I hope they can find something that works. I’ve visited the reef (same spot each time) twice, once in the late 1990s and once in 2016; the difference was shocking.
Raw coverage isn’t the only concern. Diverse colorful species being replaced with a more monocultural set of corals that can survive in warmer water sucks too.
No doubt that will be seen across many ecosystems in decades ahead.
The set of species that thrives in a changed or fast-changing ecosystem, is (usually) less diverse than the one thriving under slow-changing conditions.
That isn't a problem either. It is tautologically true that if corals experience a natural die-off, and then you look at it soon after, the species you mostly see will be the ones that grow the fastest. The other slower growing species will appear more later.
The actual problem here is that reef scientists didn't predict the current levels of the GBR. They strongly predicted the opposite, saying that after the last bleaching in ~2020 it could take a decade to recover.
Nor is ocean acidification a thing anymore. That theory was debunked years ago, by the founder of Greenpeace no less:
That's why you hardly hear about it anymore. Better understanding of corals made it clear there's no real problem there.
The reefs are millions of years old. Academic study of them is only about 40 years old. They have no clue what they're talking about and this was just proven in the most dramatic way possible: a prediction with near 100% confidence that was proven utterly wrong within <2 years of it being made. You can see why they have been making such predictions when you look at a graph of their dataset:
Up until about 2010 the level of coral cover was in slow decline. But 1980-2010 is a tiny slice of the history of the corals, and when growth suddenly reversed in 2015 and 2020, reaching record levels, they were taken entirely by surprise. This is what happens when academics extrapolate from tiny datasets in order to drum up funding.
Allowing these people to screw with the Earth via geo-engineering, to solve problems that only exist in their minds, would take climate extremism to a whole other level and make the culture war surrounding it way, way hotter. It's just not worth it. They should leave the reefs to do their thing.
Most of the increase has been driven by fast-growing Acropora corals, which are hard corals known for their reef-building abilities.
However, AIMS monitoring program team leader Dr Mike Emslie said domination of one species is not ideal.
“These corals are particularly vulnerable to wave damage, like that generated by strong winds and tropical cyclones,” he said.
“They are also highly susceptible to coral bleaching, when water temperatures reach elevated levels, and are the preferred prey for crown-of-thorns starfish.
“This means that large increases in hard coral cover can quickly be negated by disturbances on reefs where Acropora corals predominate.”
So, we're well into geo-engineering territory now, with all the uncertainties that brings. Preventative measures to avoid catastrophe have (predictably) failed, so we're now having to spend our energy to mitigate the symptoms of climate change. Has anyone run the numbers on the efficacy of this approach? As in, how many MJ of energy must be spent to avoid a MJ of heat reaching the coral? Is it even possible to offset the heat transfer of an ocean current by cooling water in its path? What are the long-term consequences of salting the air? It's all fine that the water surrounding the reef is relatively still, but how do you keep the air from moving?
The team is investigating powering their operations without burning fossil fuels.
My suggestion: look into nuclear-powered vessels. Good mobility, no dependence on external energy sources (using solar panels if your goal is to increase cloud cover may not be very useful). As a bonus, using nuclear ships to protect the coral reef is sure to send Greenpeace into a fit.
Preventative measures haven't necessarily failed entirely. The renewable power and battery electric vehicle revolutions are underway, and vastly more successful/rapid than almost anyone predicted. But, they need more time. I see geo-engineering as a way to buy time for the science and engineering needed to solve the problem without austerity measures. (unfortunately, while austerity would have allowed us to attain the Paris targets, it was a political lead balloon from the start)
Depends you define it. We hadn't completely given up, so it's not a complete failure in that sense. But we have consistently failed to meet every action for the climate goals we set ourselves and have to continuously re-evalute our "best case scenario."
Also, with heavier vehicles, you aren’t going to magically be able to use less overall power to drive them. ICEs aren’t as efficient as larger power factories, but they also don’t have dozens or hundreds of miles of transmission losses and transformers to run through. All renewables combined just surpassed coal in the US (report date Feb 2023) but that’s still only about half as much as comes from natural gas: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Public transit would still be an order of magnitude or two better. Bikeable / walkable cities would be better still.
