emergency before a full solar cycle was observed with satellite.
Indeed. It shows that environmental scientists were able to rapidly and accurately identify a looming environmental disaster that was being caused by human activity. It resulted in policy makers around the world agreeing to ban CFCs through the Montreal Protocol.
From the wikipedia:
The ban came into effect in 1989. Ozone levels stabilized by the mid-1990s and began to recover in the 2000s. Recovery is projected to continue over the next century, and the ozone hole is expected to reach pre-1980 levels by around 2075.[4] The Montreal Protocol is considered the most successful international environmental agreement to date.
Are you truly suggesting that we shouldn't have banned CFCs because of... solar cycles? I think you may have gotten your talking points mixed up.
" the ozone hole was declared an emergency before a full solar cycle was observed with satellite"
Ozone measurements go back to balloon studies in the 1930s.
Solar cycles have been studied since the 1840s.
Piers Corbyn?
You're invoking Piers Corbyn?
For serious?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/...
That is enough to dismiss you out of hand.
They did look at lots of things, but in this case there really was no question what the cause was. The bleaching event happened very quickly. It precisely coincided with an El Niño that produced abnormally warm temperatures. The amount of coral loss in different locations perfectly matched how far above average the water temperature was in each location. Here's an article that goes into more technical detail about it: https://arstechnica.com/scienc.... For example:
Overall, individual reefs within the Great Barrier Reef experienced a huge range of temperatures, ranging from no significant change up to 10C degree heating weeks. And the authors conclude that the effects were non-linear. At lower temperatures (degree heating weeks of less than 4C), even though bleaching could affect up to a quarter of the corals, and some died, there was little to no loss of coral cover at eight months.
But things changed rapidly beyond that. At a 4C degree heating week, there was a 40 percent decline. And, by the time the warmth of a degree heating week went above 8C, more than 80 percent of the coral was dead at eight months.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
It's worse than you think. Chris Reeve is an Electric Universe fanatic and has ideas that can be traced straight back to Velikovsky. Chris recently has been promulgating his own theory that sand in the Saharan Desert comes from Mars, his biggest piece of evidence being that some sand is red.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
> The data I really want to see is how often this happens.
Every eight years or so. About half of El Niños see significant coral bleaching. The coral expels the zooxanthellae that live inside, so the coral doesn't have to provide for the zooxanthellae until the "weather" gets better. The natural white color of the coral is then visible. When conditions improve they let the zooxanthellae come back.
The coral can only survive so long without the zooxanthellae, maybe a year, so if the heat (or other adverse conditions) last several years, coral can die.
Re: "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."
I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here, but prediction markets are an incredibly effective way to test theories.
Re: "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."
The leading quantum theorists of the day said the same thing when Charles Townes suggested that he had created a maser (the precursor to the laser). When radio waves were observed coming from space by radio engineers, the astronomers of the day thought it was either a mistake or a hoax. When Robert Goddard first suggested that a rocket could be sent to crash into the Moon, he was widely ridiculed (even by some physics professors) for not understanding that the rocket would have nothing to push against in space (a lot of people did not understand F=ma); in fact, this ridicule played a part in Germany and Russia becoming fluent in rocketry at the same time as the U.S. The Germans landed 3,000 V2 rockets in Europe -- a rocket built with each of Goddard's key innovations. The V2 was the first true "American" rocket ... built by Germans ... aimed at our allies ... because the American public decided to ridicule Goddard.
You might take the time to think carefully about this situation. Learn the story. Once you know these details, it completely alters the lesson of the Space Race.
Re: "Are you truly suggesting that we shouldn't have banned CFCs because of... solar cycles?"
Please observe this image detailing the structure of the electrical currents which travel in and out of the Earth's poles. There is a lot of complexity to the Earth's magnetosphere, and the poles are where all of this electrical plasma activity interacts with the Earth.
Nobody should be pretending that they know what should be happening in these regions at this point. It's too early even today for all of that posturing; it was even more so back in the 80's.
Re: "Ozone measurements go back to balloon studies in the 1930s."
