'Unprecedented' Bleaching Damages Two-Thirds Of Australia's Great Barrier Reef (bbc.com) 130
An anonymous reader writes: Unprecedented coral bleaching in consecutive years has damaged two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, aerial surveys have shown. The bleaching — or loss of algae — affects a 1,500km (900 miles) area of the reef, according to scientists. The latest damage is concentrated in the middle section, whereas last year's bleaching hit mainly the north. Experts fear the proximity of the two events will give damaged coral little chance to recover.
Re:I'll bet (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not so much the cute fishes that the problem here, it's the underlying mechanism of ocean acidification:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/ocean-oxygen-nature/index.html
aka, the Permian Triassic exctinction, the "great dying", where lots of stuff in the sea died, and algae and fungi bloomed, poisoning the atmosphere killing 90% of all spiecies and snowballing the CO2 level to 2000ppi and 8 degree celsius increase.
http://www.newsweek.com/carbon-emissions-could-spark-mass-extinction-321061
It's whether the Trump's and Pajits of this world do enough damage to take pass that runaway point.
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It's whether the Trump's and Pajits of this world do enough damage to take pass that runaway point.
Designated Shitting Oceans [imgur.com]
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That's not just shit, that's pure, unadulterated bullshit [archive.org].
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Sure, blame Trump, because the US is the great satan... GTFO.
If you are really worried about pollution and destroying the planet, you need to talk to China first (BTW, they are a lot closer to the GBR than the US as well.)
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China has over 4x the population of the USA. They emit less than half the carbon per capita of the USA.
Not only that, China is working on reducing their CO2 output. Trump is working on increasing it massively.
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Scientific American article about acidification (from CO2) contributing to Permian Extinction...
Overview:
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Full Article:
http://burro.case.edu/Academic... [case.edu]
Re:I'll bet (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'll bet (Score:5, Informative)
I'll bet they'll recover
Oh yes, of course - corals have been around since the Cambrian or thereabouts, but the question is when. And how much of The Great Barrier Reef will be lost? The reef is apparently not incredibly old, but it will take a long time to recover in human terms. Even if we stopped all polluting activity now, there will still be a long period of increasing warming. More heat in the atmosphere means more extreme storms, which mean stronger erosion on coasts and reefs, among other things, and when the coral polyps are not there to rebuild the reef, it will get eroded away. And so on.
Climate deniers always imagine that climate change is only about an small increase in temperature, so what's the fuss? The fuss is because everything is connected in a complex network, of course; if it was only about slightly more pleasant temperatures, nobody would complain, but it isn't. Take the corals - if the reef dies, not only will they get eroded away (leaving the coast exposed to the sea), but the fish that live there disappear; and since a lot of commercial fisheries depend on those fish stocks, a lot of fishers go out of business. Less fish may also mean less predation on jellyfish larvae, which is probably why we see a marked increase in jellyfish washing up on beaches; this also causes real problems for fishing in some areas. Nature is very complex and we are still only beginning to understand the complexities; but we know enough to see how easily we can unbalance the whole thing, and being reckless out of mere spite is simply incredibly stupid - criminally stupid, I'd say.
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What happens when fuck up the planet so much that it fucks us up? Do you think some H. sapiens is magically immune to climate change and pollution?
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I see the moron anti-AGW mod points are out in force.
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And before you start wining about the world you are leaving for your children, why the hell would you have children if you believe they will just be inheriting a world of misery? That's fucking evil.
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I don't think it's controversial that there are too many humans on the planet (and mosquitos, ticks, flies, jellyfish, rats, roaches, spiders!!). How to reduce the population size humanely and in a way that certain ethnic groups don't fear they're being wiped out is the challenge. Previously, mother nature and wars helped keep the population in check. Now, being highly developed helps, but countries that aren't at this stage are still growing.
think global, act locally (Score:2)
too many mosquitos, ticks, flies, jellyfish, rats, roaches, spiders!!
Don't forget when St Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, they moved to Australia.
Also, we should convince the Chinese that jellyfish [ucsb.edu] are an aphrodisiac. Probably starfish, too.
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> Climate deniers [...] complex [...]
See? There's the problem. Climate deniers and complex don't mix.
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Oh Bullshit, these rent-seekers did an aerial survey, the coral bleaching is due to a rapid drop in sea level.
Re:I'll bet (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh I didn't realise that the Great Barrier Reef was in Indonesia. Thanks for correcting that.
Now a metaphorical causality question. If another man's face hurts due to a sinus infection and I show you this through a peer review study, does that mean we get a free pass at punching you in the face?
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that an entire body of scientists think that you are.
Re:I'll bet (Score:4, Insightful)
All that counts is an objection was made. For the denier, it is irrelevant if the objection is sensible, rational, or even has anything to do with the topic at hand. So long as they raise their hand and making some vaguely intelligible sound, apparently a whole field of scientific inquiry comes crashing down.
