We sit here causing mass extinctions, destroying beautiful complex ecosystems comprising interconnected relationships that that have taken billions of years to evolve and the the response is 'something will possibly crop up in a few more billion years?'
This article commits a grave rhetorical error. The reef is not all dead (about 25% irreversibly I believe) but will be soon unless we stop most emissions. They don't make this clear at all. This leads readers to ignore and shy away from the issue further because we think it's too late. Humans like to pretend bad news isn't there and will jump on any excuse for cognitive avoidance.
The ocean reacts to temperature changes in the order of decades. The effect of things we do today will only really be apparent in approx. 20 years. Even if by some stroke of universal good sense we stop global warming today (this is not going to happen, of course), this only gives us hope for whatever's left unbleached at that time.
That's a good point, but nonetheless the article doesn't provide any figures or estimates. So other readers can point to the continued life on the reef and say 'lies', and bury their heads in the sand too. Even if it will all be dead in 20 years, or 40. The article talks of 450[units] carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We're at 400 now. No data on when we get there nor graphs or estimates of when the rest dies off.
Roughly 50 ppm per 30 years. Early 50s was 300 ppm. That seemed to be the upper limit for a long time. There are a bunch of graphs around. It's seasonal and has a hint of an exponential.
1000 ppm starts affecting performance from co2 poisoning.
1000ppm by 2100 is probably not going to happen, but considering the significant lag behind the effects, it's starting to look more and more likely that we will hit 1000ppm at some high point, perhaps in the 22nd century, before it starts going down again.
Regarding the poisoning comment, that's not very accurate. It's true, there is reduced performance at high CO2 levels, but 1000 is probably the lowest bound for the most sensitive people and the effects aren't really noticeable until high teens. You can still function indefinitely at those levels.
Yes its quite irresponsible for an article like this to be published. Yes, the reef and life as we know it is under a huge thread from global warming and acidification etc, but this article is just misleading.
"With no force on earth capable of preventing the oceans from continuing to warm and acidify for centuries to come, Veron had no illusions about the future."
I feel you're missing the point of the article. The reality is that the reef effectively has a terminal illness and there's little anyone can do now.
To use different shell material they would no longer be coral. Breeding corals with different skeleton material is like trying to breed humans with a different skeleton material.
For context: Many shelled organisms (cnidarians - corals, brittlestars, sea urchins; molluscs - shellfish) build shells from CaCO3, either as the polymorphs calcite or aragonite. Other options for shell material are silica (SiO2; e.g. some radiolaria, siliceous sponges) or chitin (C8H13O5N; e.g. shells of crustaceans). Animals make their skeletons from hydroxy apatite Ca5(PO4)3(OH).
There was recent research that coral adapted to cope with changing pH[1], but weren't adapting fast enough and the symbiotic algae that bound reefs together did not seem to adjust at all. Plankton is apparently equally vulnerable to acidification.
The unknown for coral is the rate of change of temperature.
> The reality is that the reef effectively has a terminal illness and there's little anyone can do now
Totally understand that - but the article is written from the point of view that its already dead, which it of course is not, which will cause people to ignore the article. If I was diagnosed with a terminal illness today, I would not write to everyone I know saying I was dead, I would say I was dying.
The author has some freedom to choose how to define death in this case, yes. But then he should include the definition he used. Otherwise it's just fear mongering.
It seems like attendant readers understands what the author was doing. They didn't say the definition explicitly, which would violate pep20 (explicit is better than implicit), but, considering this is an article in Outside Online magazine... I think we can accept this violation.
I can understand that you might think other people would be misled by the rhetorical structure... but I encourage you to not get upset at imagined misunderstandings on behalf of others. (Not that it's wrong, it's just makes your life a little less happy)
We are in agreement. My comment was to the effect of "the author took literary license, most (native speakers) probably knew that, don't beat a dead horse."
it's because it is actually too late to do anything. If all human carbon emissions stopped tomorrow, the reef would still die. It would take 20 years or more for the environment to be able to support reef life again. At that point it might be a wonderful ground for a new reef, but there's no way the old one can survive that long. Anyway, that will only happen if carbon emissions hit zero tomorrow, which is obviously ludicrously implausible.
[The Australian Government] shortly after approving the largest coal mine in its history, successfully pressured the United Nations to remove a chapter about the reef from a report on the impact of climate change on World Heritage sites. Australia’s Department of the Environment explained the move by saying, “experience had shown that negative comments about the status of World Heritage-listed properties impacted on tourism.” In other words, if you tell people the reef is dying, they might stop coming.
It's the other way around. If you tell people the reef is dying, they go en masse, which contributes to the bleaching greatly.
The true answer is likely more complex. Australia is one of the top coal producers in the world, has one of the largest reserves of coal in the world, and coal's share in electricity generation and exports is very high.
Ranking high on various quality-of-life indices, Australia's government is wise to protect coal's continued role in the economic system of the country. Sadly, drawing too much attention to the association between climate change, the Great Barrier Reef, and Australia's role in perpetuating climate change in its own (front)yard hurts its economic outlook and energy independence, which are valuable attributes in a world with dwindling resources. It's a shame that this maneuvering has to occur at the expense of the Reef.
Ignoring the errors in the article, what can we do? Due to the selfishness and shortsightedness of our race, I think the only way we are not totally screwed is if we (quickly) invent some tech that cleans up the atmosphere and oceans - not an easy task!
I don't like the "our race" generalisation, not when there's so many people committed to reducing carbon emissions and what-have-you; billions, if not trillions are being invested in creating clean alternatives, projects get both community and government support everywhere, countries are banning coal power plants and promoting and subsidising solar, wind and water power, big scientific teams are dedicating their lives on making nuclear fusion feasible, consumers and companies are encouraged to use electric cars or penalised for using fossil fuel cars, etc etc etc.
