Is it a tragedy that so many creatures in the Great Barrier Reef, and others, have died, will die, and some disappear? Yes, from any perspective. Killing a reef- should be criminal; literally- count it as "genocide", perhaps.
However.
I live right on top of a reef. One that was killed- 465 Million years ago.
It was a rich and beautiful world; until the Ordovician/Silurian Mass Extinction event. I know; because- my crops still tap into the rich soil left behind, and I encounter the fossils daily- horn corals, crinoids, Cryptozoöns, nautiloids, gastropods.
Did "everything" die? No. Did reefs disappear? No. What happened is called a "bottleneck" - and 90% of something dying off is typical.
Keep your eye on that 10% - those survivors- were the ancestors of the present day fauna and flora of the Great Barrier Reef.
The world after a bottleneck event never looks identical to the one prior to it. But another rich and beautiful world can and will develop.
Well. Of course. Unless we manage, this time, to poison the entire world so thoroughly, that this time- it can't.
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We have evidence across the biomes of the world that climate change is happening through the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, where people are monitoring all different aspects of climate change in many countries. The Great Barrier Reef is a very noticeable example but many habitats and species are undergoing transformations from climate change. It is shocking that this is not creating an impact on the global media and the more people do not realise that the world they live in is changing irreversibly. 'Too big to fail' should be thought of in terms of 'too small to be recognised' by our simplistic view of our natural world.
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A similar surprise about "Too Big to Fail" may apply to this planet.
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The way our changing and dying climate is being reported drive me absolutely nuts.
These articles should not be buried. They should be front and center.
Why aren't there more photos of the giant new island in the Pacific which is made of trash?
Why is NatGeo still having nature shows that show our natural world as being untouched?
Where is the BIG article on Royal Dutch Shell's decision to pull out of America's petroleum council due to fundamental differences of opinion on climate change.
I could go on. We are such fools.
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@Michelle Teas:
Though I agree and share in your grief, . . .
- Even if articles like these were on the front page, they generate interest among the few.
- You may be referring to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch"; it's not an island.
- Nat Geo is owned by Disney and its productions over time have declined.
- Royal Dutch Shell was written about in the Apr 2 NYT business section.
- Yes, we are that foolish. . .
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The small number of comments so far on this thread is itself symptomatic of the problem -- our ignoring the massive degradation of the natural systems that sustain us all. It will be of no use pushing on the brakes in a panic when the car has already gone over the cliff.
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Humans have been burning things and producing CO2 for most of their existence, it's in our DNA, as exemplified by the equipment found on the 5,000 year old Iceman know as Ötzi. "It is assumed that Ötzi wrapped charcoal embers in the leaves and carried them in the birch-bark container." Fire protects humans, and enables them to do superhuman things like flying to distant planets. The problem is not fire itself, but an imbalance in human population which threatens the environment. Humans must now learn to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere if they are to survive, limiting CO2 production is not enough. Consider the yet to be discovered atmospheric scrubbing of CO2 as an insurance policy against an overly active volcanic epoch, which is also likely in the future, as the continuing population explosion. Taking fire away from an energy hungry third world which demands all things enjoyed by the first world nations for the past century is a fools errand, get busy and figure out how to remove and manage atmospheric CO2 if you want humans to have a survival chance.
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@John Population is actually not the problem - consumption is. It will be a long while before the expanding population of Africa can produce anything like the amount of CO2 that is produced by the wealthiest top 10% of the world.
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@John - The use of fire without using buried, ancient carbon as the fuel was not warming the planet. Adding carbon that had been out of the natural cycle is causing the changes.
But saying things like "population is the problem" is one way people seem to avoid dealing with the reality - burning things for energy has always produced pollution of various types, burning things as population increased leads to deforestation along with the pollution, and saying that the third world requires fossil fuel to do well is a cop-out convenient to support a dying industry that has to go.
The energy hungry third world will be an increasingly electricity-powered world, generated from sources that do away with the primitive fire=energy connection. As their standards of living improve, their population growth will slow and stop, same as in the developed nations. And they'll be doing it with less and less of the killing pollution China and India now suffer from coal power and gas vehicles.
Saying we should encourage more burning and then try yanking bits of an ever-increasing amount of CO2 back out of the air is really a fools errand. You want to reduce CO2 concentrations in the near future? Stopping emissions is a great place to put the bulk of the effort.
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"We never thought this could happen."
We are going to hear this phrase a lot more in the next few years. But in many instances scientists and other experts have predicted events like these, and they have been ignored. Do we have to see the "worst-case" scenarios unfold in all their horror before we believe them? And if we finally do believe, will we act on the global level the climate change emergency demands? The Arctic, the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef are now screaming at us, but we just keep on shopping and flying and driving and feasting.
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What is additionally scandalous is letting corporations dredge and dump a million tons of sludge in the park...truly unbelievable. Apparently there is a loophole in Australia's no-dumping regulation for the park. But get this, the main reason for this dredging is to accommodate for the larger ships carrying coal! It will be a miracle if this reef can withstand these attacks from all sides.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/20/great-barrier-reef-authority-gives-green-light-to-dump-dredging-sludge
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@JK - the worst part of that is the willingness of the coal-owned in the government to try continuing a project that's market is dissolving. Adani's been having a great deal of trouble with this dream of shipping coal to India - especially as India is shifting quickly to use the cheaper, cleaner solar generation instead.
