9 ms·

Climate change causes Australia to downgrade Great Barrier Reef′s outlook

63 points by lelf 7y ago

jdkee 7y ago
Australia's coal friendly policies > the preservation of a unique ecosystem. It is as if the Australian government prioritizes the economic value of carbon emissions over the externalities of the globe. Who would of thunk?
- docdeek 7y ago
  The reality is, though, that if Australia stopped selling and using coal tomorrow the damage expected to impact the HBR would happen anyway. It's a global problem and requires more than local action by a high per-capita but low gross-total carbon emitter.
  - phs318u 7y ago
    Also reality though, if Australia stopped selling and using coal tomorrow, it would be called global leadership. Hahahaha. As if. DISCLAIMER: Australian citizen.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      34% of our exports come from fuels & oils [0] and 50% of our energy [1]. We contribute essentially nothing to the problem of carbon emissions [2]. We would, at best, be showing leadership by torching our own economy which is unlikely to sway the Indians, Chinese, Americans , etc into following our lead. We would be doing much better applying our leadership to making billions in exports and showing leadership in renewables & nuclear research. The only contribution Australia can make is finding a way to show that coal isn't the most profitable option. Mandating uneconomic experiments is not the path to doing that. If the reef goes because of climate change, Australia was never in a position to stop that by reducing our emissions. [0] http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Australi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita#/media/File:2018_AQAL_Group_variwide_chart_%22Worldwide_Co2_emissions%22.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
      - bigbluedots 7y ago
        > We contribute essentially nothing to the problem of carbon emissions By exporting a huge amount of coal to other countries, who then burn it. Do you think that has zero impact?
        roenxi 7y ago
        We sell about 2t for every 1t we burn [0]. Our consumption has no measurable impact, our total production has a sort-of measurable impact (can't deny that we are globally interesting [1]). The issue is although our production of CO2 is large relative to our population, in global terms it is somewhere between a rounding error and tiny. We'd be much better off focusing on research where we can have a positive impact disproportionate to our size. Our physical efforts are going to look completely feeble compared to whatever China does in their attempts at securing a standard of living comparable to Western nations. Helping them improve in an environmentally friendly way will have a much higher payoff then crippling our economy to show willing. Realistically our reliance on exporting raw resources is going to cripple Australia sooner or later anyway because it is low value add, but the solution is not to start banning things. And claiming Australia's stance on global warming has anything to do with the Great Barrier Reef is just wishful thinking; we aren't that big a producer of CO2. Our fate is in the hands of the big players. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Australia_Coal_Production.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Australia_Coal_Production... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...
        imtringued 7y ago
        I think the argument is that you cannot force a foreign country to burn less fossil fuels. If you stop selling then someone else takes your place because the demand is still there. The problem needs to be solved at the root: reduce demand for fossil fuels.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        We don't have time to wait for the worst offenders to change their ways before improving our own carbon footprint. Per capita Australia is pretty bad. Australia could be carbon neutral in a few years if it wanted to. They have immense potential for renewable energy.
  - zik 7y ago
    The link between coal and the Great Barrier Reef is the proximity of an very large new coal mine to the reef: https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/06/13/australia-approves-vast-coal-mine-near-great-barrier-reef.html https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/06/13/australia-app...
spectramax 7y ago
Not many people would oppose the opinion that we should protect the earth and yet human society has grown so complex, driven by market forces and global economy, that if governments do not take action, private enterprise sure as hell wouldn't. Selfishness of individuals triumph over long term global cause. I am sad. Humans have achieved so much and yet there are large areas of neglect, abuse, misuse and misconduct. I have a strong feeling that if we go to mars, people will still have issues. Tribal instincts will kick in and we'll fight over what color flag to put it up there. Take over of humans by AGI sounds like a better future.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  IMO Mars is going to be an absolute bloodbath, in the same way every colony on Earth was a bloodbath. We should probably do it all the same. We've not yet even sorted out the colonies we have here (HK, for instance, I would consider a Chinese colony as it was a British colony until 1997).
  - spectramax 7y ago
    HK situation is on my mind as well, I just didn't want to mention it yet again. At least whatever intelligence may explode in future (if it does), it will be hopefully pure logic with no strings attached as we, humans have - emotions, tribalism, sex, psychology, physical bodies to take care of, aging, racism, ridiculously low output bandwidth, so many things that AGI wouldn't have to deal with. I hope that it can optimize on a global domain and not get stuck in some local optima.