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.
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.
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.
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.
Venus is also high energy. There are ferocious winds. But there are no dynamic processes there. Everything is static, perpetual endless howling 200 mph winds, crushing dryness, forever, always.
Mistaking energy for dynamic is a bad mistake. Yes, we are headed towards higher energy. But whether there are any dynamics that will survive, as the extreme conditions rise, is very much the existential question.
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.
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?
This is so incredibly sad, and I feel so helpless that this is slipping through our fingers. I fear I’ll never get a chance to see a coral reef in real life, and it looks almost certain that my children won’t. Is there anything we can do as individuals to help? I tried looking into conservation efforts but it seems like any amount of money we could hope to donate isn’t going to make a drop of difference to sea temperature change. Coral reefs aren’t like tigers or pandas, they’re just too delicate and complex to survive in any human made environment.
tigers and pandas have such small natural habitats now that they’re effectively extinct in the wild; i’m not advocating for it, but it seems like nothing outside of large scale ecoterrorism can do anything fast enough to save our charismatic megafauna for anything other than morbid exhibition
it’s easy to double when numbers are under 5,000. Many ecologists are not as rosy as the indian government about this... 95% of their range is gone at this point and there’s not a lot of genetic diversity; a single disease can wipe out of the population. We’d need nearly 100,000 tigers to have the diversity to avoid this, and we’re not on track for that by a long shot.
This is one of those areas where percentage and actual count tell different stories. "doubled" vs "increased by about 1000" are very different stories when viewed in the context of "all the individuals of a species across the globe"
This is a weak, low-effort responce. There is only so much that can be done by governmental mandate. People have become used to unsustainable lifestyles and it takes lifestyle changes at the individual level to shape our broader impact.
Unfortunately this is the correct answer and I’m just now realizing it. Basically this means everyone going mostly or entirely vegetarian, restricting air travel, clean transport and energy and reduction of general production of crap (not only because the crap itself produces warming but also the shipping).
I realize you're trolling, but there is a positive way to approach this, by looking at what we can do to allow us to maintain quality of living in a sustainable way.
Cowering in the dark might be one answer, but why would you want to live that way. Let's invest our energy in understanding how we can do the things that make life worth living, while ensuring that future generations can as well.
One is that you're advocating for a hair-shirt, masochistic lifestyle stripped of all joy. I have no objection to you choosing a vow of poverty, and to pass on children, but don't try and sell it as inconvenience, what you're asking for is basically religious orders.
The second problem is, all you've done is reduced demand for those goods you've chosen not to consume. That makes them cheaper, so other people can afford more of them.
Congratulations, you've done... nothing! But you get to feel good (?) about it? Don't get me wrong, being a childless vegan with a bike and a tiny apartment can be a satisfying lifestyle, but doesn't it undermine the feeling of self-righteousness a little bit to know that all you've done is make it so one more suburban family with four kids can have tri-tip for dinner and fly to Cancun on holiday?
> a hair-shirt, masochistic lifestyle stripped of all joy
> a vow of poverty
I’ll assure you I spend a lot of money on stupid shit I don’t need and I hate my life but it’s not because of these decisions. I thank my chronic illness for that!
Will just ignore the supply and demand argument. So few people live the way I do that it’s clearly not influencing the price of flights or suburban living. Good try though. That’s a new argument I haven’t heard before.
Anyway, enjoy the rest of the ride! Going to be a wild century or so. If you have kids, I hope they have fun.
What you're proposing is of course good and mostly matches my lifestyle, but it's not a solution. If everybody did everything you say we could probably cut down our CO2 emissions by 70% or so. What do we do about the remaining 30%, except wait until the no-child policy eradicates humanity? We still need to get rid of all fossil fuels. Luckily we already have the technology to do so, and by building that out we can keep most of our lifestyle with far less emissions.
It doesn't matter if someone uses resources responsibly if someone else comes along and then uses up what's left. People defer power to higher levels - government, companies, religion, culture, education, etc. Real change involves people but will have to be driven by one of these if you want entire populations of people to go along.
Climate change is unfortunate since it means getting many countries working together, and some may see a benefit in doing nothing.
As to what people can do? I'm not sure there is an answer. A technological solution would be great but isn't assured, voting is a problem in that you already need a lot of people thinking the same way, and leading a good lifestyle will assuage personal guilt but move the needle very little, so I think it's worthwhile but not a solution. I am not sure it will make a difference as you say when others will step in and consume what you left on the table.
My opinion is that nothing meaningful will happen until we see some obvious signs of distress and even then we'll be lucky if people scramble for a solution. We are starting to see problematic weather patterns, reef bleaching, and other evidence but since the problem is statistical in nature we always get people who say such events are not necessarily an indicator of a problem. Broader scientific literacy in the community to understand the fundamentals involved would take a generation and would have to be led from the top down meaning we get back to the same issue of bringing an entire country on board.
So I don't have an answer, but I don't think someone always needs an answer to point out something isn't working. Regulation would work within a country, but you need to get leadership on board and this is a global problem meaning one country isn't enough. The solution will have to align with selfish interests whether economic or actual survival. My hopes are on cheap green energy and maybe one of the cleaner variants of nuclear but that is more of a faith-based answer than anything. I hope it'll work out but don't know enough to be sure.
No, it's really not, because individual choice is a relatively small proportion of the damage done by corporate entities and aggregations of people that serve other masters and don't have either the will or the ability to amend their own behavior.
By all means do all those things: I go in that direction myself. But also vote, because there are damages that will not be remedied short of large-scale wielding of power, and voting has some chance of directing the large-scale power that can remedy the institutional bad actors.
I guess I hit a nerve with my comment and it came off a little harsh. I mean those points I said in all sincerity because it’s been 40-50 years and the top-down approach really has not come about in the timeliness required to prevent the worst case scenarios. I don’t actually believe every one of the people of the world will change their standards of living to meet what I said, however...