There's also still some establishments that keep the economy and power grid going, but they'll be gone within 50 years if this keeps up. There's also rising economies that don't give a fuck because they're trying to catch up with the rest of the world.
So yeah, I guess I take offense to blaming everyone. I see this "baw humanity sucks" far too much - that's both insulting to yourself (do you suck? are you causing climate change?) and to those that try and make things better for all of us.
> I don't like the "our race" generalisation, , not when there's so many people committed to reducing carbon emissions and what-have-you...
From my perspective, on the whole, there are much less people who are providing even part of a solution than there are who are contributing to the problem. The race as a whole has an extremely negative impact on the planet and its co-habiting species. I am extremely indebted to those who have devoted their lives to finding solutions to this problem, but they seem to me very much the minority.
> There's also still some establishments that keep the economy and power grid going, but they'll be gone within 50 years if this keeps up. There's also rising economies that don't give a fuck because they're trying to catch up with the rest of the world.
Yup. Most of the major governments around the world and the largest corporations. Many of the rising economies are in this positing due to the selfishness of the historical actions of the leaders of countries with strong economies.
> So yeah, I guess I take offense to blaming everyone. I see this "baw humanity sucks" far too much..
Well, it think it is the majorities fault at the moment. Yes its not a productive viewpoint, but an accurate one.
> that's both insulting to yourself (do you suck? are you causing climate change?) and to those that try and make things better for all of us.
"suck" is your wording, but yes I am selfish in terms of my environmental impact, much like the average person in any developed nation. I engage in activities which have negative effects on the environment without balancing these effects. From the thousands of people I have met in my life, I cant think of one who has a positive net effect on the environment - hence, people are stupid, including me :p
In aggregate it is "our race" as a generalisation. China is doing more than any other nation with clean energy, yet still has the vast numbers of coal power plants. There's no global agreement to not open new gas, coal and oil fields.
The UK govt just overruled local govt and forced acceptance of fracking in two locations. To meet the Paris accord that they signed, no new fossil fuel fields can be developed. To meet 1.5C they need to use no more than 1/3 of current fields[1]. Aus just opened a huge new coal field.
In doing that they've probably negated all the recycling and economising of every UK household. That single act makes it hard to see the point of continuing any individual effort. We're not doing enough, we're not going fast enough.
So whilst you and I may not suck, the folks that control the big levers seem to. There will come a point, I know not where - perhaps already passed, but soon(tm), where it's too late. That will be difficult to explain to my children. I'd prefer not to need to.
Rising economies don't give a fuck, but first they're still relatively small, and second it's not them that got us all here. Developed countries invest a lot now, but they've been polluting the world for decades/centuries and even now their footprint is still the significant part of the global emission. Only a few very underdeveloped countries can truly say: "Hey, don't blame us, we had nothing to do with it". The rest of the world is guilty as charged.
He's not blaming everyone. It's just that, as a species, we have failed and as a consequence, we all will suffer the same fate.
If you're a tremendously talented athlete on a bad team (think mid-2000's Kobe Bryant), it doesn't matter how well you play. Your team still loses.
You may very well be the global environmental MVP. But for Team Homo Sapiens, it's an L. There's talks though by assistant GM Elon Musk of a possible expansion team on Mars.
> if we (quickly) invent some tech that cleans up the atmosphere and oceans
Unfortunately this is based on the same logic that says re-writing from scratch is optimal as there's no bugs in code you haven't written yet.
As unhelpful as this may be, I would characterise our current state of knowledge as: we know enough about how our planet works to know that our planet's climate is changing largely due to our activity. We don't know enough to know what we can do that won't have (nasty) unintended consequences.
It makes me sad that I can conclude this but I don't see any evidence that I can't.
I think bringing CO2 down to pre-industrial times would be a pretty save bet. If we had a source of massive CO2-free power we could extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it back into coal, effectively unburning all the coal and oil that we burned so far.
Technology that tries to undo climate change without that is what's risky.
> If we had a source of massive CO2-free power we could extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it back into coal, effectively unburning all the coal and oil that we burned so far.
We already have this technology, burning biomass with CCS [^0] as just one example. Synthesising methane with solar/wind energy, burning it and feeding the exhaust into greenhouses to grow crops as another. It just needs deploying at scale.
This is not a technology problem. It is a political/economic problem. And it can be solved given the will.
Yeah, it seems like the best currently available solution would be to dedicate a lot of land to growing some plant that captures carbon as fast as possible (hemp is probably faster than trees; bamboo maybe faster than hemp; there might be some algae that is faster than bamboo?); make charcoal out of it to stabilize it, and bury it. Busy-loop on this as fast as you can.
A lot of the CCS technologies I've seen focus on carbon-neutral energy generation. But we need to be going carbon-negative even if it costs some (solar/wind) energy.
If you're in the US, you can be sure to vote for politicians that acknowledge that global warming is happening this November. It's not much, but it's a start.
Also covered this week on Catalyst, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's weekly science magazine show. Catalyst agrees with this article: the news ain't good. Prof. Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies seemed especially pessimistic. Catalyst's website has an extended interview with him.
The modern reef is relatively recent (thousands of years) and has been land during human history. There are aboriginal stories that recount when it rapidly flooded at the end of the last ice age, which may be more than just legends. This fate could await many of our coastal cities given the thermal expansion of the oceans (let alone if a large land-based ice sheet melts).
Over the years I have seen about a thousand comments, blog posts, articles, etc that deny that human activity is causing the climate to get warmer.
But I don't think I have ever seen even one from the same crowd that denies that human activity is causing the oceans to become more acidic. I guess they know it's true, but don't want to admit it.
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