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      Everything that exists is there because it survived. Complex systems that do not prioritize survival tend to get eclipsed by those that do. One very effective way to achieve survival is to build your "self" out of many independent competing subsystems, and select only those that themselves survive. An individual human does not particularly care if some of its cells die; the point is for them to die, such that the overall human remains healthy (when they don't, you get cancer). An individual cell does not care if some of its mitochondria die; this happens naturally at times of low energy use. An individual mitochondrion does not care if glucose molecules are broken down and reconstituted into ATP; that is its function. On the other end of the spectrum, an individual corporation does not care if it ruins the lives of some of its employees by laying them off; such callousness helps improve the efficiency of the organization itself. A healthy economy does not care if the individual firms that comprise it go bankrupt, because this is the only way to free up inefficiently-used resources before they drain the whole economy of its vitality. A lot of things that suck come from competing interests across the different levels. To the corporation, layoffs are a good thing, and the share price goes up when they happen; to the individuals laid off, they're a tragedy. At the species level, evolution is what gave us the richness of biodiversity we see; at the individual level, it gives us death and fruitless competition to pass on our genes. If the machines manage to take over, it'll be because they manage to evolve this fractal competition within them, in which case they'll just replicate human foibles at the lower levels. (Won't somebody think of the poor software libraries, replaced by a shifting package.json?) If they don't evolve this, they will themselves remain tools, subject to replacement at the whim of their human masters.
emmelaich 7y ago
This news is about a month old now. This is a better write-up ... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-30/great-barrier-reef-report-long-term-outlook-downgraded-very-poor/11464294 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-30/great-barrier-reef-re... The actual report is here http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/outlook-report-2019 http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/outlook-report-2019
- Paraesthetic 7y ago
  I wouldn't trust the ABC if my life depended on it, they are a cesspit of bias and stories for gullible people. THe other is very interesting though.
MikeOfAu 7y ago
For balance, I would point out that there is an alternative point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7j75L38PlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7j75L38PlI I find it hard to know what to believe. 5 years ago it seemed clear everything was going to hell in a handbasket, now I'm more sceptical, a lot more sceptical, but ultimately unsure. I'd feel a lot less sceptical if those disagreeing weren't immediately crushed and silenced. If they are so clearly wrong, surely it is easy to show that? Moral emergencies cause humans to behave very badly. Lynch mobs and all that, or Cursaders up to their knees in blood on behalf of their God.
- garmaine 7y ago
  I bookmarked your link, and will watch it later. Since you seem open to thinking critically about the effects of both climate change and green policy, I’d recommend Robert Zubrin’s “Merchants of Despair,” if you haven’t read it already. It follows the trajectory of the malthusian anti-human movement over the last 225 years, culminating in today’s problem of climate change alarmism. Global climate Change is a real thing, albeit with consequences and timelines that are wildly exaggerated by the alarmist movement, and simply throwing insane amounts of money at renewables is not going to solve the problems that arise. PS: your post (and mine) are going to end up hidden from view in no time at all. Unfortunately even in HN there is a hive mind that censors discussion of trade offs :(
  - Oletros 7y ago
    Who are the alarmist movement? Are climate scientists alarmists?
    - garmaine 7y ago
      > Who are the alarmist movements? I assume you mean who represents them, as it isn’t an organization I’m naming. A generation ago Al Gore would have been the figurehead of the alarmist movement. Now it is Greta Thunberg and green policy makers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. > Are climate scientists alarmists? Some are, usually when they back predictions outside their specialty or make the mistake of applying scientific nodes of thought to (geo)engineering problems and unsurprisingly come up short. Most are more reserved in how they present themselves and/or understand that our prediction capability is still quite limited and the non-specialist public doesn’t understand the nuances of qualified statements about future outcomes. Unfortunately evo-activists have cherry picked data, neglecting to mention that global climate has been historically much warmer than now, that rising levels of fixed nitrogen thanks to artificial fertilizer is causing increase of the biome which sequesters carbon in biomass. Some facts presented are outright wrong: rising temperatures means higher atmospheric water capacity and therefore more precipitation, not drought, and fewer numbers of storms (albeit greater in magnitude). Deaths due to changing climate have consistently fallen year over year for as long as such things were measured. The alarmist narrative is that basically that civilization will fall apart in the next 10-15 years, there will be mass die offs, and the world will be reduced to some sort of Mad Max / Waterworld post-apocalyptic anarchy. It’s bunk, just as the same imminent doom predictions were over the last 40 years. Climate change is real, but nothing even close to that order of magnitude will happen in the next 100 years. And a 100 years is more than enough time to have a sensibly paced transition to nuclear base power supplementing fluctuating renewables, and to develop geoengineering technologies to effectively manage both regional and global climate change. It’s somewhere on the scale closer to Y2K bug, not nuclear holocaust. But this climate change alarmism is causing our kids to develop acute anxiety and depression disorders, as Greta Thunberg has, which are totally misplaced, and I pity those kids and feel anger towards the adults in their lives that are doing psychological damage. The alarmism is also driving policy recommendations that would bring about global recession on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. If millennials think boomers gave them the short stick, wait until their children see what lack of opportunities they have from our misguided climate change policies. Edit: Lol, posted and within seconds a negative score. This is always what happens when you attempt to have a reasonable discussion about scientific facts and engineering trade-offs in climate change rather than an alarmist circle-jerk. I don’t know why I bother. Why do we let such important scientific topics become politicized?
adrianN 7y ago
The reefs are already lost unless you believe we manage to become carbon neutral before 2040 or so. At 2° almost all coral will die. Already at 1.5° the majority will die.

