All Coral Will Suffer Severe Bleaching When Global Heating Hits 1.5C, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 34
Almost no corals on the planet will escape severe bleaching once global heating reaches 1.5C, according to a new study of the world's reefs. From a report: Reefs in areas currently regarded as cooler refuges will be overwhelmed at 1.5C of heating, and just 0.2% of reefs will escape at least one bleaching outbreak every decade, according to the research. The team of scientists from the University of Leeds, Texas Tech University and James Cook University used the latest climate model projections to confirm that 1.5C of global heating "will be catastrophic for coral reefs." Corals bleach when ocean temperatures are too high for too long. Algae that provide corals with much of their food and colour separate from the coral during heat stress.
Severe bleaching can kill corals, but they can recover from milder outbreaks if there are several years with no further heatwaves. The world's oceans are heating due mostly to the burning of fossil fuels. The study comes as the world's biggest coral reef system, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's Queensland coast, is on the verge of another mass coral bleaching event. In the study, the team analysed climate projections across all of the world's shallow-water coral reefs, which constitute the vast majority of reefs and provide habitat, tourism revenue and coastal protection. About 84% of the world's corals exist in areas that are expected to bleach less than once a decade and are regarded as "thermal refugia," the study said. But the analysis suggests at 1.5C of global heating, only 0.2% of the area covered by reefs is in water cool enough to avoid bleaching at least once every five years -- a frequency considered too short to allow corals to recover.
Severe bleaching can kill corals, but they can recover from milder outbreaks if there are several years with no further heatwaves. The world's oceans are heating due mostly to the burning of fossil fuels. The study comes as the world's biggest coral reef system, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's Queensland coast, is on the verge of another mass coral bleaching event. In the study, the team analysed climate projections across all of the world's shallow-water coral reefs, which constitute the vast majority of reefs and provide habitat, tourism revenue and coastal protection. About 84% of the world's corals exist in areas that are expected to bleach less than once a decade and are regarded as "thermal refugia," the study said. But the analysis suggests at 1.5C of global heating, only 0.2% of the area covered by reefs is in water cool enough to avoid bleaching at least once every five years -- a frequency considered too short to allow corals to recover.
I feeling like most midwesterners don't care. (Score:1)
Because lots of folks don't like seafood (please rate this as flamebait) outside of catfish, crawfish, crappie, and trout since they've never had it before. So they couldn't care less about what happens to coral since they've never seen it or ever been out close by the ocean.
Preservation is really difficult for people who simply don't see any short term benefit for themselves. Unfortunately the changes that a person contribute to in their lifetime can have devastating and long lasting effects for everyone
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"Preservation is really difficult for people who simply don't see any short term benefit for themselves. "
Or worse, when it interferes with short term benefits for themselves. The enemies of climate change mitigation are not merely "people", the are corporations and the ultra-rich. If you try to save the planet through politics you have lost before you start.
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If Covid is going to have one positive side effect , its that it has become horrifyingly apparent to most people that anti science conspiracy theories really do have a lot of power over a lot of people, including those in the political apparateses of the state.
Having worked in climate research I find myself pointing out to people who are mystified at the crazies marching about in the streets without masks being angry at vaccines, that none of this is actually new, and that political operatives have been pum
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The problem of course is that when politicians discover that just lying to people can win them elections, the other politicians notice, and it becomes a normal part of politics.
You say this like politicians lying to win is something new and different rather than something that has been going on as far back as we have recorded history...
Aaron Z
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The problem with it is that you literally can't get elected by telling the truth, so there's no way to dig ourselves out.
It's not new, but the consequences are accelerating.
Well (Score:3)
Guess we'd better cool down the oceans.
Can corals be genetically modified to suit? (Score:2)
What about vulnerable corals differs from less-vulnerable corals?
Re:Can corals be genetically modified to suit? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Given that some particularly hot seas, like for example the Gulf of Persia, are also home to coral reefs, there clearly are coral species that are tolerant to larger temperature ranges.
Surely a faulty conclusion. You have not given evidence that the Persian choral can withstand any meaningful temperature range. There are birds in North America right now, while many other birds flew south. Some of the birds that dont migrate south would not survive in warmer conditions, while some would, and some that flew south could survive the cold but just prefer not to while others couldnt.
Where you find a thing does not tell you the range of conditions it will survive. It only tells you a specific
Re:Can corals be genetically modified to suit? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, and his link doesn't support his argument. He is an idiot of SuperKendallian proportions, if that is possible.