I’m not saying EVs bad, but I am saying that EVs won’t solve climate change. We need to do a whole lot more, and I have zero confidence that we will. It’s just a matter of how bad and how soon. As someone in my 30s, I very much doubt that we’ll get to enjoy retirement with the same standards of living as the previous couple of generations, and as for our children and their children…I don’t think a Mad Max scenario is more than a hundred years away.
1) EV’s are more efficient. It’s already more efficient to burn the gasoline in a power plant to power your EV. Yes, transmission has losses, but gas cars are an atrocious 15-20% efficient. (Not that we should do this)
2) even if EVs don’t cut the transportation energy as much as we wish, they allow the entire fleet to smoothly transition to climate-friendly energy.
I love bikes. I have an e-bike that is 10x as efficient as an EV. But the public simply isn’t willing to switch to public transit and bikes. Even if they were, a fleet of gas-powered busses will probably be worse for the climate than wind-powered EVs.
P.S. microplastics are a real problem, but if you believe climate change is an existential threat, microplastics are not a very good reason to argue against EVs.
> Yes, transmission has losses, but gas cars are an atrocious 15-20% efficient
I thought you had to be exaggerating, but I just looked it up and you're right.
Holy moly. I'm genuinely surprised this isn't more widespread knowledge. I never hear it come up in most conversations around the pros and cons of EV's.
Your comment might be more insightful if you clarified why. Because they didn’t come fast enough? Or because you were hoping to politicize the climate crisis as an opportunity to kill the automobile?
Moreover, even if they can stop the heat, how are they planning to stop ocean acidification? Will they build a wall around the reef and manage pH within?
AFAIK, if the water acidifies even a bit more, no living organisms will be able to have any shells of any kind on them as the water becomes corrosive and simply dissolves the shells over time.
corals are sensitive to rapid and wide changes in water parameters whether it be temperature, pH, alkalinity. Due to the how large the volume of water that is in the ocean these parameters really don't fluctuate as much as you would think besides temperature. pH only dictates how fast coral can grow but corals are much more sensitive to changes in temperature and alkalinity.
Ah, what you want to say is you only care for the fast death of coral reefs and don't care for things that ensure its death but will take maybe a decade or two?
pH does not fluctuate much, true, but it drops steadily which is just as deadly to coral.
Corals are more likely to survive a slow than a fast change as well. I don't think we know that much about how evolution bottlenecks work, but I'd think it's easier to adapt to a radically different environment in three generations than one.
> So, we're well into geo-engineering territory now,
What is geoengineering?
This is a local measure, little different from erecting a huge sunshade (and very different from blocking the sun from the stratosphere or orbit).
I consider geo engineering to be action at a planetary level, like the above mentioned stratospheric dreams or driving lots of automobiles. Something local, that can be switched on and off almost instantaneously, to be quite different.
Are he big machines that suck the atmosphere through a straw geoengineering?
Casey Handmer has done the numbers on geoengineering, and it's feasible as a stopgap measure. In the article below scroll down to the section on Solar Radiation Management.
Those suggestions (launching stratospheric SO2 and grinding up basalt rock for CO2 absorption) sound a lot more mature to me than the ideas in TFA. However, when he talks about deployment at-scale the ideas are starting to sound as fantastic as the salty clouds in TFA. And dumping the rock flour near-shore as he suggests ("shallow oceans") seems tantamount to ecocide on the entire marine ecosystem.
Maybe that's just a me-problem, or a problem of mankind in general: the volumes and scales we're talking about (2 teraton of CO2!) just don't fit in my mind, so any solution at that scale likewise is incomprehensible to me. Then again, we only needed 200 years to produce it, so given our technological advancements, maybe it's not impossible to solve it in two decades.
I don't hold much hope though. The same government/industrial forces that delayed preventative action by 40 years will also delay restorative action, by probably the same number of years. There will be unforeseen consequences, either way. And millions will die, either way.
As a bonus, once perfected this method will also help defend against AI if it starts acting up. Just so long as no one turns me into a battery or something crazy like that.
Putting aside potential detrimental side effects, would reducing sunlight over the reefs even work?
Aren't there ocean currents and tides and things? Does ocean water really "sit still" for long enough that the temperature could be reduced for weeks, without warmer water from further away flowing in?