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Oh I didn't realise that the Great Barrier Reef was in Indonesia. Thanks for correcting that.
Different reefs, very close to each other and water tends to be at common levels. The same winds and currents from the El Niño that push water from the west pacific toward the east pacific effects both Australia and Indonesia.
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Take a look, Indonesia [wikipedia.org] and Australia are only 186 nautical miles apart.
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Take a look, Indonesia [wikipedia.org] and Australia are only 186 nautical miles apart.
Yeah, but the the two reefs are over 2000 miles apart [google.de]
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Thanks for your insight. I will continue to go with the well funded scientists studying the reef in question, rather than a few studying something else and extrapolating.
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The problem with the "small increase in temperature" line is that it doesn't take into account the actual sheer amount of energy required to raise mean surface and lower atmospheric temperatures even a fraction of degree. Climate pseudo-skeptics and the idiots that follow them don't acknowledge, because it kills their entire line of reasoning, that upping global mean temperature even a quarter of a degree means the atmosphere is trapping vastly greater amounts of solar radiation.
And of course, for ocean-lif
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The thing you're missing is that the rate of change is a primary factor in how damaging global warming has become. Deniers say "we'll adapt", and aside from ignoring all the other life on this planet, downplay the fact that ecosystems we rely on are getting slammed.
Most complex life forms can only adapt so far and so fast.
Extinction- yes, it happens. [Re:I'll bet] (Score:2)
I'll bet they'll recover
Oh yes, of course - corals have been around since the Cambrian or thereabouts...
True, but.
One type of coral or another has been around since the Cambrian, but species of corals have, in the past, been wiped out wholesale-- the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, in particular, (the "great dying") wiped out very close to all the reef-forming species, apparently due to the combination of anoxia and ocean acidification. In fact, 96% of all marine species were wiped out in that event.
It took about eight million years before corals are re-established in the fossil record. That's eight mil
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and burning more Coal is going to save us all.
Sic.
Yes this is Global Warming in Action but those who decry it will just stick their heads in the sand (again).
I really would like to fix the global warming problem but the Evil Super-villain in me, while I pat and stroke my white Persian cat, is debating wether wiping out 90% of the worlds human population via some cunning scheme like an orchestrated war, or letting them suffer through an extinction event is the more evil, so many pros and cons in both scenarios.
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"Shrewd manipulators" can still be stupid/ignorant.
Mostly what you need to 'manipulate' people is a position of power (or money) and to be a bit of a bully. If you're like that then money-grabbing people will try to be on your side. Look at you, you obviously admire any "millionaire set for life" and want a bit of that to rub off onto you.
A healthy amount of sociopathic paranoia helps, too. Don't be afraid to fire/destroy anybody around you who makes you look bad.
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Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who have a compulsive need to twist everything that ever happens in the world (or on the internet) into a condemnation of Trump. If a minute goes by that they're not reminding everyone within earshot that Trump is literally Hitler, Satan, and Emperor Palpatine all rolled into one, they get restless. I imagine it's quite exhausting.
At least this article is tangentially political, however, though any responsibility or involvement by Trump would imply the existence of tim
burning more Coral is going to save us all. (Score:2)
That and switching from stone washed Jeans to coral washed Jeans. It's the only thing Kendal Jenner will wear.
Re: burning more Coral is going to save us all. (Score:5, Funny)
Rick: Coral!
Carl: What, Dad?!
Rick: Coral, how can you tell a porpoise has a hot date?
Carl : oh god, no Dad...
Rick: Because he was bleaching his starfish!
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The "fake news" meme is neither retarded nor hypocritical. What it is, however, is overused.
There was actual, fake news being spread around: "fake" meaning stuff that wasn't merely in error, or poorly researched, but completely made up: whole websites devoted to spreading "news" items with no connection to reality at all, for no other purpose than trolling for eyeballs.
But then the "fake news" thing got to be a meme, and people started applying that tag to refer to anything that disagrees with their worl
I'm honestly blown away... (Score:5, Insightful)
...by the amount of willful blindness in Australia's government.
I mean, I thought for sure, once serious, real, things started dying on the planet, people would start caring. But I'm proven wrong every year.
Re:I'm honestly blown away... (Score:5, Informative)
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Kudos, good sir. Love the reference.
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Another contributing factor is the nutrient rich runoff from fertilised fields. This feeds phytoplankton. These are the primary diet of Crown of Thorns starfish larvae so more survive to adulthood. Then they switch diet and eat coral. Nothing eats them.
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They'll need to spend billions more [marinecons...ion.org.au] - or at least fix the laws on land-clearing and fertiliser overuse - if they want a hope of saving the Reef and its $6B annual tourism income & 69,000 associated jobs.