Also, it is irrelevant since bleaching is a near-surface phenomenon. The majority of the world's coral does not live at the surface and even those that will be affected can thrive deeper. The big threat to reefs is change that is too rapid, and this genius's argument fails when change occurs too quickly.
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Hopefully that will happen without us needing to do anything -- via natural selection. Some individuals will tolerate high temperatures better than others, their offspring will be more likely to survive. If we find such corals then we might use them as "seeds" for areas where corals have been bleached.
However we must not use this as an excuse for not accepting our role in the destruction of ecosystems.
How have they survived this far? (Score:2, Troll)
Corals are one of earth's oldest species, appearing around 535 million years ago.
Corals, as a thing, have survived several great extinction events.
They have survived (and, curiously to this warning) thrived in much warmer conditions including large swings of temperature from +14 C planetary to cooler than now (-8 C).
Arguably, currently these are some of the coldest conditions they've ever existed in (as the vast majority of that last 500m years was warmer, sometimes much warmer.)
They have also managed to su
Re:How have they survived this far? (Score:5, Interesting)
Corals are one of earth's oldest species, appearing around 535 million years ago.
Yes, but...
Corals, as a thing, have survived several great extinction events.
Yes, but no.
There's a period about 350 million years ago, in the Devonian, when corals completely disappeared from the geological record for millions of years. This is not well understood, but the leadng hypothesis is climate. They reappeared in the Carboniferous and proliferated through the Permian.
But then the corals that were ubiquitous through the Permian pretty much all died in the end-Permian extinction event. New forms of coral filled the empty niche after about 10 million years, but they evolved from related animals that didn't have calcareous hard parts. The corals of the Permian went extinct.
They have survived (and, curiously to this warning) thrived in much warmer conditions including large swings of temperature from +14 C planetary to cooler than now (-8 C). Arguably, currently these are some of the coldest conditions they've ever existed in (as the vast majority of that last 500m years was warmer, sometimes much warmer.) They have also managed to survive through much more rapid changes including things like the Chixiclub impactor around 65 million years ago that would have radically altered the climate - in a matter of weeks or less - for centuries if not millennia. Yet somehow they have now become such a fragile life form that they are extinction-threatened by 1.5C warming? That's pretty surprising!
OK, good point. So, we're likely to be ok if our climate event is only as bad as the KT extinction, but it might be really bad if it's like the end-Permian extinction.
But saying we're likely to only kill off 90 or 99 percent of the corals, and the survivors will certainly spread back to fill the niches in a few million years or less, is not necessarily heartening.
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"But saying we're likely to only kill off 90 or 99 percent of the corals..."
Fortunately, while that is implied in these claims it is bullshit. Killing off 90% of the coral may not make coral species go extinct but it may well lead to man's extinction.
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> There's a period about 350 million years ago, in the Devonian, when corals completely disappeared from the geological record for millions of years. This is not well understood, but the leadng hypothesis is climate. They reappeared in the Carboniferous and proliferated through the Permian.
So they may have disappeared from the fossil record but I think we can pretty conclusively say they survived as a species, no? I mean, that's self-evident.
> So, we're likely to be ok if our climate event is only as
Extinction [Re:How have they survived this far?] (Score:2)
> There's a period about 350 million years ago, in the Devonian, when corals completely disappeared from the geological record for millions of years. This is not well understood, but the leadng hypothesis is climate. They reappeared in the Carboniferous and proliferated through the Permian.
So they may have disappeared from the fossil record but I think we can pretty conclusively say they survived as a species, no?
No, not at the species level. Most of the species died. At the order level, two of the three orders of coral present in the Devonian reappeared (millions of years later) after the extinction event.
> So, we're likely to be ok if our climate event is only as bad as the KT extinction, but it might be really bad if it's like the end-Permian extinction.
Not what I said, and basically a sarcastic straw-man. In fact, I think it's undoubted that corals will (relatively easily survive situations that we, and most other life forms on this planet finely-tuned to a narrow climactic window, will not.
There's also a vocabulary problem here. We call the reef-building organisms of the Devonian through Permian "corals", but they are unrelated to the corals of today. All of the reef-building organisms of the Permian went extinct at the end-Permian extinction event. 100%.
A new and unrelated organism moved into
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Ooh, look who read Patrick Moore :D
I did too.