Ah thank you -- somehow I missed that part. Quoting:
> “It’s an average of about 30 or 40 meters deep; it’s very shallow. It’s a huge lagoon where the circulation with the Pacific Ocean is very much cut off. So water exchanges slowly through these 3,000-and-something reefs. The reason that cloud brightening can work for the Great Barrier Reef is that you’ve got all of this water trapped here.”
This must be part of how the water can be so incredibly clear here. Where I live, a lot of the turbidity of the water results from marine debris being picked up by heavy tidal movement.
We get clear waters occasionally, but it’s typically in the darker periods of the year (winter) when tides are relatively calm. This means less algae and less debris moving around. It makes for stunning diving opportunities, but it’s extremely cold and perfect visibility (by our standards) is pretty rare.
There isn’t much point to cooling the reef to prevent bleaching when acidification will also kill it. That is much harder to prevent. The only solution is to lower CO2 in the air and water.
Simple fix at personal level: bike, local & mostly vegetal diet, simple life style, 5% of the average footprint, heath benefits, financial benefits & environmental benefits
the way humans have cause massie species extinction isn't very natural, I agree control is useless, but we should rather fix the source issue, ban personal cars, swimming pools, planes, etc..
everything dies, it is part of nature's way. If, however, someone were to massively accelerate a specific individual's death, we would typically consider that a crime.
I would like to think that I will leave this world better than I found it. However, I doubt this goal is achievable. I am actively destroying my children's future, and my hoped for grandchildren's future.
I do what little I can to try to lessen the rate of destruction, but we are all part of society and all share the same guilt.
New species for what niche? Do you understand what coral reefs are and how they grow? What happens when they die? New species don't magically take their place in short order. Some basic information for you:
Sometimes called rainforests of the sea,[3] shallow coral reefs form some of Earth's most diverse ecosystems. They occupy less than 0.1% of the world's ocean area, about half the area of France, yet they provide a home for at least 25% of all marine species,[4][5][6][7] including fish, mollusks, worms, crustaceans, echinoderms, sponges, tunicates and other cnidarians.[8] Coral reefs flourish in ocean waters that provide few nutrients. They are most commonly found at shallow depths in tropical waters, but deep water and cold water coral reefs exist on smaller scales in other areas.
Are we protecting the reef because of its effects on the wider planet, or because we like it and think it’s pretty and believe it would be tragic to lose it?
For example, it seems pretty clear that we would have major problems
everywhere on Earth if we clearcut the entire Amazon rainforest. That seems to me to justify saving it.
In short: does the Great Barrier Reef’s existence have similar far-flung implications, or is this effort based on status quo bias?
I don't know, but disrupting an ecosystem has knock-on effects. It could change something else much more directly important to humanity.
That is a big premise of climate change mitigation. We don't necessarily know all the knock on effects of CO2 and other pollution, but we don't need to. Any climate/ecosystem alteration is generally disruptive to civilization, which is why things have to be so critical to even discuss geoengineering.
It seems to me that the Great Barrier Reef is going to go away. That has nothing to do with my mindset, or any actions I have or have not taken. We didn’t start the fire, etc.
That said, under discussion is whether or not resources should be spent to save it (and what format the allocation of those resources might be). It is thus more than reasonable to ask “what happens if we don’t?”.
Doing nothing is frequently (IMO in the vast majority of times) the best problem-solving strategy. Whenever faced with a problem, my first thought is always “if we do nothing and wait, will this problem go away in an acceptable fashion?”
For example: There are many thousands of stray cats out in the world who will die of lack of food and shelter very soon. Does your “mindset” have you out feeding and sheltering them? Do they not matter because they don’t have immediate functional utility?
This sort of black and white thinking you seem to be applying doesn’t lend itself well to doing cost/benefit analysis over a set of possible future actions.
Well, it's your mindset, so you answer that question, don't pin it on me. If the GBR truly had no impact on the wider ecosystem, would you choose to let it die. What level of impact would it take to care, its minimum usefulness to you. The status quo environment is the only one we know civilization to flourish in, as it was a remarkably stable period, so it's self-evident to me that we should be keeping as much the same as it was around the time the Industrial Revolution took off if we want to preserve as much of the climate as possible. Would you raze the Louvre and replace it with a server farm if someone said that space would be more useful that way.