I don’t think this is a similar scenario to banning lead gas or aerosols harmful to ozone. These changes, if implemented by the government, would effect families’ dinner plates, the way they get around, how much and what they can buy and how they throw things away when they’re already used to things the way they are. It would severely limit their ability to travel freely. And we can say that new technologies will arise to take the place of those things that were lost but there will almost certainly be a gap between when we would need to lose access to those things like cheap transport and meat and when the new tech came out (high speed electric planes, lab grown meat, etc.). Basically any way you look at it, the average person NEEDS to have a lower standard of living for the foreseeable future to prevent the worst of climate change. This plan of action is not popular anywhere, so obviously it will never be implemented by any top-down approach.
Again just my thoughts. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve here.
government regulations influence how people live their lives. we incentivize buying homes so more people live in single family homes. if we tax something people do it less. tax carbon.
Ozone hole was fixed with regulation. Leaded gasoline was banned by regulation. Obviously government alone is not enough, but it can make a large step in the right direction.
Individual action is also important, but we will never solve the climate problem by ignoring what governments can/should do.
Should I vote for the party that thinks bottle recycling will save the world, or the party who thinks recycling is a socialist tax sham sent to oppress us? Those are my two choices.
> Should I vote for the party that thinks bottle recycling will save the world, or the party who thinks recycling is a socialist tax sham sent to oppress us? Those are my two choices.
Where? Because I don’t know of a major party anywhere in the world that matches the first description.
This is most 'progressive' parties in first world countries.
Environmentalism, but only so long as it doesn't actually challenge the status quo of our society.
You have the Liberal Party of Canada, which brought in a carbon tax, great, but in order to justify to the public their expansion of oil sands export development. The notion that we would stop pumping oil out of the ground and burning it is unthinkable.
The even more progressive BC NDP also committed to exporting liquified natural gas to be burned in other countries, justifying it with promises of carbon tax increases.
Parties that were considering our climate crisis with due gravity would be doing everything they could to lower CO2 emissions, not taking one step forward, and one step back, and fiddling around the edges.
Until we find something capable of the level of creation and higher order thought we are, preferably without some of our negatives, then being anthropocentric is the only logical view to have.
I do. Moral and ethical relativism does not protect you from having to stake a claim on a set of thoughts and values and standing by them.
You're more than welcome to think not of course, however this is definitely a more common thought than not. There's a larger shared set of values that people tend to hold even if it's not objective and I think you'd have to go to great lengths to prove me incorrect regarding those things being good to the majority, and even greater lengths that the opposite thought is good at all.
Until humans find something capable of the level of creation that humans deem higher order, then human logic is the only viable measurement?
This is a circular argument for anthropocentrism. It makes no attempt to define any of its qualifying characteristics from outside the human perspective.
To some, coral reefs, rainforests, and biodiversity are all a level of creation higher order than what humans can produce. Those things didn't need us to exist. In fact we ruin them. Not to mention other forms of created beauty humans haven't figured out how to ruin yet, such as sunsets or starry skies.
Sure, but I'd have to grant you anything other than the human perspective matters most first and you've already assumed it does where as I remain unconvinced. You made a pretty out there statement and I provided what is in all likely hood the common opinion.
I think the burden is on you here if you want people not to believe humans, of which I assume you and I are a part of, and our perspectives matter the most.
Until the coral reef learns to speak up and say, hey I'm putting my foot down. Humans and our choices determine it's continued existence. That alone makes our perspectives the most important if you want to continue having a coral reef, because it's our perspectives you'd need to be changing to keep it around.
We are for better or worse the arbiters around these parts.
I agree that most people are unquestioning anthropocentrists and that itself is fine. I disagree that it's the responsibility of everything else on the planet to meet us at the table. It should be humanity's job to close the communication gap. Consider it an act of benevolence if you must.
I don't view it as a deficiency in other species' ability to communicate. It's a deficiency in our ability to listen. The reefs are speaking up, they're literally laying their lives on the line and the 'body' count is communication to humans that we should stop. It's not just coral, we are in the middle of a mass extinction event. One that just so happens to correlate with the exponential growth of humanity.
I think it's fair for people to question direct participation in exponential population growth. More people for more people's sake is not a solution, it's a problem. Of course this leads to a lot of really bad ideas about population control. Its a hard problem to solve, but I argue it's the same class of hardness as getting people to change their behavior in the middle of a mass extinction that doesn't impact them with anything but second order effects.
> But as my colleague Robin Hanson has pointed out, dwindling populations create their own inexorable logic.
“have their own inexorable logic” seems to stand in for “cam be scaremongered via naive assumption that trends extend to infinity”.
> If the Japanese population shrinks by half, to 65 million or so, what’s to stop it from declining to 30 million? Or 20 million?
The same negative feedback pressure that is why the runaway growth that was the concern when people projected then-current trends forward ~50-60 years ago didn’t happen, either.
It’s much more plausible that global human population is approaching the horizontal asymptote of a logistic curve than that the slowing of global growth points to a shift to permanent population loss that would be an existential threat.
One obvious factor: strong non-family economic support systems are one of the strongest predictors of low natural population growth, but shrinking populations strain thlse systems, reducing their long-term viability. There are many more negative feedback mechanisms at work, too.
> This is a circular argument for anthropocentrism. It makes no attempt to define any of its qualifying characteristics from outside the human perspective.
You won't be able to do this. Human minds will make human arguments. Even if you had a "higher order" perspective, human minds would only be able to comprehend it in their own terms. Definition? Perspective? These themselves are human notions.
> sunsets or starry skies
Happen thanks to our atmosphere, in a narrow wavelength of EM that precambrian critters found useful to eat each other with. Beauty is in the eye of the anthropocentric beholder.
The circularity is unavoidable. Like induction, you just have to be okay with it.
If everyone who cares about the environment doesn't have kids, this just ensures that the children of those who don't care about the environment will rule the world.