"One of the drivers of large-scale solar deployment in India has been the rapid decline in solar tariffs, which are now at record lows of just Rs. 2.44/kWh (US$34/MWh), fixed flat/zero indexation for 25 years. This is half the tariff required to support a new, non-mine mouth coal fired power plant, underscoring the economic challenges facing India’s coal sector."
http://ieefa.org/ieefa-india-more-solar-advances/
India has a lot of sun. India also isn't happy with China's increasing the activity of their Navy along the shipping lanes that Australian coal would be steaming over.
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The ocean is out of sight and out of mind, but we’ve used it for a dumping ground, polluted it, overfished it and now the ocean is warming and acidifying.
These impacts don’t happen in a vacuum, there are synergies among them which make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts.
Atlantic fish stocks are between 1/1,000 and 1/10,000 of what they were 150 years ago. We are creating an ocean that will be filled with nothing but microbes and jellyfish.
The surface waters of the ocean are less dense than waters at depth, so it takes a lot of energy to turn the ocean over. As the surface warms faster now than at depth it gets harder to turn the ocean over, so it gets more strongly stratified.
The nutrient rich waters at depth which feed great fisheries slow their journey to the surface and oxygen rich surface waters slow their journey to the depths and the ocean turns to desert.
During previous times of ocean anoxia the oceans likely filled the atmosphere with lethal hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen, killing much life on land as well as the ocean.
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@Erik Frederiksen
There was a paper on the last bit in Geology in 2005 titled "Massive release of hydrogen sulfide to the surface ocean and atmosphere during intervals of oceanic anoxia".
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/33/5/397/29629/massive-release-of-hydrogen-sulfide-to-the-surface?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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2019 will be known as the year of awareness. A lot can be accomplished if it is soon. A lot can be accomplished right away. Start with conservation. For example, bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as is produced by solar panels. Stop bitcoin mining (and stop gold mining, while we are at it, since if we work together on this with less paranoia gold has no use anymore except for jewelry). If us Americans can cut back on carbon to European standards, it cuts US emissions in half. A huge amount of our energy for heating is wasted. 70% of fossil fuel energy is lost as waste heat. Waiting even one more year will cost us astronomically more in the long run. If there is a long run.
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I had a conversation yesterday with a stranger and the subject of climate change came up. The first thing out of his mouth was a complaint about how his “lifestyle would be ruined” by the carbon tax one of the political parties in his home province planned to introduce. His selfishness was jaw-dropping. I wanted to tell him that a lot more than his “lifestyle” is going to be ruined when the ocean inundates our coasts, wildfires ravage our forests, drought parches our crops and the Great Barrier Reef is a memory, to name just a few of the consequences we can expect. But of course I didn’t, because there’s simply no penetrating the abysmal ignorance of these climate-change deniers. I politely ended the conversation and moved on.
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It is very sad that an article about a business in the Philippines refusing to be shaken down by “influencers,” and one about the wealth inequality at USC, generate a much more lively discussion than seen here. Are people too overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe we are facing to even talk about it? Or are people just shrugging their shoulders at the prospect of this almost incomprehensibly tragic future?
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@Madame W As Greta Thunberg as already so eloquently pointed out to the world. "There can be no hope without action". There hasn't been appropriate action. I think most people think, nothing can be done. Either they think the climate will do what ever the climate wants to do and it is too big to control and too late anyway..., OR they think the politicians will never be able to make the change that is needed. Both of these reasons for not paying attention are problematic to say the least.
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It's not climate change. It's the steadfast refusal of industry and governments to stop burning fossil fuels that's destroying the natural world that sustains us. I don't know why we have ever let scientists shape the messaging on this issue when it's known that they are poor at communicating with the public. We are not suffering from "climate change". We are not adaptation to climate change. If at all - because how much adaptation is really happening - we are adapting to the criminal refusal of national governments to stop burning fuels. The planet is getting hotter because of the burning of fossil fuel. The coral reefs are dying because we are burning dirty, polluting, belching fossil fuels. You never even need to mention climate change to get this message across. Climate change is a scientific construct that clearly most people don't understand so let's call it by its cause already, not by its effect.
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@Lisa McFadden I think I'm in "violent agreement" with you. We need to start thinking about adapting to the change like our ancestors have for many thousands of years, because no matter what we change now, we will not stop the change of the climate any more than we can change the weather. The challenge will be, how to maintain our current quality of life with a very stable electric grid that supports that quality of life. Currently coal and gas support about 60% of the grid, nuclear (carbon free) another 30% and renewables less than 10%. So to stop burning fossil fuels will be a long difficult path unless we are willing to concede the quality of life that it currently provides.
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@Gary We can maintain our “quality of life” at the same time as we rid ourselves of fossil fuels only with an enormous effort. At the moment, we are not even close to the goals of the Paris Climate Accord.
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@Lisa McFadden
You're right. This is exactly what Al Gore tried to tell us in "An Inconvenient Truth." Money is god, and the rich control the narrative. Don't tell the captains of industry, who get all the tax breaks, how to make money. Don't ask them to consider whether the way they acquire their wealth is good for the planet. We hear it all the time: they have a responsibility to their shareholders. The fact that human beings are Earth's shareholders is not a priority when it's cheaper to pollute.
So we need to talk about the science too. When our citizens are fed a pack of lies about climate change, and are so poorly educated that they can be convinced that scientific proof is an arbitrary set of opinions concocted by liberals, they can be -- and have been -- convinced that bringing back coal is a good idea. Then climate change is seen as a false issue.
However, I take your point. World-wide climate change is human-made. We have to hold accountable the polluters and the politicians who are in their pockets. Otherwise, we'll all be victims of perfectly orchestrated human stupidity in the name of greed.
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