Re:I'm honestly blown away... (Score:5, Insightful)
And every time someone mentions agricultural runoff (specifically from sugarcane), the lobbyists hit up the national party, and we're all reminded that natural resources and agriculture are untouchables.
No, it can't be the farmers, they're all "generational custodians" who couldn't possibly do anything harmful to the environment.
Apologies to those farmers who actually give a crap.
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It is not farmers or agriculture per se.
It is the american system, where a farmer is the others farmer enemy and needs to drive the other one out of business to buy his land to get a "little bit more land" to be able to sell his crops for a little bit less but can sell more in mass. Dictated by the big food corporations, who try to pressure every farmer to sell a little bit cheaper and hence a part of them goes bankrupt the surviving go into debt and buy the land, or new investors found new farms.
Look how b
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I saw that story, and had to look up when "South Sea Adventure" by Willard Price, a book I read in my childhood, was written. It specifically mentioned CoTs as being a problem for coral reefs (but didn't go into specifics of why the population was increasing so much. It was a children's book, after all.)
This book was written in 1952. For this to be in a children's book it had to have been pretty well known for years beforehand. El Niño effects have been known for a lot less time.
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Besides don't think of the reef as dying, so much as the living skin relocating to another region. The reef in it's current locations has died many times before, in fact is has been hundreds of metres above sea level as a coastal land formation and proof of that is in coral cores. The amount of living coral will reduce dramatically as it colonises new locales and when sufficient properties of the rich and greedy have gone underwater and something is done, in a century or two, the living coral will return.
Re:I'm honestly blown away... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, Australia is the biggest coal exporter in the world by quite a margin, so there certainly is something it could do - i.e. stop exporting coal.
Australia has over a 3rd of the global coal market. It wont stop of course though, because money. If only they'd start utilising that desert for renewables, or start using their massive uranium reserves by pushing research into cleaner nuclear, or offering some of that uninhabitable territory for underground nuclear waste disposal instead.
Bit of a wasted opportunity really, but hey, change is hard.
But make no mistake, Australia could single handedly collapse the supply of coal, pushing it's prices up to be unaffordable and forcing a move to renewables, nuclear, and gas, which all avoid to a large degree the warming problem.
Australia is literally selling out it's national heritage and it can only blame itself.
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Aside from coal exports, there is something to be said for actually setting an example. And Australia, at the behest of Rupert Murdoch's go-to-war-over-CO2 media empire, has set a bad one.
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Australia's GDP is 1.5tn, it's coal export industry is worth 0.03tn.
Yes it'd have an impact for sure, but it'd hardly kill their economy altogether.
Importers couldn't merely switch over to other sources because there aren't any other sources that could scale up quick enough to cover the loss of 38% of the market. This would force prices sky high and put coal power out of business across the world because at that point it would be drastically cheaper to just switch to renewables. The idea that you could magi
Re:I'm honestly blown away... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's plenty they could have done, and plenty they still could do. They could have started reducing emissions decades ago when the scientific evidence first became clear, and they could have invested in a world-leading solar industry instead of still more open-pit coal mines. They could also have given the Reef Marine Park Authority the funding and authority it needed to *effectively* deal with declining water quality, instead of the lip service it gets now, and at least reduced the huge additional stress on the Reef from agricultural run-off.
Instead, they've repealed our price on carbon, declared that "coal is good for humanity", green-lit even more coal mines, and approved a massive expansion & dredging operation for a coal export port right in the middle of the Reef's coastline (overruling the GBRMPA and even changing the law to allow themselves to ignore expert advice). And to cap it all off, last year they censored any mention of the Reef from a UNESCO report on World Heritage Tourism Sites at Risk (on the ironic grounds that it might affect tourism) - just as the 2016 bleaching event was killing off an unprecedented 67% of the coral in the Reef's northern third.
Even this extensive damage may have recovered somewhat, given 10-15 years of benign conditions, but a fourth bleaching event the very next year has crushed any hopes of that - the question now is whether we'll lose most of the middle third as well. But hey, at least the government has made sure we'll have coal for our tourists, if not coral.
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Our government is going through a major innovation frenzy at the moment in the hope of inventing the steam engine.
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Funny you should say that. The Abbott/Turnbull governments instructed the CSIRO to run a marsupial-based alternative energy production trial, but due to the ferocity of the Tasmanian devil and various government health and safety regulations they were ordered to use a Tasmanian tiger (thylacene) instead. Since the only known remaining example of the thylacene is a stuffed exhibit in a museum no power was produced, thus proving the conservative government's argument that alternative energy schemes aren't eff
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Algae don't vote, so why would a government care?
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The problem is timescale. It's really hard for political systems to react to things that are more than a decade away. In democracies it's a challenge to react to things that are going to happen after the next election.
Things that don't happen quickly, and when once they happen can't be fixed quickly, are almost always ignored.
