I grew up in Queensland. During school in the late 90s, we were taught the same thing, except the reef was meant to already be gone by today. When I visited a few years ago, it was stunning.
Hopefully this report won’t come true either, but it is hard to believe anyone predicting what Australia will be like in 2100.
In any case, particularly on a forum like this, we should argue about what technological ideas we can use to radically transform this gloomy prediction of the future. Rather than just accepting it as fact.
I grew up in Queensland too. There have been massive changes to the reef, and the whole coast in my lifetime. Even now it is a shadow of it's former self.
During that time the run off from farming, mining and development has increased markedly. The destruction of forests and mangroves and see grasses had increased. There was a time in the 00's when the rate of forest clearance in Queensland was the highest of anywhere in the developed world.
Technological ideas will do sweet fuck all if the political will is not there. (Unless your technological idea is to change the political will). Not even if there is real money behind those ideas. Need i remind you the gov gave half a billion dollars to a few ex mining executives to 'protect the reef'. It seems previous little had been achieved so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrier_Reef#Protection_... suggests that quite a lot of effort went into improving the water quality and pollution/protection situation, so maybe the takeaway shouldn't be "scientists are lying about climate change" but "actions we take now actually can make a meaningful difference". I still think it's a little optimistic to suggest we won't ruin our planet through unaccounted-for externalities, but it gives me a little hope (and also doesn't, ya know, convey a tone that might encourage the science deniers as your comment might be accused of doing).
On the other hand, while micro-scale interventions can affect pollution and acidification, global temperature rise may be an entirely different beast, and that's what the people in this article are worried about.
Also grew up in (far north) Qld in 80s and 90s. Spent much of my childhood camping on islands and snorkelling fringing reefs where my (clouded) memories are pretty great. Like most, attended state schools ... but we never visited the reef, and it was rarely, if ever, mentioned. Returned a few years ago to work in reef conservation. You should keep in mind that the sites zoned/selected for tourism make up less than 1% of the reef and tend to be chosen because of their natural beauty and resilience. You are not visiting a randomly selected site (not to mention that you tend to swim in an area the size of a couple of 50m pools, the reef is about the same size as Italy, as long as the west coast of the US .. or QLD). Unless you're talking a bed of dead coral (which could easily be caused by a storm) most signs of stress in the ecosystem are unrecognisable to the average eye. Much of the reef, including many of the tourist sites, have already been heavily affected by the mass bleaching events (most recently in 2019/2020). Many of the reefs recovered, some of them didn't and the boats visiting them stopped doing so. I have personally seen pristine reefs and decimated ones within a few kms of each other. It is a nuanced story. The main issue is that the heating events - that lead up to the bleaching - are occuring more frequently. Bleaching isn't the only outcome here. E.g. many species' reproductive cycles are effected by temperature. Add to this other effects of climate change, such as acidification (which doesn't just take a toll on corals but also hugely important sea grass populations). Plus seperate anthropogenic stressors, such as nutrient runoff which can lead to uncontrollable outbreaks of coral eating starfish. Absolutely agree that technology is a vital component, but without a major and rapid ideological shift (in Aus at least) the distopia painted by Ove, et al may be closer than you think.
If you're interested, we collected ~14k images from across the reef between Oct and Dec last year. You can have a look (and help us analyse them) here: greatreefcensus.org/analysis
> we should argue about what technological ideas we can use to radically transform this gloomy prediction of the future
The two issues are rising water temperatures due to global heating; and outflows of nutrients and to a lesser extent, effluent, due to industrial agriculture, mostly animal agriculture.
For the first one, we need to give up fossil fuels which means cutting down our consumption; for the second, we need to cut down our consumption of resource-intensive, waste-intensive foods.
There isn't going to be some magical "technological idea" where we can continue on much longer with our two centuries of unchecked exponential growth in consumption, and exponential growth in pollution, and not devastate our biosphere.
People have been telling me for decades about such a solution and yet it never comes. Each new technology just spurs people on to new levels of obsessive consumption and waste.
