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Some corals regrow after 'fatal' warming

341 points by howard941 7y ago

NoblePublius 7y ago
Don’t tell Greta.
- Ardon 7y ago
  The article says the corals are regrowing in the period between heat waves, not that the coral reefs will survive global warming - or that temperatures are improving. Go ahead and tell Greta. Or tell the people who keep grasping by their fingernails for tiny instances where global warming isn’t as bad as it could be, they’re the ones who need it.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    Unfortunately this doesn't do anything for the people who believe that global warming is a geoengineered conspiracy, rather than the result of carbon emissions by industry.
    - gmuslera 7y ago
      They should learn about Hanlon's Razor. Anyway, the denialism movement could be described as a socialengineered conspiracy, and that part is pure malice.
      - nerdponx 7y ago
        Sadly it's the left-wing hippie version of the climate change denialism. Some choice quotes, in case you weren't aware of this weird and fascinating movement, which descended from Chemtrails-ism, demonstrating the truly bizarre cognitive dissonance involved: - "The earth is way too big for industry to affect the climate" - "The government has much more advanced technology than they will ever admit" - "There is no consensus among climate scientists that carbon can cause climate change" - "The media is lying to you, only a small vocal minority of climate scientists thinks that climate change is due to carbon emissions" - "This guy on Youtube is a climate scientist and he says HAARP can modify the weather! Why should I trust you and not a climate scientist? Why would this person lie?" The funny thing is that these people are typically hard-core environmentalists.
        nerdponx 7y ago
        Interesting wave of downvotes. Care to explain?
  - NoblePublius 7y ago
    Can’t hear you while crunching my Sweetgreen salad trucked to freezing New York with diesel fuel /shrug/
vangourd 7y ago
Global Warming politics aside as easily as a catastrophe can be pushed aside. Is anyone more informed able to explain how the KT Extinction event affected corals? How were they able to survive the mass extinction event of the dinosaurs if they're so sensitive to temperature changes?
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  Googling "coral kt extinction" gave me this BBC article- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45133197 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45133197 So it looks like either corals evolved after the KT extinction event or they survived in very small amounts (maybe a few species) before re-exploding in diversity after the extinction event. This can be seen in global warming today- some corals take to the hotter water better than other corals, and even some regions that have had hotter water historically have corals that aren't really affected, while the Great Barrier Reef and similar are undergoing a mass dying. EDIT: Also, deep water corals do exist, so it's possible they survived from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-water_coral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-water_coral
  - vangourd 7y ago
    Thank you for you response. I should have LBYL instead of EAFP
    - MichaelApproved 7y ago
      I hate acronyms so much. LBYL - Look Before You Leap EAFP - Easier to Ask Forgiveness than Permission
      - polycaster 7y ago
        Thank you very much
      - tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
        You must have really hated the early internet then!
iagovar 7y ago
Honestly this tastes like nothing. With phytoplankton, acidification and the threat of the methane trigger
- MichaelApproved 7y ago
  I’m having trouble understanding this comment. What are you trying to say?
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    That this will not be enough to survive long term. Those are really ancient animals in any case and know a few tricks.
- topmonk 7y ago
  Methane is a nothing burger. It breaks down so quickly it doesn't affect much.
  - sterkekoffie 7y ago
    It breaks down to form water and CO2...which are both greenhouse gases.
    - topmonk 7y ago
      Methane is measured in parts per billion, co2 in parts per million... So, what is your point?
  - brilee 7y ago
    Methane breaks down quickly, yes, but it also has a much, much more potent greenhouse effect. Taking both factors into account, releasing 1 ton of methane is estimated to be about equivalent to releasing 25 tons of CO2.
    - topmonk 7y ago
      Yes, but is the amount of methane released anywhere near the same as CO2? Hint: methane is measured in parts per billion, whereas co2 is measured in parts per million.
buboard 7y ago
I thought politics wasn’t allowed here
MichaelApproved 7y ago
> But the researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several years, growing back and starting a new skeleton. Is it that 38% use this method or they all try to use this method and only 38% are successful?