It’s too late to save the reefs. It isn’t too late the rest of the environment. Maybe the reef dying will be a wake up call for the world. But probably not.
Everything I read tells me that it’s too late. Even if we stop all CO2 production tomorrow there will be severe climate change due to the CO2 already released.
Seems like the best idea is to just enjoy the time we have left.
I think your timelines are a bit off, the article claims it’ll be gone in 2100. Your kids will be fine, regardless of your views on if it’s true or not.
btw if you want to see the reef in real life, it’s easy!
From any major airport in the world you can probably get to Brisbane for $1000 USD return. Then Brisbane to Cairns is around $100 AUD return. You could win back the cost of your flights at the Cairns Casino, the best (worst) attraction in town!
It’s far away from most people and it’s not cheap, but if you want to do it, spend the rest of this year saving up and do it when Australia opens its borders.
You just have to be able to live with yourself, given that your trip (and presumably your lifestyle more generally) is destroying the very thing that you are visiting to admire. That's beyond me.
Civil aviation is 2% of global carbon emissions. It's also one of the hardest things to make clean. Flying is not something people should feel guilty about. We actually can, and probably should, keep civil aviation -- especially seeing as we need to implement carbon capture anyway.
Heating your house and eating meat contribute far more to your personal carbon footprint than flying, unless you fly much more than usual.
Aviation makes up a small percentage because globally almost nobody can afford to fly. For me, taking a flight to Australia and back is a good way to double my carbon emissions for the year.
I feel we're focusing on the wrong thing here. The primary reason we want healthy ecosystems is so they can sustain human life in the long term.
Personally I don't care if I ever see the reef, the Amazon or any other ecosystem. I'm pretty much interested in sustainable ecosystems to ensure human welfare.
Won't directly help, but you can contribute some time to help us better understand the current state of (some key reefs on) the GBR: greatreefcensus.org
What do climate change denialists think about stories like this?
Do they
A) Think it's a complete lie/exaggeraiton, and the Barrier Reef will be fine?
B) Think it's happening but not because of human activity (a massive die off across thousands of kilometers is totally natural, dude)
C) Agree that it's caused by humans, but that it's too late to do anything about (probably true), but that also it's not worth taking action on the REST of our emissions even though it could help prevent extinctions and irreversible ecosystem changes in areas we haven't even discussed yet.
D) Agree that it's caused by humans, but trying to do anything will destroy the economy, and the livelyhood of people that depend on it, so it's not worth doing
E) Agree that it's caused by humans, and renewable energy is cheap enough now that the economy will be fine, but trying to do anything about it will cause a reduction in corporate profits for a couple of companies, so it's not worth doing.
As recently as 10 years ago it feels like most conservatives were in Category A
Looking at the statements of most right-wing politicians, it seems that we are approaching critical mass of entry into group D.
How do people live with themselves knowing the mental gymnastics they are doing to remain "right" and never admit their thinking was flawed in any way shape or form...
I can accept that in broader society, climate change is an "ideological" concept.
I cannot accept that it would be inside a well educated circle like hackernews. It should not be any more controversial than flat earth theory or moon landing conspiracies.
So, I think it's reasonable for me to try to understand, anthropologically speaking, the mindset of a modern climate change denialist. My uncharitable and editorialized descript of their perspectives is perfectly justifiable. These people are actively perpetuating information and policy decisions that will cause the deaths of millions in the next century, the displacement of 100s of millions of more, and a reduction in the quality of life of billions.
They are not worthy of my civility. Civility is what is leading to the the status quo where we as a society - both left and right - have just accepted that the great barrier reef will be dead within a decade, and our children's children will only read about coral reefs in textbooks.
I think you’re expectations are sadly misplaced. In reality it turns out that a community of people interested in technology doesn’t really equate to it being that much smarter in terms of critical thinking, evaluating science, so forth, than the general population. Liking technology doesn’t automatically mean people have decent critical thinking skills, or are naturally inclined/trained to think scientifically and skeptically. You see people applying motivated reasoning repeatedly, avoiding agreement on the facts because they don’t seem to like the consequences of them, rather than being able to separate how they feel about it, the morals, their values, so forth from what are simple facts. Shows up in lots of topics.
- Your comment wasn't about climate change, but about your interpretations of people who don't care about it as much as you do. Talking about climate change is not unproductive.
- Your comment did not make a good faith attempt to shine light on the mindset of the people who oppose solutions to global warming. You set up 5 strawman arguments and then beat them down.
- Comments like these are not effective at changing the minds necessary to avoid an ecological disaster. The most likely impact of your comment is that you galvanised the viewpoint of a few climate change deniers and pushed people in the centre away from your point of view.
might want to modify your interpretation of what "well educated" people get up to in the world these days huh? HN has long been a bastion of libertarian contrarianism made up of (imo) privileged and extremely "well educated" folks disconnected from large swaths non-silicon society.
you should really just not read the comments here and seriously stop thinking these nerds care that much or would do anything if they did.
I have a different view than captured by your A-E options.
1) The climate, or really the whole earth, has some background rate of change, that itself changes over time.
2) On top of that, there is change, ranging from significant to insignificant depending on the area, caused by humans.
3) This will cause the earth to change at a rate (potentially much) faster than if humans were not here.
None of this, to me, represents a problem in itself. The earth before humans, or at any other point in our history was not some ideal utopia. Humans have inflicted colossal change upon the world since our first day -- we've decimated pests, built cities over forests and dams over rivers, created lakes and removed others, just to name just a few. The world we live in today is anything but "natural".
My primary point of disagreement with those who consider climate change a grave threat is the approach. Rather than setting "reduction targets" and "cutting back", we will, as humans have always done, build solutions to problems as we grow. Whether that's investing in improved desalination technology to provide large quantities of fresh water (due to a demand for water), electric vehicles to reduce localized emissions (due to a demand for clean air), or plant a trillion trees to store carbon (due to a demand for lower temperatures), the key is that for those to be workable options they must represent the growth of humanity, not the decline. There's also vast amount of land in Canada and Russia that at present is undesirable because it is too _cold_.
