Since 2016, Half of All Coral In the Great Barrier Reef Has Died (theatlantic.com) 223
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.
Major Coal Exporter (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3)
Re:Easy to calculate (Score:4, Funny)
If half dies every two years, it will be around forever. Thanks Zeno!
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Too bad Zeno couldn't grok that space and time are quantized which is just another way of saying the universe is digital, not analog, at its lowest level.
i.e. Plank time [wikipedia.org], Plank meter [wikipedia.org]
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Show me ANY physics theory or equations that relies on a time quantum smaller then the Planck second (5.39 x 10^-44s) -- that isn't "magically instantaneous" and that isn't behind a fucking paywall.
Furthermore, if space was quantized and time not, or vice versa, how would _exactly_ would that work?
Logically, either both space and time are discrete (as Planck posited), OR both space and time and continuous.
This is one of the million dollar questions in Physics:
Q. Does time exist at a smaller quantum then the
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If half dies every two years, it will be around forever.
By the same logic: You can never leave your basement.
(going half the distance to the door will always need a finite amount of time therefore you can never reach it)
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You're a hoot at parties, aren't you?
Theoretically speaking, of course.
Re: It's not a rate, it's an event. Right there in (Score:2)
About every eight years, with El Niño (Score:3)
> 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 othe
Okay! Let's stand around wringing hands! (Score:2, Troll)
Okay.
CAN anything REALISTICALLY be done in a time-frame that would help save ANY of the remainder?
Because if something CAN, all the whingeing and bitching is wasting time.
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CAN anything REALISTICALLY be done in a time-frame that would help save ANY of the remainder?
Slashdot does not exist to provide solutions, but to criticize the proposed ones. You must be new here.
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CAN anything REALISTICALLY be done in a time-frame that would help save ANY of the remainder?
There is more at stake than just the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. This is just the foreword of the many extinctions that are to come. There are MANY things we must do to veer off this catastrophic path, the first of which is informing people of what is actually happening. An informed public can elect leaders to change the law so that we actually improve the situation instead of sitting around and claiming everything is fine. [pics.me.me]
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Yes. First, we stop digging.
The problem is that the leaders of the worst offending countries don't really give a fuck or are actively trying to make things worse. A surprising number of world leaders seem to be self-absorbed nihilists.
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Re:Okay! Let's stand around wringing hands! (Score:5, Interesting)
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,
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Congratulations on completely missing my point.
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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.
Re:Okay! Let's stand around wringing hands! (Score:5, Informative)
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 sad, too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Watch this Episode of Nova for Worse News (Score:3)
http://www.pbs.org/video/decod... [pbs.org]
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.
You must be gullible to believe that (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a more informative source: https://www.theaustralian.com.... [theaustralian.com.au]
"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.”"
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The story you've linked is from 2016. This story is "since 2016."
Coral bleaching events didn't suddenly end in 2016 and never happen again. The problem is getting worse.
Crown of Thorns (Score:2, Insightful)
Before Global Warming was blamed for it, the Crown of Thorns starfish [gbrmpa.gov.au] 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.
Need to Downgrade It (Score:2)
Perhaps it should now be downgraded to "The Good Barrier Reef". Eventually it will inevitably become the "The Fair Barrier Reef" and ultimately "The Poor Barrier Reef".
It happens (Score:2)
1) IIRC, the GBR isn't this forever thing. In geologic terms, it's practically ephemeral at 20,000 years. It's not improbable that at some point, it will have lived it's span and then will succumb. We may witness this.
2) my understanding is that most of the bleaching of the reef *isn't* due to temperature change* but is in fact due to agri runoff and nitrogen blooms. In a test project where this was strongly suppressed, the reef bounced back significantly.
*let's remember that coral is one of the oldest
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The Great Barrier Reef is 18 million years old. If you get this basic number wrong by two orders of magnitude, why should we listen to anything else you have to say?
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You're right, I was wrong - I OVERestimated its age by a factor of 2.
