'Unprecedented Mass Coral Bleaching' Expected in 2024, Says Expert (theguardian.com) 50
Record-breaking land and sea temperatures, driven by climate breakdown, will probably cause "unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality" throughout 2024, according to a pioneering coral scientist. From a report: The impact of climate change on coral reefs has reached "uncharted territory," said Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, Australia, leading to concerns that we could be at a "tipping point."
The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25.
Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.
The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25.
Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.
Tipping points... (Score:1)
This is one of the tipping points that we have already passed. The coral reefs are dead and they can never possibly recover.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, there is no bleaching as of yet
This is one of the most retarded things anyone has said about a reef where 93% is already bleached and dead. But congrats you cited yet another climate denier who uses statistics like "grow by 25%" to pretend everything is fine, when the actual reality is that the coral cover went from 95% dead to 93% dead.
Re:Tipping points... (Score:4, Insightful)
No one has claimed it can't recover. The issue is that every actual scientists and marine biologist knows that it takes hundreds of years to recover.
The only morons are those who think they know better than actual scientists whose professional job is to understand this.
Re: (Score:2)
Be better
Re: (Score:2)
> No one has claimed it can't recover.
OP did...
Re: Tipping points... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Literally every article published by actual scientists who study the reef rather than the one you site. I'll take their word for it over the quote you provided from a known heavily anti-climate change biased site that exists solely to promote misinformation.
Read some actual facts, and hint if your site relies on an entire heading touting facts vs misinformation, it's peddling the latter.
Re: (Score:2)
And when they've had worse they've taken millennia to recover. Seeing a weed in your garden grow in a day is not a reason to dismiss the cutting down of a 1000 year old tree either.
Timeframes matter, well to those people who aren't hell bent on destroying everything they do anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
> And when they've had worse they've taken millennia to recover
So? Whats the rush?
Re:Tipping points... (Score:4, Informative)
Corals have been around for half a billion years. They have had worse.
No, not quite. There were reef-forming organisms called "corals" around in the Cambrian period, but they all died in the Permian extinction-- 100% extinction, none survived.
(The end-Cretaceous extinction gets all the publicity, but the real OMG extinction on our planet was the end-Permian extinction event, the "great dying".)
50 million years or so later, in the mid-Triassic, a different order evolved to fill over the niche, but these modern corals are unrelated to the rugose and tabulate corals of the Paleozoic, other than the fact that we use the word 'coral' to refer to them both.
Re: (Score:2)
Climate Change Dispatch doesn't sound like a biased source at all. I'm sure Kamala Harris will show up any time now and shake down my freezer for hamburger patties. https://climatechangedispatch.... [climatecha...spatch.com]
Re: (Score:2)
you loonies need to be locked in prison.
Re: (Score:2)
Yet another freaking alarmist article. Of course, there is no bleaching as of yet, it is "expected". In the meantime, life finds a way:
Great Barrier Reef growing [climatecha...spatch.com]
What happens if the "expected" bleaching doesn't occur? Will anyone be responsible? In my opinion, the "scientists" pushing such alarmist articles should be forever expelled from the field of science, should their prediction turn incorrect. Publishing articles like this is an intervention into politics. The scientists responsible for this alarmist articles should be held accountable and treated by tar and feathers if it turns out that they're selling snake oil, as many of them are.
So the reef can recovered* when previous heat waves subsided. What happens when the heat waves grows more intense and frequent? When they last longer? When the climate has changed and the heat wave effectively never ends?
Don't confuse a warning sign for an 'all is well'.
* Though it sounds like the coral composition changes towards faster growing species.
Re: (Score:2)
This is one I've never quite grasped. Young coral will float along with ocean currents, some will settle in locations now better suited and survive, and over time more heat-tolerant coral will evolve and recolonize the abandoned areas.
The world has been hotter in the past, after all. The real problem would be if they could neither spread nor evolve rapidly enough, and we're likely only dealing with the latter - if they had to stay where they are for decades or centuries, I'd expect them to fail to adapt.
U
Re: (Score:2)
Coral is one of the slowest developing forms of life on the planet. Will it survive in this world? Yeah of course. On the other hand maybe we should wait another 100000 years for it to recover into the massive reef we are actively destroying.
Re:Tipping points... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you're right, you're just missing an important point. Sure, the coral *species* will probably survive, but coral reefs grow at only around a cm per year. At that rate it can take thousands of years for a major reef ecosystem to form and in some cases much longer than that. So if the coral reefs die, humans' will be unable to experience and learn from such things again until the pyramids at Giza are roughly twice the age they are now.