63 points by lelf 7y ago

Australia's coal friendly policies > the preservation of a unique ecosystem. It is as if the Australian government prioritizes the economic value of carbon emissions over the externalities of the globe. Who would of thunk?

docdeek 7y ago
The reality is, though, that if Australia stopped selling and using coal tomorrow the damage expected to impact the HBR would happen anyway. It's a global problem and requires more than local action by a high per-capita but low gross-total carbon emitter.
- phs318u 7y ago
  Also reality though, if Australia stopped selling and using coal tomorrow, it would be called global leadership. Hahahaha. As if. DISCLAIMER: Australian citizen.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    34% of our exports come from fuels & oils [0] and 50% of our energy [1]. We contribute essentially nothing to the problem of carbon emissions [2]. We would, at best, be showing leadership by torching our own economy which is unlikely to sway the Indians, Chinese, Americans , etc into following our lead. We would be doing much better applying our leadership to making billions in exports and showing leadership in renewables & nuclear research. The only contribution Australia can make is finding a way to show that coal isn't the most profitable option. Mandating uneconomic experiments is not the path to doing that. If the reef goes because of climate change, Australia was never in a position to stop that by reducing our emissions. [0] http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Australi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita#/media/File:2018_AQAL_Group_variwide_chart_%22Worldwide_Co2_emissions%22.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
    - bigbluedots 7y ago
      > We contribute essentially nothing to the problem of carbon emissions By exporting a huge amount of coal to other countries, who then burn it. Do you think that has zero impact?
      - roenxi 7y ago
        We sell about 2t for every 1t we burn [0]. Our consumption has no measurable impact, our total production has a sort-of measurable impact (can't deny that we are globally interesting [1]). The issue is although our production of CO2 is large relative to our population, in global terms it is somewhere between a rounding error and tiny. We'd be much better off focusing on research where we can have a positive impact disproportionate to our size. Our physical efforts are going to look completely feeble compared to whatever China does in their attempts at securing a standard of living comparable to Western nations. Helping them improve in an environmentally friendly way will have a much higher payoff then crippling our economy to show willing. Realistically our reliance on exporting raw resources is going to cripple Australia sooner or later anyway because it is low value add, but the solution is not to start banning things. And claiming Australia's stance on global warming has anything to do with the Great Barrier Reef is just wishful thinking; we aren't that big a producer of CO2. Our fate is in the hands of the big players. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Australia_Coal_Production.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Australia_Coal_Production... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...
      - imtringued 7y ago
        I think the argument is that you cannot force a foreign country to burn less fossil fuels. If you stop selling then someone else takes your place because the demand is still there. The problem needs to be solved at the root: reduce demand for fossil fuels.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      We don't have time to wait for the worst offenders to change their ways before improving our own carbon footprint. Per capita Australia is pretty bad. Australia could be carbon neutral in a few years if it wanted to. They have immense potential for renewable energy.
- zik 7y ago
  The link between coal and the Great Barrier Reef is the proximity of an very large new coal mine to the reef: https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/06/13/australia-approves-vast-coal-mine-near-great-barrier-reef.html https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/06/13/australia-app...