Humans have survived in horrendously hostile environments and have built upon that the wonderful and wholly unnatural modern lifestyle. Humans have never in history been THIS well resourced to survive despite environmental changes, and I have the utmost confidence we will do exactly that.
I mean I hear what you're saying and it sounds GREAT. It sounds optimistic. And hopeful.
But it also sounds just Option A. "The threat is exaggerated".
For vast amount of land in Canada and Russia to become habitable, vast amounts of land that currently house HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people will become UN-inhabitable.
Either due to sea level rise, or from just heat.
I understand maybe on the scale of our civilization we will survive (Maybe), but not before the unnecessary deaths of millions, maybe billions.
Is that worth it to you? Or do you believe that I am being alarmist, and exaggerating the grave threat?
The ones that I've read have untouchable sacred cows that shape how they view the world, such as "the market is efficient and self-correcting" or "all/any government/group/societal intervention is bad". These are their holy third rails which cannot be questioned. All other beliefs warp themselves around these sacred faiths until they can satisfiably fit.
It's like how medieval scientists had to use "all scripture is literally true" as their starting point. The actual work is to make reality fit within their required doctrines.
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.
Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see anything about ocean acidification in those links, only temp/CO2 correlation, and the chart of ice core data only goes up to 280ppm CO2. Since we’re at 420 now yet we have had temperatures this high before, maybe that historic relationship can’t be relied upon (as humans weren’t there the last time) and another explanation is required? See sibling comment re rate of change and time lag for species to adapt.
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.
What kind of annual sustained global emissions reductions would be necessary to have a 50-50 chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees? [0]
2018 estimates of the carbon budget remaining for a 50% chance of less than 1.5C warming: 200 Gt CO_2-e -- 800 Gt CO_2-e [1]. Lots of uncertainty, I will ignore tails on both sides. Assume current global emissions are around 35 Gt CO_2-e / year [2][3]. Since it is now 2021, not 2018, subtract about 105 Gt CO_2-e from the remaining budget, giving a range of around 95 -- 695 Gt CO_2-e remaining.
Crude estimate of years remaining until carbon budget for 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5C is exhausted: 2 years -- 20 years, assuming steady 35 Gt CO_2-e / year emissions.
Let's make things easier and relax the target and aim to reduce emissions to 5% of current levels -- a massive drop of 95%, not the full 100%. This relaxed target does not try to achieve net zero emissions, but to merely get us into the ballpark of where that a zero net emissions goal could perhaps be reachable with enough additional effort.
Supposing we are unlucky and reality is consistent with the scenario where we have two years of carbon budget remaining. To stay within the relaxed budget we would need to consistently sustain 78% annual drop in emissions per year for two years.
Supposing we are lucky and reality is consistent with the scenario where there are twenty years of carbon budget remaining. To stay within the relaxed budget we would need to consistently sustain 14% annual drop in emissions per year for twenty years.
What might sustained 14% annual drops in emissions feel like? It seems like world annual emissions dropped 7% in 2020 vs 2019 [3]. In the trailing decade 2010-2019 we were seeing about 1% annual growth in emissions. So if we assume Covid is entirely responsible for that difference, that's a 8% emissions reduction -- perhaps transient that will bounce back -- from a one-off event. If we consistently had two different Covid-scale economic shocks every year for twenty years, each with a corresponding _permanent_ reductions in emissions, that might suffice to maintain the 14% _permanent_ annual drop in emissions necessary to reduce emissions to 5% of current levels by 2041.
To benchmark against reality and pick on my own country: Australia's federal government reckons it is on track to reduce emissions to 480 Mt CO_2-e by 2030, from 540 Mt CO_2-e in 2019 [4]. This corresponds to sustaining a 1.1% annual drop in emissions for eleven years.
[0] I don't think limiting warming to at most 1.5 degrees C is a goal that is intentionally reachable from within the current human system. It is worth doing some back of the envelope accounting exercise every now and again to get a feel for the remaining carbon budget & the scale of the challenge.
[2] I am being optimistic and rounding down to 35 Gt from 36.4 Gt in 2019 to make the numbers easier. Let's ignore 2020's data as not representative of what humans do in a typical year, due to the pandemic shock, although hopefully some of the behaviour change will be sticky (WFH, etc).
You make the wrong assumption that emission reductions have to come from economic disruption. Building solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, and EVs can be done with no economic disruptions at all and, when done at sufficient scale, can reduce our emissions by at least 70%.
One lens to think about this is the lens of species extinction [+]. The world is currently experiencing species extinction at a rate significantly higher than the background rate, due to direct and indirect human causes:
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
> Even considering a conservative background rate of two extinctions per million species-years, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have otherwise taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear if they were merely succumbing to the expected extinctions that happen at random.
[...]
> It would likely take several millions of years of normal evolutionary diversification to “restore” the Earth’s species to what they were prior to human beings rapidly changing the planet.
I tried to find a source for the claim of "several million years of normal evolutionary diversification" to restore the previous level of biodiversity. After backtracking through a few layers of citations, we find this pair of studies:
> Lu, P. J., Yogo, M. & Marshall, C. R. Phanerozoic marine biodiversity dynamics in light of the incompleteness of the fossil record. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA103, 2736–2739 (2006)
> Alroy, J. Dynamics of origination and extinction in the marine fossil record. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA105, 11536–11542 (2008)
The more recent of the two studies concludes the following:
> The new [marine invertibrate fossil record] data show that two biotic mechanisms have hastened recoveries from mass extinctions and confined diversity to a relatively narrow range over the past 500 million years (Myr). First, a drop in diversity of any size correlates with low extinction rates immediately afterward, so much so that extinction would almost come to a halt if diversity dropped by 90%. Second, very high extinction rates are followed by equally high origination rates. The two relationships predict that the rebound from the current mass extinction will take at least 10 Myr, and perhaps 40 Myr if it rivals the Permo-Triassic catastrophe. Regardless, any large event will result in a dramatic ecological and taxonomic restructuring of the biosphere.