There have been recent discussions that we were doing that kind of geo-engineering accidently, in the Atlantic shipping lanes, for many years, when ships burned high sulphur fuel oil. The sulphur dioxide in the exhaust was shielding the ocean from solar radiation keeping the water temperatures cooler.
We changed the fuel regulations for ships in 2020.
The atlantic ocean near North America is now at all time high temperatures.
Could be related. ?
Seriously. I personally feel like we need a bit more ambition as a species. Saying that nothing can be done about global warming except to reduce consumption and degrowth is—honestly— a losing message. If more people tried to solve global warming instead of grandstanding over it, I think we’d be a lot closer to solutions. We’ve already accidentally geoengineered the whole planet.
I gotta say, I find articles like this to be brilliant. Not easy to write. But this one was emotionally spot on.
The stubborn refusal to slightly inconvenience ourselves by foregoing inessential consumption is much more telling of our lack of ambition. Fucking up the planet and the non-human life on it is simply too convenient.
"The stubborn refusal to slightly inconvenience ourselves by foregoing inessential consumption" is the force behind of all scientific, technological and social progress. Without it, we'd be just another animal species frolicking in the forests and dying horrific deaths at the hands of other predators or pathogens.
I used "inessential" as a shorthand for "expendable when judged by some sensible measure of ecosystem and QoL impact", not in an absolute sense.
I.e. antibiotics, home heating or some forms of transport wouldn't be inessential under that definition, but giant hoards of factory farmed meat, large private yacht fleets or the insanity that is the status quo of daily work commute would be.
Progress indeed, because even ignoring anything else, we at least live much happier lives, and die much less brutally, than we did in the state of nature.
I do think that energy can be shifted much more rapidly to low-carbon forms such as solar and wind. That can be done. And I don't view it as "degrowth" to stop wasting so much energy on pointless endeavours such as e.g. oversized single-occupant petrol-engine vehicles for a daily urban commute to an office.
We’ve already accidentally geoengineered the whole planet. We might as well understand what we're doing and steer it better. As well as, not instead of.
As always these only buy a bit of time if not coupled with massive and swift CO2, methane, chemicals runouts, etc etc etc reduction, didn’t check if mentioned in the article.
On a somewhat tangental note, I've wondered about doing something like this in a desert area: piping seawater into a hot and arid climate, spraying into the air but managing salt collection to avoid salting the earth.
My (limited) understanding is that there's a feedback loop (both positive and negative) between vegetation and rainfall -- so why not kickstart it in the positive direction?
It wasn't totally clear to me in the article whether the mist is entirely made up of sea water. It mentions how small the most important particles are, but is that an effect of the missing process or an additive mixed in while atomizing the sea water?
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread[0] https://www.tropicnow.com.au/2022/august/4/best-coral-cover-...
The set of species that thrives in a changed or fast-changing ecosystem, is (usually) less diverse than the one thriving under slow-changing conditions.
The actual problem here is that reef scientists didn't predict the current levels of the GBR. They strongly predicted the opposite, saying that after the last bleaching in ~2020 it could take a decade to recover.
Nor is ocean acidification a thing anymore. That theory was debunked years ago, by the founder of Greenpeace no less:
https://www.climatedepot.com/2015/06/24/greenpeace-co-founde...
That's why you hardly hear about it anymore. Better understanding of corals made it clear there's no real problem there.
The reefs are millions of years old. Academic study of them is only about 40 years old. They have no clue what they're talking about and this was just proven in the most dramatic way possible: a prediction with near 100% confidence that was proven utterly wrong within <2 years of it being made. You can see why they have been making such predictions when you look at a graph of their dataset:
https://dailysceptic.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/coral.pn...
Up until about 2010 the level of coral cover was in slow decline. But 1980-2010 is a tiny slice of the history of the corals, and when growth suddenly reversed in 2015 and 2020, reaching record levels, they were taken entirely by surprise. This is what happens when academics extrapolate from tiny datasets in order to drum up funding.