"Although coral reefs have been around for over 500 million years, the Great Barrier Reef is relatively young at 500,000 years, and this most modern form is only 8,000 years old, having developed after the last ice age."
https://quicksilver-cruises.co... [quicksilver-cruises.com]
You, on the other hand, are almost completely fucking ignorant.
Sigh (Score:2)
I'm just glad that Arthur C. Clarke is not around to see this.
oh good (Score:2)
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I know of a much better part of Australia. But since I might retire there, I'm not going to tell you where that is, other than that it's also definitely not in QLD. :-)
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Or perhaps it's the massive energy released by local volcanic activity [sciencemag.org] warming the region.
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So far all you have shown is that there is an underwater volcano. You are about twenty steps away from proving that it killed half of the Great Barrier reef. I'm sure you're not going to find any peer-reviewed scientific literature showing this link, so please let us know when you have published your own peer-reviewed study. Until then, STFU.
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Did you read the entire article or just the abstract? Unless you forked out $200 to Springer, I'm betting it's the latter.
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And you claim to have read the article? It's right there in black and white, buddy.
Re: Truly sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 corre
Re: Truly sad... (Score:5, Informative)
This news isn't exactly new.
There is a fantastic documentary Mission Blue [netflix.com] about the ocean that discusses the coral dying back in 2014.
Other [awesomeocean.com] 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.
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Chasing Coral [netflix.com] is a 2017 documentary on Netflix specifically about the coral bleaching occurring at the Barrier Reef, and around the world. The aim of the researchers is to capture on time lapse camera a bleaching event.
Seeing the destruction of these ecosystems was difficult to watch.
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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 [nasa.gov]
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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
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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 unp
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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 m
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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. [holoscience.com] There is a lot of complexity to the Earth's magnetosphere [researchgate.net], 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 postu
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" 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.
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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.
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Piers Corbyn?
You're invoking Piers Corbyn?
For serious?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/... [rationalwiki.org]
That is enough to dismiss you out of hand.
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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.
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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
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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 web
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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?
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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
Re: Truly sad... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
~25% of California's air pollution comes from China. That's around 6700km away. It is not as implausible as you think.
Citations:
https://www.zmescience.com/eco... [zmescience.com] https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
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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... [arstechnica.com]. 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.
Re:Human Caused Global Warming? (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate mixing seeing political agendas thrown in with science.
Then stop doing it?
Re:Human Caused Global Warming? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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 scie
Re:Human Caused Global Warming? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [phys.org].
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.
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You understand ...
More than you, apparently: "In a paper published this week in the journal Science, the scientists used a global dataset of 104 species of one of the most widespread coral variety..."
... that 'coral' is the name of a singular species, right?
Sorry, you were saying?
Re:Human Caused Global Warming? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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During the Younger Dryas [wikipedia.org], which was fairly recent, the temperature shifted faster that it is shifting now
We are still moving away from the Ice Age, and mere blips up and own don't change the longterm trend.
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Re:Human Caused Global Warming? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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?
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They also say corals have been around for about half a billion years.
I'm sure they have had worse.
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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 world has changed so much since the last ice that it is probably difficult to say with any certainty what elevation the location of the barrier reef was at. But it is true, the reef itself did not exist then. It's only about 18 million years old, so that's about 242 million years after the last ice age.
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Not sure where the 242 million years comes from, the last ice age - the glacial period - ended about 12,000 years ago [wikipedia.org].
That's the beginning of the current interglacial period of the current ice age, which started ~2.6 million years ago and is ongoing. The last major ice age was the Karoo Ice Age [wikipedia.org]
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Given the "ups and downs" of long term cyclical temperature shifts over the last 10-15,000 years, how can that conclusion be justified?
Rate of change matters.
If the temperature rises you can always move closer to the poles.
If I set you on fire, not so much so.
We are effectively setting corals on fire with the sudden rate at which we changed their living conditions.
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God damn typing on iphones.
For "what is happening clearly is not global warming." read "What is happening clearly is not cyclical.
And throw some appropriate blockquotes in there too. :(
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See this paper [nasa.gov], specifically figures 4 through 6. Look at the time from ~1890 to ~1940 - it's about the same level of change as we've seen from ~1970 to today (both about 50 year periods).