It sounds like you're fine with ringing the alarm bell even without the satellite imagery. That's where you and I differ, sir.
These comments demonstrate an overt disregard for the value of predictions in science.
Re: "his biggest piece of evidence being that some sand is red."
You've managed to leave out all of the convincing parts. This is how you should have explained the problem:
Sand's color comes from iron, but iron is not involved in the process of creating or transporting the sand. When sand is colored, simple microscopy reveals that the color comes from a thin varnish of iron-oxide which is glued onto the quartz with clay. That little detail poses a very serious problem for the existing attempts to explain where these deserts come from. It would seem to disrupt most of these existing theories, because they generally rely upon transport over big distances -- which would necessarily remove this thin iron-oxide varnish.
Geologists tell us that the vast 100,000 cubic km navajo sandstone bed started out as sand that was transported across the entire United States mainland from the Appalachians by a massive river (ha!). Yet, somehow it managed to end up as 90% pure quartz, and evidence for this hypothetical river has never emerged. The algebra suggests that the Appalachians must have reached 28 km (17 mi) in height to create this amount of sand.
The Sahara and Arabian deserts both lack a confirmed origin. The Sahara sand is thought to be millions of years old -- yet, excavated bones are from water-adapted creatures and human settlements. People just a few thousand years ago thrived in these regions, and they were wet. Sand theorists like to propose mass migrations for sand, but it's not difficult to discount their claims. It really doesn't matter whether or not a person agrees with the hypothesis put forward in Garry Gilligan's Extraterrestrial Sands. I definitely don't agree with everything he said in that book. But, he seems to be one of the few people who are systematically reviewing the mainstream sand theories, and he has proposed an alternative atmospheric plasma chemistry process for how sand condenses into granules from meteorite vapor.
Re: "Piers Corbyn does not make the kind of predictions you claim. You're putting forth something he has not done as factual."
Corbyn is an astrophysicist who makes his money by making long-range forecasts about extreme weather events -- predictions which are then literally purchased by the people who need to know this information in the regions in which he currently covers. He literally sells predictions for a living, and people continue to buy them for the very reason that they are accurate. From his website:
The quote which contains the claims which you suggest have been made up come from a paper which appeared in Proc. Eighth Intl. Conf. on Risk and Gambling, London, July 1990, and was apparently republished later in a journal named Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy. The author, Robin Dale Hanson, is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He received his degree from Caltech.
Which part of this are you claiming has been made up?
Re: "Considering the quality of the rest of the paper, I will conclude it was made up or overheard in a pub."
Did it occur to you to ask the paper's author for more information, before you went online to assert that he's a fraud?
You said ...
What I observe is that you seem to have some aversion to contacting the author of this paper in order to determine whether or not there is a valid source for these claims -- yet, no problems at all with going online to label the paper's author as a fraud. I have to imagine that he'd be interested to at least know that you're lodging these claims against him, and I feel obligated to point him to your comments, so that he can have a chance to answer your question -- and if necessary, defend himself.
The line of best fit for those two periods are very different, and you've managed to cherry-pick the start of the industrial revolution as "normal change".
Amusing, well done.
Nothing can be done anyway. Global populations will continue to advance and demand high energy lifestyles. Also, populations will rise from 7 billion to 10-12 over 100 years.
If most of the CO2 was created by 600 million north americans and euros, how can we deny the same lifestyle to 5 billion poor people? We can demand rich people drive electric cars and airplanes, but poor people are going to burn coal/wood/oil in huge amounts. So there is really no way to fight CO2 buildup until carbon fuels run out and populations decline significantly.
If corals are this sensitive to change, they will have to be preserved for re-seeding hundreds of years from now.
Proof of that is NOBODY is talking about population control. It's not politically correct, but 7 billion people becoming 12 billion is death to habitats.
All those people need housing, farm land and work. They all want to live the high energy lifestyle they see in western culture. There is no fair way to tell them they have to live like pre-industrial people because CO2 and a coral reef somewhere.
Is some world dictator going to turn large parts of each continent into a wildlife refuge and keep people away by force? There is no leadership capable even if there was the will.