Do yourself a favor: get a list of fallacious arguments (such as : https://www.ucm.es/data/cont/d... [www.ucm.es] ) Learn it by heart, exercise creating such arguments and finding them, and then read the book again.
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Honestly, I didn't even know who Patrick Moore was until maybe last year? Year before?
And no, looking at the actual history, I don't believe he could fairly call himself one of the 'founders' of Greenpeace. One of the early members, sure. One of the early important members, sure. But his claims to partial foundership are feeble.
And "an argument that disagrees with my religion" isn't a fallacy.
Reef bleaching != reef death (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the color in a reef comes from colorful algae that live in a symbiotic relationship with the coral (which are technically animals, not fungi, algae etc) and help feed the coral, but they're not exclusively dependent on them 100% of the time
When the water cools after the summer the algae will often return and the reef returns to full health again. Reefs in colder areas benefit from sea level temp rise, as those reefs grow faster and corals can/will migrate to them, but it is a slow process, measured in fractions of an inch per year for hard corals, and an inch or two for others.
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Yes, the VAST majority of corals will not experience bleaching because the water they exist in is currently colder than would be required. It is an amazingly stupid claim that does not pass the sniff test but has been pushed by preservation communities now for decades.
simply cannot be true (Score:3)
Corals do not exist only close to the surface, they extend quite deep. Furthermore, with warming comes sea level rise which makes existing coral effectively deeper. Water is opaque to most EM radiation and heavily filters visible light. Water temperature changes rapidly with depth, even close to the surface. These are well known facts.
Claiming that that "almost no corals...will escape severe bleaching" ignores deeper water corals unless solar radiation spontaneously starts penetrating hundreds of feet deep and ocean warming extends hundreds of feet deep. In other words, bullshit. Relatively little of coral reefs will actually be affected in this way, although they are the most visible ones and the impact could be terrible. Coral is not about to die off. Also some corals can move...deeper if need be. And they do.
As an avid scuba diver, I am well aware that we've been hearing these warnings for quite some time and have also been told that bleaching kills coral. Regarding coral bleaching, the preservation community is intentionally alarmist. Yes, it's a concern as is climate change generally, but "almost" all corals will not be killed off once we hit 1.5C, the fact is that we will have far worse problems to worry about.
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Also, corals exist around the world at a wide range of temperatures. The corals around the Hawaiian Islands exist around 23-25C. The corals around the Gulf of Thailand live between 27-29C.
I don't mean to minimize the risk to corals from increasing temperature, but like you, I'm convinced this is alarmist. It simply isn't possible that almost all species of coral will exhibit bleaching as temperatures rise a further 0.4C.
I don't anticipate corals will instantly adapt and migrate around the world, but agree t
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Exactly. For every area where corals may be stressed, there is another where existing corals are likely to thrive. The question isn't whether climate change is bad or that climate change may do damage to underwater ecosystems, it is whether coral will be completely wiped out throughout the world. The answer is clearly no.
Hawaii is a great example, but there are even more tropical examples. I have dived in many locations in Malaysia and Indonesia, part of the larger reef structure that includes the Great
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Yes, it's a concern as is climate change generally, but "almost" all corals will not be killed off once we hit 1.5C, the fact is that we will have far worse problems to worry about.
It's merely a canary. The problem is that the issue is so slow moving and the ramifications so massive, that humans generally cannot fathom the consequences. And when we can't understand it, we tend to ignore it. If anything, we need more visible canaries.
We can't do anything about climate change (Score:2)
Nobody's going to be homeless today so that they're great grandkids or even just their grandkids don't have to deal with climate change. If all fails they'll tell themselves that their kids are so freaking amazing that they'll be untouched by the impacts. And
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So, we need solutions to the problem that don't cause people to become homeless.
OK, let's go find them.
I am constantly amazed at the amount of anti-technology invective on slashdot. "The first thing I thought of might be expensive so only rich people could afford it, therefore we can't do anything about climate change! There can't possibly be any solutions and therefore we have to avoid trying to deal with the problem!"
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Right, the actual problem is the belief that the world exists so that rich people can get richer. Technology creates wealth with little or no effort, yet rather than exploit this to the benefit of everyone the world largely seeks to further impoverish the average person for the benefit of the ultra-rich and create propaganda networks to convince the poor to support those policies.
Misleading title (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:2)
Study did not "find" it. Study predicted it. Some predictions come true, others don't.