I’ve visited a couple different parts in the last 3-4 years. Some parts are still stunning. Others had massive bleaching. The ship I was on had photos of the different sites we dives at. Huge difference in some areas.
You would be “stunned” by 1% of the Great Barrier Reef and wouldn’t notice the missing 99%. This bias is the central topic of the book “The Once and Future World”.
Would you clarify your point? I think you may be saying that the reef could already have been dead to a large extent at the time of parent commenter’s visit, but it’s not clear...
“My friends got covid and they’re fine” comes to mind:
1. Your anecdotal experience is meaningless.
2. I’d rather have scientists confidently say “we’ll all die if we don’t change” than “eh maybe it’ll be alright, let’s wait and see” while business continues as usual.
Getting the population riled up about #realistic# scenarios is a good way to actually changing things.
I dived a few different areas two months ago in QLD and I was very sad to see a belched dead reef. I’m sure there are healthy parts but there are a lot of dead or dying parts too.
Australia is no longer my top country to dive - Indonesia and Philippines are far better.
The problem isn’t necessarily that they won’t move to colder areas (well that is a problem for coastal regions susceptible to hurricanes, etc, but I digress). The problem is that the waters around those reefs are warming up faster than the reefs could ever possibly hope to move. Reefs are built by corals excreting calcium carbonate onto their attached surface. This process is an incredibly slow one with mature reefs taking many hundreds of thousands of years to form. The reefs can’t keep ahead of water temperatures that are projected to change within the next 50 years.
My understanding is that temperature is only part of the problem. Acidification is ongoing, due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. That's a global problem: the ocean is literally starving for oxygen, everywhere.
If the thermohaline cycle in the Atlantic continues slowing down, there will be significantly less water circulating. There's a risk that bigger & bigger parts of the ocean just sit, don't flow, and thus never get exposed to the air: that they truly deeply & forever run out of oxygen.
The dynamical processes of earth are being disrupted. We talk about extreme weather being the risk, but a lack of weather, a lack of variety, a forever hot, non-humidity bearing (higher temperatures carry less humidity) sit-and-stew earth, just sitting here, baking, is the hell we are headed to. The dynamical processes risk becoming static, stagnant situations. The flow of life & change & systems is being baked off the planet.
Nope. Chaos theory says very much the opposite, and our experience is tending to back chaos theory here. I mean yes what you describe would also be bad, but it's not that we're going to see. I can't speak to the thermohaline cycle: perhaps you're describing something that'll happen specifically in the depths of the ocean? Sounds bad.
Up here where WE live, the possible extremes of weather are factors of chaotic energy, and small increases in global temperature will produce wider potential swings in weather behavior. So we are not at all going to see 'a lack of variety' and we're not seeing it now. We're seeing 'wait, WHAT' weather and it's only going to get worse.
The challenge is surviving those energies. Never mind colonizing Mars or Venus, the challenge we'll face is clinging on to THIS planet, and a hell of a lot of people will end up not able to survive what's coming. And it's subcultures like Hacker News we'll depend on, for people who'll come up with the 300-mph storm windows etc.
I own a house: I'm not thrilled at what's going on. I'm trying to work out what I've got to do in order to not be taken out by some kind of weather extreme beyond what we used to have when I was growing up.
Coral reef and corals are different things. A coral is just an animal. Will settle in any suitable place reached by sea currents. If the currents in their place go from poles to equator will never survive to settle there. A coral reef needs 1000 years and several submarine mounts to appear. It hosts tens of thousands of species interacting together, is more complex than the more complex software that we could imagine and not all of those species can just move with the coral and survive in the new area. Algae for example, that are of crucial importance in the survival of the reef, both as symbionts but also as competitors.
Wipe the 10% of the species, just the rare ones, and you will have still a stunning "virgin" coral reef but is neither healthy nor sustainable long term. Wipe all the uncommon species of coral and Acropora will refill all empty space so technically there is plenty of coral still. Wipe all sharks and there will be a chain of unexpected consequences down on the food chain. The reef works as a whole entity.
Is about quantity but also about quality of the remaining corals.