You can also check this graph [drroyspencer.com] and see we have had periods of much greater - and more rapid - temperature increses AND decreases, back in 1986-1988, 1997-1999, and 2009-2011.
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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.
Re:And yet, it's been reported... (Score:4, Insightful)
So which news source do you believe
The one given with the article ; where is yours?
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Here's one [abc.net.au].
That's from September, so springtime, and apparently over the winter the corals had recovered somewhat. Then came summer and the season of warmer water killed a lot more corals, leading to the current article. I see no inconsistency here. Both can be true. Last winter the corals recovered more than people thought they would, but then a lot more got killed.
Re:More bad news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Unless we stop flying over half the planet just to lie on the beach for a few days, and getting our water from Hong Kong while living in Europe nothing will help.
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Re: More bad news (Score:3)
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Not at all. There's a ton of good environmental news out there. It's just we never hear about it
I dunno, I recall reading [newsweek.com] lots [nationalgeographic.com] of good news [medicalnewstoday.com] about environmental issues. But the reality is, things are getting worse faster than they're getting better. The news reflects that.
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But the reality is, things are getting worse faster than they're getting better.
Wow, no. In your made up universe, it is. Meanwhile back in the real world pollution controls are improving pretty much everywhere and we no longer put lead in gasoline.
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Certain political factions like to tussle with the rich to get in their way, to get paid to get back out of the way. Class warfare rhetoric sufficed for 70 years, then fell on hard times. Environmental issues, then called ecology, rose up to take the rhetorical place of why politicians should control.
The error both sides make is not realizing the veracity of the claim is irrelevant. And that this corruption is an unfortunate side effect. It is in fact the main driving force. The surface arguments are t
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because it would disturb the artificial sense of crisis created by stories like these.
You managing to grow a daisy in your garden doesn't make the fact that we're destroying the worlds largest coral reef any more "artificial". On the scale that matters the news is actually bad and one day through your gas mask you may realise that putting you fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, and going lalalal wasn't the fantastic method of dealing with the situation you thought it was.
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Not at all. There's a ton of good environmental news out there. It's just we never hear about it
Sure, there's a few cases of low hanging fruit that have been plucked, like curtailing the wanton spewage of certain chemicals or saving a couple of especially cute species from the brink of extinction.
Meanwhile, the elephant in the room which is climate change continues unabated, and in many ways worse than experts were recently predicting. Right behind it is habitat destruction and fragmentation, which is almost as hard to address and still running rampant all over the world.
Your attitude is like some guy
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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
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If we all kill ourselves with climage change, the reef will die too, so technically you're right.
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It'd be doing your bit.
Except that... (Score:2)
If the temperatures hadn't changed at all....
THIS WOULD STILL BE HAPPENING. THIS IS DUE TO AGRICULTURAL RUNOFF.
Coral = marine invertebrates, that have a symbiotic relationship with dinoflaggellates (microscopic algae).
So basically, agricultural runoff contains pesticides - toxins designed to kill small microbes, plant, fungus, arthropods, invertebrates, etc.
Hmm...any wonder the coral reefs are dying.
Re: (Score:2)
Peer-reviewed literature backing up your idea? Or are you about to publish it? 'Cause otherwise the shouting suggests you are a garden-variety crackpot.
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By your theory the entire ocean should be full of coral reefs, because evolution will adapt corals to a wide variety of conditions. This is counter-factual. Nature doesn't make coral reefs as a goal. They just happen under a narrow set of conditions as a side effect of population survival. If the conditions change, and the descendants of a the current population of hard corals survive, they'll adopt different lifestyles like their relatives the soft corals.
And since hard corals are a keystone species [wikipedia.org], t
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Bullshit. Researchers are tracking warm water conditions, and directly observing corals bleaching and subsequently dying off as a result of sustained higher temperatures on average.
Agricultural pollution is at best a correlation to the world wide decline of the corals.
Nice attempt at FUD though. Extra points for caps abuse and intelligence insults.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. After all the humans are dead, evolution will keep marching on.