In the event where coral reefs were killed, and all the species they support became extinct, in 10 -- 40 million years we might expect to find that biodiversity had recovered again -- perhaps unlikely to see reefs again, but perhaps something rich and strange.
[+] : reduction of habitat doesn't necessarily imply species extinction, although it is going to put populations that depend upon those habitats under more stress -- stress that they may not be able to recover from
Assuming we can make and dump dry ice / ice at scale through renewable energy, would it be a feasible / meaningful solution to even try, in order to extend time (not reduce temperature)?
Absolutely not. Adding carbon dioxide to water creates carbonic acid, which dissolves shellfish shells and coral reefs.
In fact ocean acidification from dumping carbon dioxide in the air is already putting us at risk of losing most of our shellfish in the next few decades.
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.
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...
I agree with the rebbutal. We saw a few bits of the reef and some was stunningly beautiful. Other bits in comparison were heavily bleached and not looking healthy at all.
It's a collective effort from the whole world we'll need to reverse the damage.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
You can move heat from one place to another with a variety of means. Where do you propose we put the massive amount of heat energy extracted from the water?
These are all symptoms of over consumption, warming, plastic... Bill Gates's idea of spraying chalk dust into the stratosphere is duct tape that will maybe address one of the symptoms.
There are close to eight billion of us here. The planet absorbs twenty billion tonnes of CO2. That gives a quota of three tonnes for each of us, divided equally.
Three tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year, per person. Three tonnes.
I live in a Nordic country where the average emissions are over ten tonnes per a year. How is that not comparable to Nazi era Germany, where normal folk knew what was happening but did nothing to prevent it from happening?
Except maybe few thingies. Germans were gassing a group of people alienated and we're gassing our own children. Germans trying to act to stop the gassing would likely be killed, we're facing the consequence of upsetting someone.
Tell me how I (or anyone else) justify using over four times the sustainable amount of resources and pretend to be a goodie?
Three tonnes of course is a rough guideline. But my idea is that 2020 equivalent of three tonnes should be a good guideline for the coming decades to fix most of our sustainability problems.
Tech will progress simultaneously and help us in offsetting the accumulated burden, but what we really need is to relearn the moderation that was present daily just some decades ago.
I think a lot of us are going forward with the hope that technology will improve and we will find solutions.
You can take individual action. I did for a couple decades. It was, more or less, a waste of time and energy, but I felt smug for a while. The world needs more Elon Musks, not more smug Westerners. There are billions of people in the developing world who want their world to continue to develop, and right now that takes energy.
Tech wont come in time as we're passing tipping points all the time, the due date was already.
Only chance is psychology of moderation and realizing the statistics of the over consumption.
Oxfam told in their report that the top 1% contributed twice the amount of the lowest 50% over the course of last 25 years. And out of that consumption of the rich, most is vain.
This stuff is not science, it's fear propaganda. Scientists and the media form a kind of complex that allows each to get what they want without consequence when their claims turn out to be wrong. The scientists get publicity, which helps with grants. The media gets to run a scary story, which puts money in their pocket. In twenty years, when doomsday has still failed to materialize, nobody will remember the claims, just like most people today don't remember the doomsday prophecies of twenty years ago. There's no reckoning. There's no penalty to the scientists or the journalists for endlessly dumping toxic waste on the public.
Without a global agreement/government I dont see the issue of climate change getting solved anytime soon.
In many countries in Europe we are required to return plastic bottles to stores for recycling.
Meanwhile in China they ferry water in plastic bottles everyday to people because tap water there is undrinkable.
146 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIf 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.
EDIT: turns out they do: https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-oceans-warm-tropical-coral...
Also, coral reefs grow extremely slowly.
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.
Mistaking energy for dynamic is a bad mistake. Yes, we are headed towards higher energy. But whether there are any dynamics that will survive, as the extreme conditions rise, is very much the existential question.
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.
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?
If it's at risk, I can still be motivated to do something to save it.
https://www.businessinsider.in/science/environment/news/indi...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49148174
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/tigers-genetic-div...
1. Don’t eat meat.
2. Don’t get in airplanes.
3. Don’t drive a car.
4. Live in as small a house/apartment as you can.
5. Don’t have kids.
It turns out that when people ask, “But what can I do?” What they really mean is “What can I do that won’t really inconvenience me that much?”
Cowering in the dark might be one answer, but why would you want to live that way. Let's invest our energy in understanding how we can do the things that make life worth living, while ensuring that future generations can as well.
If you think a big house, a car, kids, flying for vacation, and a steak are what make life worth living, well then enjoy the end of the ride.
One is that you're advocating for a hair-shirt, masochistic lifestyle stripped of all joy. I have no objection to you choosing a vow of poverty, and to pass on children, but don't try and sell it as inconvenience, what you're asking for is basically religious orders.
The second problem is, all you've done is reduced demand for those goods you've chosen not to consume. That makes them cheaper, so other people can afford more of them.
Congratulations, you've done... nothing! But you get to feel good (?) about it? Don't get me wrong, being a childless vegan with a bike and a tiny apartment can be a satisfying lifestyle, but doesn't it undermine the feeling of self-righteousness a little bit to know that all you've done is make it so one more suburban family with four kids can have tri-tip for dinner and fly to Cancun on holiday?
> a vow of poverty
I’ll assure you I spend a lot of money on stupid shit I don’t need and I hate my life but it’s not because of these decisions. I thank my chronic illness for that!