At the end-Permian extinction, nearly everything that made carbonate skeletons was wiped out, probably because of the enormous amounts of CO2, SO2, and HCl that were produced. Coral had to re-evolve from non-carbonate producing species.
You already have several answers, but I want to add a different one.
A bird that was very common when I was a boy is dying now. Why doesn't it just move a few km northwards, to where the temperature is right for it? It doesn't because it needs craggy islands in a shallow sea and the right temperature range.
A lot of species can move, but that doesn't mean that there are many suitable new locations. What we have now has been optimised for the current geography and climate over a long, long time. Shifting all the locations 100km isn't likely to produce as many geography/climate matches.
The report sites a lot of papers, many of which by one report author Hoegh-Guldberg who has been studying reefs and claiming they are at risk since at least 1999. One of the latest of those papers puts it like this (ideas which the article does not accurately represent):
"Even if the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement are achieved, coral reefs are likely to decline by 70–90% relative to their current abundance by midcentury."
"Although alarming, coral communities that survive will play a key role in the regeneration of reefs by mid-to-late century. Here, we argue for a coordinated, global coral reef conservation strategy that is centred on 50 large (500 km2) regions that are the least vulnerable to climate change and which are positioned to facilitate future coral reef regeneration."
Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove, Kennedy, E. V., Beyer, H.L., McClennen, C., Possingham, H.P., 2018. Securing a Long-term Future for Coral Reefs. Trends Ecol. Evol. 33, 936–944. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.09.006
That sounds pretty doomed to me. They're saying that mass destruction is inevitable, and the best path forward is to protect habitat that's got the best chance of future regrowth. Of course, "best chance" is according to imperfect modeling and optimism that people will actually get their shit together on the Paris treaty in the next 30 years.
And if 70-90% loss doesn't sound like "doom" to you, may I have 80% of your assets?
First, let's set aside that this is a secretive climate change denial lobbying group that's been under multiple investigations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundati...) and is headquartered at the same office as an industrial mining lobbying group and look at the actual claim.
They quote fired climate skeptic Peter Ridd (https://www.desmogblog.com/peter-ridd) who has been funded by numerous industrial groups and coincidentally made claims that their products are harmless.
Anyway, then the article says the author of the claim they are criticizing, Terry Hughes of James Cook University "refused to make public the raw data". This is linguistic acrobatics. His research team had already made public the data so he personally couldn't make it public a second time because that's not how language works. Here's the data:
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.ncjsxk...
So in summary they lied about the data not being public and cited someone who intentionally misrepresented data and has been censured for that multiple times, all in 243 words. That's some achievement!
I know this is a sensitive topic with in the west but how about reducing meat consumption (esp red meat) so we cut down ghg emissions. plus more eco-friendly transportation like EVs & fewer flights for vacations.
as the saying goes an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Reducing emissions to zero, scarily enough, is the minimum. We actually need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to prevent further temperature increases, which lag behind CO2 concentration by years.
Meat consumption is a huge driver of agriculture, which is responsible for the run off chemicals that are killing the reefs and it requires even more transportation and power consumption! Stop being so smug, you're clueless.
This is very sad but seems inevitable. Corals are fascinating organisms, behaving as both animals and plants, but more importantly they are the foundation of the ocean ecosystems where they exist. Hundreds of millions of people depend on them indirectly.
If you want to learn more about coral bleaching there is a great documentary called Chasing Coral, available on Netflix and YouTube.
It would “repair” itself in the sense that the animals already endangered may go extinct, the damage we caused would run its course. But over a few millennia our effect on our environment would slowly go away and life and the planet would move on without us.
Global warming is an issue for life, but because it affects humans and the economy is why we care. Animal will migrate, go extinct, or adapt, but ultimately the ecosystem will move on.
> Are we certain that nature would 'repair' itself?
Our mere presence casts an anthropic shadow over observations of how likely disastrous environmental outcomes have been. For example, any extinction worse than the end Permian extinction would likely have prevented mammals from surviving, and humans then evolving. So just by our presence we can rule out the occurrence of such an event, even if (without us) it could perhaps have been likely.