spectramax 7y ago

Not many people would oppose the opinion that we should protect the earth and yet human society has grown so complex, driven by market forces and global economy, that if governments do not take action, private enterprise sure as hell wouldn't. Selfishness of individuals triumph over long term global cause. I am sad. Humans have achieved so much and yet there are large areas of neglect, abuse, misuse and misconduct. I have a strong feeling that if we go to mars, people will still have issues. Tribal instincts will kick in and we'll fight over what color flag to put it up there. Take over of humans by AGI sounds like a better future.

arcticbull 7y ago
IMO Mars is going to be an absolute bloodbath, in the same way every colony on Earth was a bloodbath. We should probably do it all the same. We've not yet even sorted out the colonies we have here (HK, for instance, I would consider a Chinese colony as it was a British colony until 1997).
- spectramax 7y ago
  HK situation is on my mind as well, I just didn't want to mention it yet again. At least whatever intelligence may explode in future (if it does), it will be hopefully pure logic with no strings attached as we, humans have - emotions, tribalism, sex, psychology, physical bodies to take care of, aging, racism, ridiculously low output bandwidth, so many things that AGI wouldn't have to deal with. I hope that it can optimize on a global domain and not get stuck in some local optima.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Everything that exists is there because it survived. Complex systems that do not prioritize survival tend to get eclipsed by those that do. One very effective way to achieve survival is to build your "self" out of many independent competing subsystems, and select only those that themselves survive. An individual human does not particularly care if some of its cells die; the point is for them to die, such that the overall human remains healthy (when they don't, you get cancer). An individual cell does not care if some of its mitochondria die; this happens naturally at times of low energy use. An individual mitochondrion does not care if glucose molecules are broken down and reconstituted into ATP; that is its function. On the other end of the spectrum, an individual corporation does not care if it ruins the lives of some of its employees by laying them off; such callousness helps improve the efficiency of the organization itself. A healthy economy does not care if the individual firms that comprise it go bankrupt, because this is the only way to free up inefficiently-used resources before they drain the whole economy of its vitality. A lot of things that suck come from competing interests across the different levels. To the corporation, layoffs are a good thing, and the share price goes up when they happen; to the individuals laid off, they're a tragedy. At the species level, evolution is what gave us the richness of biodiversity we see; at the individual level, it gives us death and fruitless competition to pass on our genes. If the machines manage to take over, it'll be because they manage to evolve this fractal competition within them, in which case they'll just replicate human foibles at the lower levels. (Won't somebody think of the poor software libraries, replaced by a shifting package.json?) If they don't evolve this, they will themselves remain tools, subject to replacement at the whim of their human masters.

emmelaich 7y ago

This news is about a month old now. This is a better write-up ... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-30/great-barrier-reef-report-long-term-outlook-downgraded-very-poor/11464294 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-30/great-barrier-reef-re... The actual report is here http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/outlook-report-2019 http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/outlook-report-2019

Paraesthetic 7y ago
I wouldn't trust the ABC if my life depended on it, they are a cesspit of bias and stories for gullible people. THe other is very interesting though.