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Let me sadly fix your logic for you.
Caring doesn't matter if the people in control don't.
If you haven't seen it... (Score:5, Insightful)
...then you're already too late.
Re:If you haven't seen it... (Score:4, Informative)
Liberal scientists (Score:3, Funny)
How come before cigarettes, cancer was caused by radiation?
Let me tell ya, it's a fake new plot by Obama loving scientists to outlaw cigarettes!! That's why!
My logic is undeniable! I've got awards for science stuff, and I say we need to roll back regulation on tabacco that's holding back the American tabacco industry. Those Obama loving lying scientists and their so called 'science', they claim to know, but they don't know, I know, because my twitter feed told me so.
Lets make American the leader in cigarett
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...then you're already too late.
No it's not. But it will be soon. There are still many beautiful areas of the reef. But if you're going to see it, I wouldn't put it off.
Re:Meh, will be gone in next ice-age anyway. (Score:4, Informative)
Those so called warm periods were localised. They didn't encompass the entire planet.
"The geography and climate of earth are ever-changing."
And? Trees fall down naturally in forests. Does that mean we shouldn't be concerned about illegal logging? And climate generally changes over the course of millions of years, not hundreds. Nature can't keep up.
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Those so called warm periods were localised. They didn't encompass the entire planet.
Yes and every scientist who's income depend on the current warm period being unique and unprecedented, global in scale and perpetual, while warming have to be local and self-limited event agree!
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So I guess all the data is faked by The Man, right? FFS. Go back to bashing your bible.
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Those so called warm periods were localised. They didn't encompass the entire planet.
Can you point to the studies that prove that?
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There are no such studies, in fact we have studies that imply that this is false.
However the scientists who wrote books about it treated it like local phenomena as they e.g. only gathered data in Europe and did not look for Africa or Asia.
Hence around the time when e.g. Wikipedia got filled with articles about it, the writers "assumed" it was a localized phenomena. However book authors like Hubert Lamb (https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home) believed that the period between 1100 - 1300 AD it
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Those so called warm periods were localised.
No they where not. How would that physically even possible?
We know since 20 or more years that at the same times were "warm periods" in regions like China and Japan. It is just so that Wikipedia articles get updated slowly.
It was never really disputed anyway, the tenor was: "we have no evidence", but evidence is found meanwhile. The question remains "how global" it was, because finding written evidence from south african tribes is a bit difficult ... or nordic R
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Don't play silly semantic games when you're clearly clueless. Nature can't keep up means that natural selection can't keep up since it depends on the reproduction rate of the individual species. Bacteria can keep up with man made climate change, elephants and oak trees can't. Now run along and go play with your little school friends and let the adults continue the discussion.
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Your house won't last the next millennia either, so let's just tell the local fire station not to bother turning up if it happens to catch fire. The neighbourhood is ever-changing, after all.
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The next "ice age" was due in dozens if not hundreds of millennia, not in 1000 years.
An excuse for every season (Score:5, Insightful)
"We gotta do something or the corals will be dead!"
"The corals are fine, look, they're thriving."
"The corals are gone, everything's dead!"
"Well, then we can as well continue when it's too late to change anything anyway"
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The corals are just pining for the fjords.
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They are ... resting.
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"The corals are fine, look, they're thriving."
My personal favourite was the numbnuts politician who "proved" that the coral reef was fine by going to one of the few places where there was no bleeching and proceeded to pick up a lovely beautifully coloured coral and bring it up to the surface for a photo op. ... likely killing it in the process.
Same the guilty: Pauline Hanson, head of the climate denying One Nation party.
Trump has doomed us all!!! DOOOOMED!! (Score:1)
The coral reefs are only the START. Trump has been in office for 3 months and has already caused the total extinction of the human race! [cnn.com] And he hasn't even broken out the nukes yet!
What's the real solution? (Score:1)
This is a series of problems that exist at many levels.
- World population is still growing
- There are business reasons to look the other way
- There are political reasons to look the other way
- Much of the problem exists at a compounded micro level which means that each person contributes to the problem but doesn't feel they could contribute to the solution no matter what we do.
- Human consumption is at a level which is frightening.
- Recycling barely has any impact because we simply make too much crap we don
Only a pessimist... (Score:3)
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Liberal propagaadna (Score:1)
"But the reefs! The ice! The bees! It's all propoganda by liberals for their global warming bs!
A Better Explanation (Score:1)
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Ah yes, an 8th grade biology teacher and denialist who's probably never even seen the Great Barrier Reef, writes a blog article speculating that the peer-reviewed scientific evidence from one of the foremost Reef scientists is all completely wrong, because... other reefs have in the past been bleached by different causes. And you think this is a "better explanation" why, exactly?
As usual, denialists can't scrape up any evidence that could survive peer review, so they spend their time denying the evidence th
back to back bleaching (Score:2)