Perhaps planets like Earth are just normally unstable, falling into states that destroy their biospheres, and Earth itself has been extremely lucky. There's no reason to think that luck will continue.
https://imgur.com/a/Yy59VjX this shows exactly what we've done to biodiversity. Biomass of farm animals, human and wildlife compared. The equivalent ratio is present everywhere we go.
This article implies temperature is the culprit but I was under the impression the problem is more ocean acidification caused by co2, which happens to also cause temperature rise.
Another thing to remember is the tendency for us to compress all of history in a very short period of time, so arguments that are about 'oh x species will evolve' are more on the timescale of 1000s-10000s of years at least. Thus what we lose today are likely to never be seen again by us or any of our ancestors who understand our way of life. If enough of these events happen they can compound and lead to ecological collapse which may permanently affect life on earth and earth's ability to sustain life.
The prevailing theory is that ocean acidification (OA) and global temperature are tied to atmospheric CO2 levels(as illustrated in image 1 in my OP). Given that relationship, any historical change in one would correspond to a change in the other.
It is not the peak temperature that is the problem, but the speed for which the temperature is rising. Adaptation need time, especially for symbiotic relationships. The reason that the coral is dying is because the sharp increase in temperature is mimicking that of an disease, and the incorrect reaction causes the coral to self-die.
It actually a bit similar to how a virus in an pandemic can become deadly to humans because it cause the immune system of the host to go into hyper drive. The virus itself can be rather minor, and the immune system reaction under normal circumstances would be pretty harmless, but an incorrect reaction results in death. Inflammation can be a great tool to combat a virus, but too much inflammation in the lungs can cause acute respiratory distress resulting in death.
To add to this, "coral reef bleaching" is not a coral reef die-off event, it means that the colorful symbiotic alge that coexist with the coral (many corals are a lot like flamingos, they are themselves generally colorless, but other factors in their environment cause notable color) have left the coral that make up the reef, leaving it white. The coral it self (an animal by definition, not an algae) is still alive, although stressed, in a bleaching event.
Reefs see bleaching happen on an annual basis, and extended bleaching can cause a die-off (the algae produces additional food for the coral) but the concept that hot water -> dead coral is, perhaps, not a direct impact. There's a couple of books by prominent marine biologists on this topic, that annual bleaching happens both in warm water and cold water corals. I'll dig up the citations if there's enough interest.
That said, no comment on acidification, that is a different topic and I don't have any factoids on that
It's important to understand that there were many extinction events throughout the history of the earth. Just in the world of Foraminifera there were at least seven catastrophic events which wiped out all or most of entire genetic lines. Some do survive, and over millions of years they can repopulate areas, but the resurrection will not happen one one hundredth as quickly as the destruction does, and it very well may not look anything like what exists now.
Please use full sentences and reply to my argument or observation, not my intention. It took me a minute to decipher what exactly you were saying because your reply was not clear.
Key points from your link:
> About 56 million years ago, a mysterious surge of carbon into the atmosphere warmed the planet and turned the oceans corrosive. In about 5,000 years, atmospheric carbon doubled to 1,800 parts per million (ppm), and average global temperatures rose by about 6 degrees Celsius.
> In the last hundred years, rising carbon dioxide from human activities has lowered ocean pH by 0.1 unit, an acidification rate at least 10 times faster than 56 million years ago, says Hönisch.
What I cannot figure out is why if OA and global temps are dependent on atmospheric CO2, why has there not been major die offs in recent history(particularly 8k years before present. It seems to be that OA is particularly hard to study.
Readit News
Hopefully this report won’t come true either, but it is hard to believe anyone predicting what Australia will be like in 2100.
In any case, particularly on a forum like this, we should argue about what technological ideas we can use to radically transform this gloomy prediction of the future. Rather than just accepting it as fact.
During that time the run off from farming, mining and development has increased markedly. The destruction of forests and mangroves and see grasses had increased. There was a time in the 00's when the rate of forest clearance in Queensland was the highest of anywhere in the developed world.