So to make things clear: *we* are the ones who are going to experience an irreparable loss, not the planet. Sure, from the perspective of deep geologic time the loss of our existing coral reefs in our lifetime isn't that signficiant to the planet, but to be fair if you adopt *that* perspective our lifetimes aren't that significant either. In due time we and everyone we know will be gone and forgotten, but it might be nice not to live out our insignificant lives in a planet that is turning into a shithole.
I've been snorkeling on the reef that's off the Florida Keys, and it is positively mindblowing. If you have a chance to go someplace like that, I highly recommend you do it, but do it *very* soon, like preferably this year.
Re: (Score:3)
> if you adopt *that* perspective our lifetimes aren't that significant either
I have been of that perspective for a long time now (in human terms of 'long'). My life matters to me, but to someone born 100 years from now I'm about as significant as a random ancestor from 4 generations back. Maybe someone will look at a photo of me. Probably not. My name may persist for a while in birth or death records. Or be lost.
Taking care of the planet is just something I think is the right thing to do for those
Re: (Score:2)
>I've been snorkeling on the reef that's off the Florida Keys, and it is positively mindblowing.
>If you have a chance to go someplace like that, I highly recommend you do it, but do it *very* soon, like preferably this year.
Taken care of, starting 30 years ago. But I did SCUBA. Which is, if you are up for it, way more fun that snorkelling because you don't have to worry about how long your breath will last if you want to look at something 6' down.
I've done both, and if you can find a shallow reef, I much prefer snorkeling. You can go deeper with scuba, but being unencumbered by the tank and equipment gives you a lot more freedom snorkeling.
Of course, there are a lot of dive spots where all the good stuff is too deep for snorkling.
Re: (Score:2)
> The coral reefs are dead and they can never possibly recover.
No they are not. How come the exist today then? They should have died long ago when the climate was far hotter and colder.
They will simply move mate, thats what happens. When climate changes, things, including humans, migrate. We however dont need to move as much as we can use out tech. We could also use our tech to help move the coral.
Unprecedented? (Score:2)
This isn't new. There is plenty of precedent. That's why they expect it to happen. Is it going to decimate the reefs? (Kill 10%)
Re: (Score:2)
Bleaching is a natural event that is going to happen with unnatural frequency. I suppose its effect is going to depends on how often these events occur and what other pressures a particular reef is under.
We can probable expect these mass bleaching events to happen in El Niño years -- 3-5 times per decade. This would be a lot more than it happened in pre-anthropocene times, maybe 10x? Bleaching necessarily kill coral, but it's a high stress event that will kill some. For example a bleaching event in
Prophets (Score:1)
sure (Score:2)
but we must be able to do something about this easily avoidable situation, right? ...right??
https://news.mongabay.com/2023... [mongabay.com]
Who cares (Score:1, Troll)
I think coral looks better when it's bleached.
Re: (Score:2)
I bet it would make a good soup.
Do we still rate nuclear fission a greater threat? (Score:1)
The IPCC has published reports for years that without nuclear fission in the energy mix that we will continue to miss goals for CO2 emission reductions. Does this mean we abandon all else and put everything into nuclear fission? Of course not. Does this mean we should start building more nuclear power plants as soon as possible? Indeed it does.
The IPCC isn't alone in this assessment, there's plenty of others that ran the numbers and concluded the same. If people want to continue insisting that nuclear
Re: (Score:2)
Anytime you equate the words nuclear and IPCC it shows that you either don't know how long it takes to build nuclear facilities, or you don't know what time frames the IPCC reports have given to address the issue.
Or likely both.
Re: (Score:1)
We know how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant today, and how much it costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Construction on Unit 1 at Barakah began in 2012, it was producing electricity in 2020. Unit 4 will be operating soon. https://menafn.com/1107448335/... [menafn.com]
That's 12 years to get 5600 MW of electrical generating capacity online, and only 8 years for 1/4 of that final capacity. With a cost under $25 billion. I know people will dispute that this cost can translate so easily elsewhere in the w
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear power is discussed several places. Probably the most relevant is in the summary, page 69:
Buzzzzzzzz (Score:2)
BUzzwords like
"unprecedented" and "unmatched" p*ss me pff not end.
Yeah, as if the Human race has seen everything :D