Any other course of action is either irrational or outright self-hatred, right?
Wrong.
It might help to consider the paradigm of 'fouling the nest' (or not fouling it), and to learn some basic ecology with an emphasis on humans' inescapable reliance on a functioning biosphere. Oh, and get a grip on the fundamentals on the principle of 'the tragedy of the commons'.
There's a whole lot of other logical fallacy, incorrect statement, and ethical repugnancy in your little spiel, but I'll leave it to you to contemplate (if you're capable of objective self-reflection) why you're so wrong that you're not even wrong. At this basement level in a comment tree there's nothing to be gained by getting too involved with specious nonsense of the sort that you espouse: sufficient that it has been called for what it is.
Am I mistaken? If not, it seems to me this article is ignoring the much larger natural variations in order to blame the die off on the much smaller increase which might be global-warming related.
Yes, you are mistaken, and no, "this article" is not "ignoring the much larger natural variations in order to blame the die off on the much smaller increase which might be global-warming related."
Many species, including coral polyps and especially their symbiotic zooxanthellæ, are robust to a degree of variability in the temperature of their local environment, as long as that variation occurs around relatively stable means for each respective species. However, they are much more sensitive to medium- to longer-term fluctuations of those means themselves, even if those fluctuations are small compared to the magnitude of short-term fluctuations aaround their physiologically-optimal temperature means.
If that doesn't make sense, let me put it this way: over shortish periods of time many species can tolerate a degree of fluctuation of temperature away from their preferred sweet spot - but beyond a short period, if those fluctuations begin to lean in one direction, altering the underlying mean, then the organism is in trouble. This physiological response to an excursion from a preferred mean is compounded by the fact that most organisms are less able to tolerate extreme warmer deviations from their mean than they are able to tolerate cooler deviations from the mean, of a similar magnitude. This is depicted by the well-known growth-response curves to temperature for organisms, which are in a great majority of cases skewed to the left (negatively skewed). A good illustration of this phenomenon is shown in the shapes of the curves in the meta-analyses of this paper:
The upshot is that most organisms living close to their optimal mean temperatures are more vulnerable to warming than they are to cooling.
So, yes, corals of the Great Barrier Reef are vulnerable to the several degrees* of underlying, human-caused increase in the mean temperature of their environment. To be precise, they're vulnerable to the toxic metabolites that their symbiotic zooxanthellæ produce when these algæ are warmed above their tolerable thermal maxima (and as figure 9 of the above-linked paper indicates, these are generally lower for autotrophs compared with heterotrophs, which has a whole range of implications for the ecological interactions of trophic webs).
Of course, none of this precludes the profound chemical effect of ocean acidification on the ability of coral polyps to precipitate calcium carbonate for the construction of their skeletons, or any of a number of other environmental stressors. These all synergise with respect to their impacts, and the result is that coral (as with many other species and ecosystems) are struggling to maintain their populations over the longer term.
*As others have indicated, the magnitude of the warming underpinning the bleaching event is greater than the aggregate 'greenhouse' gas-caused warming of all of the world's oceans. Conflating the two is a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Any other course of action is either irrational or outright self-hatred, right?
Wrong.
It might help to consider the paradigm of 'fouling the nest' (or not fouling it), and to learn some basic ecology with an emphasis on humans' inescapable reliance on a functioning biosphere. Oh, and get a grip on the fundamentals on the principle of 'the tragedy of the commons'.
There's a whole lot of other logical fallacy, incorrect statement, and ethical repugnancy in your little spiel, but I'll leave it to you to contemplate (if you're capable of objective self-reflection) why you're so wrong that you're not even wrong. At this basement level in a comment tree there's nothing to be gained by getting too involved with specious nonsense of the sort that you espouse: sufficient that it has been called for what it is.
Am I mistaken? If not, it seems to me this article is ignoring the much larger natural variations in order to blame the die off on the much smaller increase which might be global-warming related.
Yes, you are mistaken, and no, "this article" is not "ignoring the much larger natural variations in order to blame the die off on the much smaller increase which might be global-warming related."
Many species, including coral polyps and especially their symbiotic zooxanthellæ, are robust to a degree of variability in the temperature of their local environment, as long as that variation occurs around relatively stable means for each respective species. However, they are much more sensitive to medium- to longer-term fluctuations of those means themselves, even if those fluctuations are small compared to the magnitude of short-term fluctuations aaround their physiologically-optimal temperature means.
If that doesn't make sense, let me put it this way: over shortish periods of time many species can tolerate a degree of fluctuation of temperature away from their preferred sweet spot - but beyond a short period, if those fluctuations begin to lean in one direction, altering the underlying mean, then the organism is in trouble. This physiological response to an excursion from a preferred mean is compounded by the fact that most organisms are less able to tolerate extreme warmer deviations from their mean than they are able to tolerate cooler deviations from the mean, of a similar magnitude. This is depicted by the well-known growth-response curves to temperature for organisms, which are in a great majority of cases skewed to the left (negatively skewed). A good illustration of this phenomenon is shown in the shapes of the curves in the meta-analyses of this paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0153343
The upshot is that most organisms living close to their optimal mean temperatures are more vulnerable to warming than they are to cooling.
So, yes, corals of the Great Barrier Reef are vulnerable to the several degrees* of underlying, human-caused increase in the mean temperature of their environment. To be precise, they're vulnerable to the toxic metabolites that their symbiotic zooxanthellæ produce when these algæ are warmed above their tolerable thermal maxima (and as figure 9 of the above-linked paper indicates, these are generally lower for autotrophs compared with heterotrophs, which has a whole range of implications for the ecological interactions of trophic webs).
Of course, none of this precludes the profound chemical effect of ocean acidification on the ability of coral polyps to precipitate calcium carbonate for the construction of their skeletons, or any of a number of other environmental stressors. These all synergise with respect to their impacts, and the result is that coral (as with many other species and ecosystems) are struggling to maintain their populations over the longer term.
*As others have indicated, the magnitude of the warming underpinning the bleaching event is greater than the aggregate 'greenhouse' gas-caused warming of all of the world's oceans. Conflating the two is a mistake.