Will just ignore the supply and demand argument. So few people live the way I do that it’s clearly not influencing the price of flights or suburban living. Good try though. That’s a new argument I haven’t heard before.
Anyway, enjoy the rest of the ride! Going to be a wild century or so. If you have kids, I hope they have fun.
Climate change is unfortunate since it means getting many countries working together, and some may see a benefit in doing nothing.
As to what people can do? I'm not sure there is an answer. A technological solution would be great but isn't assured, voting is a problem in that you already need a lot of people thinking the same way, and leading a good lifestyle will assuage personal guilt but move the needle very little, so I think it's worthwhile but not a solution. I am not sure it will make a difference as you say when others will step in and consume what you left on the table.
My opinion is that nothing meaningful will happen until we see some obvious signs of distress and even then we'll be lucky if people scramble for a solution. We are starting to see problematic weather patterns, reef bleaching, and other evidence but since the problem is statistical in nature we always get people who say such events are not necessarily an indicator of a problem. Broader scientific literacy in the community to understand the fundamentals involved would take a generation and would have to be led from the top down meaning we get back to the same issue of bringing an entire country on board.
So I don't have an answer, but I don't think someone always needs an answer to point out something isn't working. Regulation would work within a country, but you need to get leadership on board and this is a global problem meaning one country isn't enough. The solution will have to align with selfish interests whether economic or actual survival. My hopes are on cheap green energy and maybe one of the cleaner variants of nuclear but that is more of a faith-based answer than anything. I hope it'll work out but don't know enough to be sure.
By all means do all those things: I go in that direction myself. But also vote, because there are damages that will not be remedied short of large-scale wielding of power, and voting has some chance of directing the large-scale power that can remedy the institutional bad actors.
Again just my thoughts. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve here.
Individual action is also important, but we will never solve the climate problem by ignoring what governments can/should do.
Where? Because I don’t know of a major party anywhere in the world that matches the first description.
Environmentalism, but only so long as it doesn't actually challenge the status quo of our society.
You have the Liberal Party of Canada, which brought in a carbon tax, great, but in order to justify to the public their expansion of oil sands export development. The notion that we would stop pumping oil out of the ground and burning it is unthinkable.
The even more progressive BC NDP also committed to exporting liquified natural gas to be burned in other countries, justifying it with promises of carbon tax increases.
Parties that were considering our climate crisis with due gravity would be doing everything they could to lower CO2 emissions, not taking one step forward, and one step back, and fiddling around the edges.
You're more than welcome to think not of course, however this is definitely a more common thought than not. There's a larger shared set of values that people tend to hold even if it's not objective and I think you'd have to go to great lengths to prove me incorrect regarding those things being good to the majority, and even greater lengths that the opposite thought is good at all.
This is a circular argument for anthropocentrism. It makes no attempt to define any of its qualifying characteristics from outside the human perspective.
To some, coral reefs, rainforests, and biodiversity are all a level of creation higher order than what humans can produce. Those things didn't need us to exist. In fact we ruin them. Not to mention other forms of created beauty humans haven't figured out how to ruin yet, such as sunsets or starry skies.
I think the burden is on you here if you want people not to believe humans, of which I assume you and I are a part of, and our perspectives matter the most.
Until the coral reef learns to speak up and say, hey I'm putting my foot down. Humans and our choices determine it's continued existence. That alone makes our perspectives the most important if you want to continue having a coral reef, because it's our perspectives you'd need to be changing to keep it around.
We are for better or worse the arbiters around these parts.
I don't view it as a deficiency in other species' ability to communicate. It's a deficiency in our ability to listen. The reefs are speaking up, they're literally laying their lives on the line and the 'body' count is communication to humans that we should stop. It's not just coral, we are in the middle of a mass extinction event. One that just so happens to correlate with the exponential growth of humanity.
I think it's fair for people to question direct participation in exponential population growth. More people for more people's sake is not a solution, it's a problem. Of course this leads to a lot of really bad ideas about population control. Its a hard problem to solve, but I argue it's the same class of hardness as getting people to change their behavior in the middle of a mass extinction that doesn't impact them with anything but second order effects.
Quick edit: That article is just to backup my comment about population decline, I don't really agree with the article's opinion to ramp up births.
> If you think the world is overpopulated and has serious environmental problems, you might welcome this news.
It me
> But as my colleague Robin Hanson has pointed out, dwindling populations create their own inexorable logic.
“have their own inexorable logic” seems to stand in for “cam be scaremongered via naive assumption that trends extend to infinity”.
> If the Japanese population shrinks by half, to 65 million or so, what’s to stop it from declining to 30 million? Or 20 million?
The same negative feedback pressure that is why the runaway growth that was the concern when people projected then-current trends forward ~50-60 years ago didn’t happen, either.
It’s much more plausible that global human population is approaching the horizontal asymptote of a logistic curve than that the slowing of global growth points to a shift to permanent population loss that would be an existential threat.
One obvious factor: strong non-family economic support systems are one of the strongest predictors of low natural population growth, but shrinking populations strain thlse systems, reducing their long-term viability. There are many more negative feedback mechanisms at work, too.
You won't be able to do this. Human minds will make human arguments. Even if you had a "higher order" perspective, human minds would only be able to comprehend it in their own terms. Definition? Perspective? These themselves are human notions.
> sunsets or starry skies
Happen thanks to our atmosphere, in a narrow wavelength of EM that precambrian critters found useful to eat each other with. Beauty is in the eye of the anthropocentric beholder.
The circularity is unavoidable. Like induction, you just have to be okay with it.
And political stances are remarkably heritable.
Seems like the best idea is to just enjoy the time we have left.
Please. What a joke.
Read the IPCC reports. They are projecting massive increases in the wealth and health of the whole world in all future emissions scenarios.
Some scenarios are just worse than others, but all are better than today.
The world has been improving for centuries. The idea that we need to "enjoy what time we have left" is absolutely insane. It's pseudo-science
Yes, human impacts on the environment cause problems. No, they aren't going to cause human extinction.