Allowing these people to screw with the Earth via geo-engineering, to solve problems that only exist in their minds, would take climate extremism to a whole other level and make the culture war surrounding it way, way hotter. It's just not worth it. They should leave the reefs to do their thing.
However, AIMS monitoring program team leader Dr Mike Emslie said domination of one species is not ideal.
“These corals are particularly vulnerable to wave damage, like that generated by strong winds and tropical cyclones,” he said.
“They are also highly susceptible to coral bleaching, when water temperatures reach elevated levels, and are the preferred prey for crown-of-thorns starfish.
“This means that large increases in hard coral cover can quickly be negated by disturbances on reefs where Acropora corals predominate.”
The team is investigating powering their operations without burning fossil fuels.
My suggestion: look into nuclear-powered vessels. Good mobility, no dependence on external energy sources (using solar panels if your goal is to increase cloud cover may not be very useful). As a bonus, using nuclear ships to protect the coral reef is sure to send Greenpeace into a fit.
Depends you define it. We hadn't completely given up, so it's not a complete failure in that sense. But we have consistently failed to meet every action for the climate goals we set ourselves and have to continuously re-evalute our "best case scenario."
Also, with heavier vehicles, you aren’t going to magically be able to use less overall power to drive them. ICEs aren’t as efficient as larger power factories, but they also don’t have dozens or hundreds of miles of transmission losses and transformers to run through. All renewables combined just surpassed coal in the US (report date Feb 2023) but that’s still only about half as much as comes from natural gas: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
You can use this tool to look up the numbers for your state for total cradle-to-grave emissions for EVs vs hybrids vs ICE https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html
Public transit would still be an order of magnitude or two better. Bikeable / walkable cities would be better still.
I’m not saying EVs bad, but I am saying that EVs won’t solve climate change. We need to do a whole lot more, and I have zero confidence that we will. It’s just a matter of how bad and how soon. As someone in my 30s, I very much doubt that we’ll get to enjoy retirement with the same standards of living as the previous couple of generations, and as for our children and their children…I don’t think a Mad Max scenario is more than a hundred years away.
2) even if EVs don’t cut the transportation energy as much as we wish, they allow the entire fleet to smoothly transition to climate-friendly energy.
I love bikes. I have an e-bike that is 10x as efficient as an EV. But the public simply isn’t willing to switch to public transit and bikes. Even if they were, a fleet of gas-powered busses will probably be worse for the climate than wind-powered EVs.
P.S. microplastics are a real problem, but if you believe climate change is an existential threat, microplastics are not a very good reason to argue against EVs.
I thought you had to be exaggerating, but I just looked it up and you're right.
Holy moly. I'm genuinely surprised this isn't more widespread knowledge. I never hear it come up in most conversations around the pros and cons of EV's.
AFAIK, if the water acidifies even a bit more, no living organisms will be able to have any shells of any kind on them as the water becomes corrosive and simply dissolves the shells over time.
pH does not fluctuate much, true, but it drops steadily which is just as deadly to coral.
What is geoengineering?
This is a local measure, little different from erecting a huge sunshade (and very different from blocking the sun from the stratosphere or orbit).
I consider geo engineering to be action at a planetary level, like the above mentioned stratospheric dreams or driving lots of automobiles. Something local, that can be switched on and off almost instantaneously, to be quite different.
Are he big machines that suck the atmosphere through a straw geoengineering?
Some countries will start geo-engineering, it's just a matter of time. Dubious that it will actually help. Might make things much worse, though.
Casey Handmer has done the numbers on geoengineering, and it's feasible as a stopgap measure. In the article below scroll down to the section on Solar Radiation Management.
"We should not let the Earth overheat!"
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/06/06/we-should-not-...
Maybe that's just a me-problem, or a problem of mankind in general: the volumes and scales we're talking about (2 teraton of CO2!) just don't fit in my mind, so any solution at that scale likewise is incomprehensible to me. Then again, we only needed 200 years to produce it, so given our technological advancements, maybe it's not impossible to solve it in two decades.
I don't hold much hope though. The same government/industrial forces that delayed preventative action by 40 years will also delay restorative action, by probably the same number of years. There will be unforeseen consequences, either way. And millions will die, either way.
I also don't think we'll pave the whole thing over.