Technological ideas will do sweet fuck all if the political will is not there. (Unless your technological idea is to change the political will). Not even if there is real money behind those ideas. Need i remind you the gov gave half a billion dollars to a few ex mining executives to 'protect the reef'. It seems previous little had been achieved so far.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/11/a-mocker...
On the other hand, while micro-scale interventions can affect pollution and acidification, global temperature rise may be an entirely different beast, and that's what the people in this article are worried about.
If you're interested, we collected ~14k images from across the reef between Oct and Dec last year. You can have a look (and help us analyse them) here: greatreefcensus.org/analysis
"A few years ago, the one part I visited was stunning, so there isn't an issue at all."
But in fact half of the reef has died since then: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-20...
> we should argue about what technological ideas we can use to radically transform this gloomy prediction of the future
The two issues are rising water temperatures due to global heating; and outflows of nutrients and to a lesser extent, effluent, due to industrial agriculture, mostly animal agriculture.
For the first one, we need to give up fossil fuels which means cutting down our consumption; for the second, we need to cut down our consumption of resource-intensive, waste-intensive foods.
There isn't going to be some magical "technological idea" where we can continue on much longer with our two centuries of unchecked exponential growth in consumption, and exponential growth in pollution, and not devastate our biosphere.
People have been telling me for decades about such a solution and yet it never comes. Each new technology just spurs people on to new levels of obsessive consumption and waste.
1. Your anecdotal experience is meaningless.
2. I’d rather have scientists confidently say “we’ll all die if we don’t change” than “eh maybe it’ll be alright, let’s wait and see” while business continues as usual.
Getting the population riled up about #realistic# scenarios is a good way to actually changing things.
Australia is no longer my top country to dive - Indonesia and Philippines are far better.
EDIT: turns out they do: https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-oceans-warm-tropical-coral...
If the thermohaline cycle in the Atlantic continues slowing down, there will be significantly less water circulating. There's a risk that bigger & bigger parts of the ocean just sit, don't flow, and thus never get exposed to the air: that they truly deeply & forever run out of oxygen.
The dynamical processes of earth are being disrupted. We talk about extreme weather being the risk, but a lack of weather, a lack of variety, a forever hot, non-humidity bearing (higher temperatures carry less humidity) sit-and-stew earth, just sitting here, baking, is the hell we are headed to. The dynamical processes risk becoming static, stagnant situations. The flow of life & change & systems is being baked off the planet.
Up here where WE live, the possible extremes of weather are factors of chaotic energy, and small increases in global temperature will produce wider potential swings in weather behavior. So we are not at all going to see 'a lack of variety' and we're not seeing it now. We're seeing 'wait, WHAT' weather and it's only going to get worse.
The challenge is surviving those energies. Never mind colonizing Mars or Venus, the challenge we'll face is clinging on to THIS planet, and a hell of a lot of people will end up not able to survive what's coming. And it's subcultures like Hacker News we'll depend on, for people who'll come up with the 300-mph storm windows etc.
I own a house: I'm not thrilled at what's going on. I'm trying to work out what I've got to do in order to not be taken out by some kind of weather extreme beyond what we used to have when I was growing up.
Deleted Comment
Wipe the 10% of the species, just the rare ones, and you will have still a stunning "virgin" coral reef but is neither healthy nor sustainable long term. Wipe all the uncommon species of coral and Acropora will refill all empty space so technically there is plenty of coral still. Wipe all sharks and there will be a chain of unexpected consequences down on the food chain. The reef works as a whole entity.
Is about quantity but also about quality of the remaining corals.
Also, coral reefs grow extremely slowly.
A bird that was very common when I was a boy is dying now. Why doesn't it just move a few km northwards, to where the temperature is right for it? It doesn't because it needs craggy islands in a shallow sea and the right temperature range.
A lot of species can move, but that doesn't mean that there are many suitable new locations. What we have now has been optimised for the current geography and climate over a long, long time. Shifting all the locations 100km isn't likely to produce as many geography/climate matches.
https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/science-policy...
They are not "doomed" they are "at risk".
And if 70-90% loss doesn't sound like "doom" to you, may I have 80% of your assets?
https://www.thegwpf.com/claims-of-dramatic-loss-of-great-bar...