Read "Enlightenment Now" or "The Rational Optimist" for some perspective.
From any major airport in the world you can probably get to Brisbane for $1000 USD return. Then Brisbane to Cairns is around $100 AUD return. You could win back the cost of your flights at the Cairns Casino, the best (worst) attraction in town!
It’s far away from most people and it’s not cheap, but if you want to do it, spend the rest of this year saving up and do it when Australia opens its borders.
Heating your house and eating meat contribute far more to your personal carbon footprint than flying, unless you fly much more than usual.
Personally I don't care if I ever see the reef, the Amazon or any other ecosystem. I'm pretty much interested in sustainable ecosystems to ensure human welfare.
Do they
A) Think it's a complete lie/exaggeraiton, and the Barrier Reef will be fine?
B) Think it's happening but not because of human activity (a massive die off across thousands of kilometers is totally natural, dude)
C) Agree that it's caused by humans, but that it's too late to do anything about (probably true), but that also it's not worth taking action on the REST of our emissions even though it could help prevent extinctions and irreversible ecosystem changes in areas we haven't even discussed yet.
D) Agree that it's caused by humans, but trying to do anything will destroy the economy, and the livelyhood of people that depend on it, so it's not worth doing
E) Agree that it's caused by humans, and renewable energy is cheap enough now that the economy will be fine, but trying to do anything about it will cause a reduction in corporate profits for a couple of companies, so it's not worth doing.
As recently as 10 years ago it feels like most conservatives were in Category A
Looking at the statements of most right-wing politicians, it seems that we are approaching critical mass of entry into group D.
How do people live with themselves knowing the mental gymnastics they are doing to remain "right" and never admit their thinking was flawed in any way shape or form...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I cannot accept that it would be inside a well educated circle like hackernews. It should not be any more controversial than flat earth theory or moon landing conspiracies.
So, I think it's reasonable for me to try to understand, anthropologically speaking, the mindset of a modern climate change denialist. My uncharitable and editorialized descript of their perspectives is perfectly justifiable. These people are actively perpetuating information and policy decisions that will cause the deaths of millions in the next century, the displacement of 100s of millions of more, and a reduction in the quality of life of billions.
They are not worthy of my civility. Civility is what is leading to the the status quo where we as a society - both left and right - have just accepted that the great barrier reef will be dead within a decade, and our children's children will only read about coral reefs in textbooks.
- Your comment wasn't about climate change, but about your interpretations of people who don't care about it as much as you do. Talking about climate change is not unproductive.
- Your comment did not make a good faith attempt to shine light on the mindset of the people who oppose solutions to global warming. You set up 5 strawman arguments and then beat them down.
- Comments like these are not effective at changing the minds necessary to avoid an ecological disaster. The most likely impact of your comment is that you galvanised the viewpoint of a few climate change deniers and pushed people in the centre away from your point of view.
you should really just not read the comments here and seriously stop thinking these nerds care that much or would do anything if they did.
1) The climate, or really the whole earth, has some background rate of change, that itself changes over time.
2) On top of that, there is change, ranging from significant to insignificant depending on the area, caused by humans.
3) This will cause the earth to change at a rate (potentially much) faster than if humans were not here.
None of this, to me, represents a problem in itself. The earth before humans, or at any other point in our history was not some ideal utopia. Humans have inflicted colossal change upon the world since our first day -- we've decimated pests, built cities over forests and dams over rivers, created lakes and removed others, just to name just a few. The world we live in today is anything but "natural".
My primary point of disagreement with those who consider climate change a grave threat is the approach. Rather than setting "reduction targets" and "cutting back", we will, as humans have always done, build solutions to problems as we grow. Whether that's investing in improved desalination technology to provide large quantities of fresh water (due to a demand for water), electric vehicles to reduce localized emissions (due to a demand for clean air), or plant a trillion trees to store carbon (due to a demand for lower temperatures), the key is that for those to be workable options they must represent the growth of humanity, not the decline. There's also vast amount of land in Canada and Russia that at present is undesirable because it is too _cold_.
Humans have survived in horrendously hostile environments and have built upon that the wonderful and wholly unnatural modern lifestyle. Humans have never in history been THIS well resourced to survive despite environmental changes, and I have the utmost confidence we will do exactly that.
But it also sounds just Option A. "The threat is exaggerated".
For vast amount of land in Canada and Russia to become habitable, vast amounts of land that currently house HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people will become UN-inhabitable.
Either due to sea level rise, or from just heat.
I understand maybe on the scale of our civilization we will survive (Maybe), but not before the unnecessary deaths of millions, maybe billions.
Is that worth it to you? Or do you believe that I am being alarmist, and exaggerating the grave threat?
It's like how medieval scientists had to use "all scripture is literally true" as their starting point. The actual work is to make reality fit within their required doctrines.
No one cares. No one has a relationship to Coral. Most people see it as some weird sea stick, like a tree.
The Coral will all die and I don't know what articles like this are trying to say? Go back in time? Pretend that your solar panel will save them?
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.
2018 estimates of the carbon budget remaining for a 50% chance of less than 1.5C warming: 200 Gt CO_2-e -- 800 Gt CO_2-e [1]. Lots of uncertainty, I will ignore tails on both sides. Assume current global emissions are around 35 Gt CO_2-e / year [2][3]. Since it is now 2021, not 2018, subtract about 105 Gt CO_2-e from the remaining budget, giving a range of around 95 -- 695 Gt CO_2-e remaining.
Crude estimate of years remaining until carbon budget for 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5C is exhausted: 2 years -- 20 years, assuming steady 35 Gt CO_2-e / year emissions.
Let's make things easier and relax the target and aim to reduce emissions to 5% of current levels -- a massive drop of 95%, not the full 100%. This relaxed target does not try to achieve net zero emissions, but to merely get us into the ballpark of where that a zero net emissions goal could perhaps be reachable with enough additional effort.