MikeOfAu 7y ago

For balance, I would point out that there is an alternative point of view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7j75L38PlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7j75L38PlI I find it hard to know what to believe. 5 years ago it seemed clear everything was going to hell in a handbasket, now I'm more sceptical, a lot more sceptical, but ultimately unsure. I'd feel a lot less sceptical if those disagreeing weren't immediately crushed and silenced. If they are so clearly wrong, surely it is easy to show that? Moral emergencies cause humans to behave very badly. Lynch mobs and all that, or Cursaders up to their knees in blood on behalf of their God.

garmaine 7y ago
I bookmarked your link, and will watch it later. Since you seem open to thinking critically about the effects of both climate change and green policy, I’d recommend Robert Zubrin’s “Merchants of Despair,” if you haven’t read it already. It follows the trajectory of the malthusian anti-human movement over the last 225 years, culminating in today’s problem of climate change alarmism. Global climate Change is a real thing, albeit with consequences and timelines that are wildly exaggerated by the alarmist movement, and simply throwing insane amounts of money at renewables is not going to solve the problems that arise. PS: your post (and mine) are going to end up hidden from view in no time at all. Unfortunately even in HN there is a hive mind that censors discussion of trade offs :(
- Oletros 7y ago
  Who are the alarmist movement? Are climate scientists alarmists?
  - garmaine 7y ago
    > Who are the alarmist movements? I assume you mean who represents them, as it isn’t an organization I’m naming. A generation ago Al Gore would have been the figurehead of the alarmist movement. Now it is Greta Thunberg and green policy makers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. > Are climate scientists alarmists? Some are, usually when they back predictions outside their specialty or make the mistake of applying scientific nodes of thought to (geo)engineering problems and unsurprisingly come up short. Most are more reserved in how they present themselves and/or understand that our prediction capability is still quite limited and the non-specialist public doesn’t understand the nuances of qualified statements about future outcomes. Unfortunately evo-activists have cherry picked data, neglecting to mention that global climate has been historically much warmer than now, that rising levels of fixed nitrogen thanks to artificial fertilizer is causing increase of the biome which sequesters carbon in biomass. Some facts presented are outright wrong: rising temperatures means higher atmospheric water capacity and therefore more precipitation, not drought, and fewer numbers of storms (albeit greater in magnitude). Deaths due to changing climate have consistently fallen year over year for as long as such things were measured. The alarmist narrative is that basically that civilization will fall apart in the next 10-15 years, there will be mass die offs, and the world will be reduced to some sort of Mad Max / Waterworld post-apocalyptic anarchy. It’s bunk, just as the same imminent doom predictions were over the last 40 years. Climate change is real, but nothing even close to that order of magnitude will happen in the next 100 years. And a 100 years is more than enough time to have a sensibly paced transition to nuclear base power supplementing fluctuating renewables, and to develop geoengineering technologies to effectively manage both regional and global climate change. It’s somewhere on the scale closer to Y2K bug, not nuclear holocaust. But this climate change alarmism is causing our kids to develop acute anxiety and depression disorders, as Greta Thunberg has, which are totally misplaced, and I pity those kids and feel anger towards the adults in their lives that are doing psychological damage. The alarmism is also driving policy recommendations that would bring about global recession on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. If millennials think boomers gave them the short stick, wait until their children see what lack of opportunities they have from our misguided climate change policies. Edit: Lol, posted and within seconds a negative score. This is always what happens when you attempt to have a reasonable discussion about scientific facts and engineering trade-offs in climate change rather than an alarmist circle-jerk. I don’t know why I bother. Why do we let such important scientific topics become politicized?

adrianN 7y ago

The reefs are already lost unless you believe we manage to become carbon neutral before 2040 or so. At 2° almost all coral will die. Already at 1.5° the majority will die.