They quote fired climate skeptic Peter Ridd (https://www.desmogblog.com/peter-ridd) who has been funded by numerous industrial groups and coincidentally made claims that their products are harmless.
This time he misreads AIMS data for which AIMS has openly criticized him before on (that's why he had to create his own chart and not use one of AIMS). AIMS of course, firmly and clearly states the opposite of his findings: https://www.aims.gov.au/docs/research/climate-change/declini... . Coincidentally the GPWF is fairly well known for intentionally deceptive graphics https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Warming_P...
Anyway, then the article says the author of the claim they are criticizing, Terry Hughes of James Cook University "refused to make public the raw data". This is linguistic acrobatics. His research team had already made public the data so he personally couldn't make it public a second time because that's not how language works. Here's the data: https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.ncjsxk...
So in summary they lied about the data not being public and cited someone who intentionally misrepresented data and has been censured for that multiple times, all in 243 words. That's some achievement!
as the saying goes an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
If you want to learn more about coral bleaching there is a great documentary called Chasing Coral, available on Netflix and YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGGBGcjdjXA
Off to watch it now.
If we don't have it defined, I don't think we fully understand our relationship with the natural world and how to fix it.
Global warming is an issue for life, but because it affects humans and the economy is why we care. Animal will migrate, go extinct, or adapt, but ultimately the ecosystem will move on.
Our mere presence casts an anthropic shadow over observations of how likely disastrous environmental outcomes have been. For example, any extinction worse than the end Permian extinction would likely have prevented mammals from surviving, and humans then evolving. So just by our presence we can rule out the occurrence of such an event, even if (without us) it could perhaps have been likely.
Perhaps planets like Earth are just normally unstable, falling into states that destroy their biospheres, and Earth itself has been extremely lucky. There's no reason to think that luck will continue.
In simple terms my understanding is, high biodiversity. More diversity is correlated with resilience, adaptability, etc.
The temperature estimates in the article do not eclipse highs in fairly recent history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_periods_and_events_in_...
Nor does the rate of change exceed that of what the earth experienced as recently as 8k years before present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene#/media/File:North-wes...
While temperatures have fluctuated over the millennia, the last time co2 was this high (400+ppm) was maybe 30 million years ago: https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/
Another thing to remember is the tendency for us to compress all of history in a very short period of time, so arguments that are about 'oh x species will evolve' are more on the timescale of 1000s-10000s of years at least. Thus what we lose today are likely to never be seen again by us or any of our ancestors who understand our way of life. If enough of these events happen they can compound and lead to ecological collapse which may permanently affect life on earth and earth's ability to sustain life.
It actually a bit similar to how a virus in an pandemic can become deadly to humans because it cause the immune system of the host to go into hyper drive. The virus itself can be rather minor, and the immune system reaction under normal circumstances would be pretty harmless, but an incorrect reaction results in death. Inflammation can be a great tool to combat a virus, but too much inflammation in the lungs can cause acute respiratory distress resulting in death.
Reefs see bleaching happen on an annual basis, and extended bleaching can cause a die-off (the algae produces additional food for the coral) but the concept that hot water -> dead coral is, perhaps, not a direct impact. There's a couple of books by prominent marine biologists on this topic, that annual bleaching happens both in warm water and cold water corals. I'll dig up the citations if there's enough interest.
That said, no comment on acidification, that is a different topic and I don't have any factoids on that
seriously two clicks.
Key points from your link:
> About 56 million years ago, a mysterious surge of carbon into the atmosphere warmed the planet and turned the oceans corrosive. In about 5,000 years, atmospheric carbon doubled to 1,800 parts per million (ppm), and average global temperatures rose by about 6 degrees Celsius.
> In the last hundred years, rising carbon dioxide from human activities has lowered ocean pH by 0.1 unit, an acidification rate at least 10 times faster than 56 million years ago, says Hönisch.
What I cannot figure out is why if OA and global temps are dependent on atmospheric CO2, why has there not been major die offs in recent history(particularly 8k years before present. It seems to be that OA is particularly hard to study.