Supposing we are unlucky and reality is consistent with the scenario where we have two years of carbon budget remaining. To stay within the relaxed budget we would need to consistently sustain 78% annual drop in emissions per year for two years.
Supposing we are lucky and reality is consistent with the scenario where there are twenty years of carbon budget remaining. To stay within the relaxed budget we would need to consistently sustain 14% annual drop in emissions per year for twenty years.
What might sustained 14% annual drops in emissions feel like? It seems like world annual emissions dropped 7% in 2020 vs 2019 [3]. In the trailing decade 2010-2019 we were seeing about 1% annual growth in emissions. So if we assume Covid is entirely responsible for that difference, that's a 8% emissions reduction -- perhaps transient that will bounce back -- from a one-off event. If we consistently had two different Covid-scale economic shocks every year for twenty years, each with a corresponding _permanent_ reductions in emissions, that might suffice to maintain the 14% _permanent_ annual drop in emissions necessary to reduce emissions to 5% of current levels by 2041.
To benchmark against reality and pick on my own country: Australia's federal government reckons it is on track to reduce emissions to 480 Mt CO_2-e by 2030, from 540 Mt CO_2-e in 2019 [4]. This corresponds to sustaining a 1.1% annual drop in emissions for eleven years.
[0] I don't think limiting warming to at most 1.5 degrees C is a goal that is intentionally reachable from within the current human system. It is worth doing some back of the envelope accounting exercise every now and again to get a feel for the remaining carbon budget & the scale of the challenge.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-much-carbon-budget-...
[2] I am being optimistic and rounding down to 35 Gt from 36.4 Gt in 2019 to make the numbers easier. Let's ignore 2020's data as not representative of what humans do in a typical year, due to the pandemic shock, although hopefully some of the behaviour change will be sticky (WFH, etc).
[3] https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/images/carbonbudg...
[4] https://www.industry.gov.au/data-and-publications/australias...
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
> Even considering a conservative background rate of two extinctions per million species-years, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have otherwise taken between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear if they were merely succumbing to the expected extinctions that happen at random.
[...]
> It would likely take several millions of years of normal evolutionary diversification to “restore” the Earth’s species to what they were prior to human beings rapidly changing the planet.
-- https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...
I tried to find a source for the claim of "several million years of normal evolutionary diversification" to restore the previous level of biodiversity. After backtracking through a few layers of citations, we find this pair of studies:
> Lu, P. J., Yogo, M. & Marshall, C. R. Phanerozoic marine biodiversity dynamics in light of the incompleteness of the fossil record. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA103, 2736–2739 (2006)
> Alroy, J. Dynamics of origination and extinction in the marine fossil record. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA105, 11536–11542 (2008)
The more recent of the two studies concludes the following:
> The new [marine invertibrate fossil record] data show that two biotic mechanisms have hastened recoveries from mass extinctions and confined diversity to a relatively narrow range over the past 500 million years (Myr). First, a drop in diversity of any size correlates with low extinction rates immediately afterward, so much so that extinction would almost come to a halt if diversity dropped by 90%. Second, very high extinction rates are followed by equally high origination rates. The two relationships predict that the rebound from the current mass extinction will take at least 10 Myr, and perhaps 40 Myr if it rivals the Permo-Triassic catastrophe. Regardless, any large event will result in a dramatic ecological and taxonomic restructuring of the biosphere.
-- https://www.pnas.org/content/105/Supplement_1/11536.full
In the event where coral reefs were killed, and all the species they support became extinct, in 10 -- 40 million years we might expect to find that biodiversity had recovered again -- perhaps unlikely to see reefs again, but perhaps something rich and strange.
[+] : reduction of habitat doesn't necessarily imply species extinction, although it is going to put populations that depend upon those habitats under more stress -- stress that they may not be able to recover from
Came across this interesting idea of storing ship emissions as dry ice at the bottom of the ocean. [1]https://fathom.world/co2-spears-decarbonise-ccs/
In fact ocean acidification from dumping carbon dioxide in the air is already putting us at risk of losing most of our shellfish in the next few decades.
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.
It's a collective effort from the whole world we'll need to reverse the damage.
Australia is no longer my top country to dive - Indonesia and Philippines are far better.
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.
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.
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.
as the saying goes an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
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.
In simple terms my understanding is, high biodiversity. More diversity is correlated with resilience, adaptability, etc.
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://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!
Why don't we just completely trash the barrier reef and focus on saving the next reef that isn't completely trashed.
There are close to eight billion of us here. The planet absorbs twenty billion tonnes of CO2. That gives a quota of three tonnes for each of us, divided equally.
Three tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year, per person. Three tonnes.
I live in a Nordic country where the average emissions are over ten tonnes per a year. How is that not comparable to Nazi era Germany, where normal folk knew what was happening but did nothing to prevent it from happening?
Except maybe few thingies. Germans were gassing a group of people alienated and we're gassing our own children. Germans trying to act to stop the gassing would likely be killed, we're facing the consequence of upsetting someone.
Tell me how I (or anyone else) justify using over four times the sustainable amount of resources and pretend to be a goodie?
#3TA
Tech will progress simultaneously and help us in offsetting the accumulated burden, but what we really need is to relearn the moderation that was present daily just some decades ago.
You can take individual action. I did for a couple decades. It was, more or less, a waste of time and energy, but I felt smug for a while. The world needs more Elon Musks, not more smug Westerners. There are billions of people in the developing world who want their world to continue to develop, and right now that takes energy.
Only chance is psychology of moderation and realizing the statistics of the over consumption.
Oxfam told in their report that the top 1% contributed twice the amount of the lowest 50% over the course of last 25 years. And out of that consumption of the rich, most is vain.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
Meanwhile in China they ferry water in plastic bottles everyday to people because tap water there is undrinkable.