Aren't there ocean currents and tides and things? Does ocean water really "sit still" for long enough that the temperature could be reduced for weeks, without warmer water from further away flowing in?
> “It’s an average of about 30 or 40 meters deep; it’s very shallow. It’s a huge lagoon where the circulation with the Pacific Ocean is very much cut off. So water exchanges slowly through these 3,000-and-something reefs. The reason that cloud brightening can work for the Great Barrier Reef is that you’ve got all of this water trapped here.”
We get clear waters occasionally, but it’s typically in the darker periods of the year (winter) when tides are relatively calm. This means less algae and less debris moving around. It makes for stunning diving opportunities, but it’s extremely cold and perfect visibility (by our standards) is pretty rare.
New species will evolve to take over the niche.
Control is a powerful drug.
I would like to think that I will leave this world better than I found it. However, I doubt this goal is achievable. I am actively destroying my children's future, and my hoped for grandchildren's future.
I do what little I can to try to lessen the rate of destruction, but we are all part of society and all share the same guilt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_reef
Sometimes called rainforests of the sea,[3] shallow coral reefs form some of Earth's most diverse ecosystems. They occupy less than 0.1% of the world's ocean area, about half the area of France, yet they provide a home for at least 25% of all marine species,[4][5][6][7] including fish, mollusks, worms, crustaceans, echinoderms, sponges, tunicates and other cnidarians.[8] Coral reefs flourish in ocean waters that provide few nutrients. They are most commonly found at shallow depths in tropical waters, but deep water and cold water coral reefs exist on smaller scales in other areas.
For example, it seems pretty clear that we would have major problems everywhere on Earth if we clearcut the entire Amazon rainforest. That seems to me to justify saving it.
In short: does the Great Barrier Reef’s existence have similar far-flung implications, or is this effort based on status quo bias?
That is a big premise of climate change mitigation. We don't necessarily know all the knock on effects of CO2 and other pollution, but we don't need to. Any climate/ecosystem alteration is generally disruptive to civilization, which is why things have to be so critical to even discuss geoengineering.
Please don't question how we got here - your mindset is the answer.
That said, under discussion is whether or not resources should be spent to save it (and what format the allocation of those resources might be). It is thus more than reasonable to ask “what happens if we don’t?”.
Doing nothing is frequently (IMO in the vast majority of times) the best problem-solving strategy. Whenever faced with a problem, my first thought is always “if we do nothing and wait, will this problem go away in an acceptable fashion?”
For example: There are many thousands of stray cats out in the world who will die of lack of food and shelter very soon. Does your “mindset” have you out feeding and sheltering them? Do they not matter because they don’t have immediate functional utility?
This sort of black and white thinking you seem to be applying doesn’t lend itself well to doing cost/benefit analysis over a set of possible future actions.
We changed the fuel regulations for ships in 2020.
The atlantic ocean near North America is now at all time high temperatures. Could be related. ?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
Getting good at it is one way out.
I gotta say, I find articles like this to be brilliant. Not easy to write. But this one was emotionally spot on.
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/call-for-non-use-agreement-solar-g...
I.e. antibiotics, home heating or some forms of transport wouldn't be inessential under that definition, but giant hoards of factory farmed meat, large private yacht fleets or the insanity that is the status quo of daily work commute would be.
But even if we achieve that tomorrow, that just one of the needed wins, e.g. the seas would still be full of plastic debris and fertiliser run-off. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
We’ve already accidentally geoengineered the whole planet. We might as well understand what we're doing and steer it better. As well as, not instead of.
The MEER is another example but for humans (with mirrors): https://www.meer.org/
As always these only buy a bit of time if not coupled with massive and swift CO2, methane, chemicals runouts, etc etc etc reduction, didn’t check if mentioned in the article.
IIRC the temperature in the oceans is lagging by decades, so they'll likely continue rising even if we fixed everything
Whatever the ambient temperature, I'm fond of breathing without pain and without drugs.
Maybe I'm weird. Or maybe other people have this same quirk and would like pollution levels to go down anyway.
Topics like this that impact more people deserve much more open scrutiny.
My (limited) understanding is that there's a feedback loop (both positive and negative) between vegetation and rainfall -- so why not kickstart it in the positive direction?