- dev_dull 7y ago
  Also, who’s to say they “developed” that? That makes it sound like they’re dealing with something completely new (fits into man-made climate change narrative). Is it possible that through millions of years of evolution the earth had many such warming experiences and they developed this technique well before we arrived on the scene?
  - sterkekoffie 7y ago
    If you'd RTA you'd have answered your question. We've long had evidence for this type of recovery happening. The problem is that the evidence is from the Paleozoic fossil record. It's vanishingly unlikely that /no/ corals ever undertook this process in the past 300 million years but it's not typical behavior and it's extremely significant that it's been observed in modern corals. We know that catastrophic climate change has occurred in the past. Climate scientists are not proposing this is new on a geological time scale. But it's new to us and to most extant species. We don't all have these tricks up our sleeves.
    - TearsInTheRain 7y ago
      It's not new to us and most extant species. There were several rapid ~10 C temperature changes at the end of the pleistocene period 10-15k years ago: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-proble...
gatestone 7y ago
Corals naturally suffer from many hazards, and they naturally recover. Climate change makes it worse. How much worse? I am not qualified to answer that. "...disturbances such as bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks are occurring more often, are longer-lasting and more severe. This means coral reefs have less time to recover..." https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-great-barrier-reefs-doom-are-exaggerated/news-story/500e73695109b027df6f5b4a8a398f80 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-gre...
- ColanR 7y ago
  > Climate change makes it worse. You should probably cite that.
  - neuronexmachina 7y ago
    I'm not the original commenter, but here's a citation: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralreef-climate.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralreef-climate.html > As temperatures rise, mass coral bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent. Additionally, carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean from the atmosphere has already begun to reduce calcification rates in reef-building and reef-associated organisms by altering seawater chemistry through decreases in pH. This process is called ocean acidification.
  - ehnto 7y ago
    Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. It isn't exactly a controversial opinion amongst people who believe in climate change. Here is a great summary from the Australian government, a government that is doing everything it can to worsen the situation yet at least acknowledges that it is something real and happening right now: http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climate-change http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climat...
    - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
      > Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to judge One of the arguments that I find compelling, from individuals who would advocate for a less dramatic reading of the climate news, is that there's A LOT MORE MONEY available for researchers to find out how bad the situation is & not a lot of money (or encouragement from peers) available for folks who consistently find that there's less reason for alarm. Bit of a confirmation bias, there? Maybe.
pvaldes 7y ago
Of course they do, but this is not the real question here. Zooxanthellae in temperate reef corals like C. Caespitosa are relativelly tolerant to temperature change. Tropical reef corals are machines infinitely more complicated. Having a lot of Acropora growing really fast is not necessarily a good symptom, for example.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  You say "of course they do" as though it's not a novel finding and "this is not the real question" as though this is the answer to a question and not a scientific finding. Neither is the case.
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    1) Bleaching in corals is not one disease. They are (at least) five different types associated to four different genuses of bacteria. All of them could be symptoms of another problem instead the real causes, as seen in research done in Oculina, the other ubiquitous species from Mediterranean Sea with Cladocora (see Ainsworth et al 2008). And there are other kinds of necrosis caused by viruses, echinoderms and polychaetes. That some species of corals at least can recover relatively fast after bleaching is know since... dunno, but probably since 80's at least. A bibliographic search should find early documents about it. Other species never bleach and other just die (Levas et al 2018) 2) The real juicy question to answer there, is not if corals bleach and recover, we knew that they do it since decades even if was not reported for Cladocora. The question is what corals bleach and what corals recover, in my not so humble opinion.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      1) OK, but I'm not sure how it pertains to your point that there are multiple causes of bleaching. 2) In this case, Cladocora caespitosa
      - pvaldes 7y ago
        Corals can recover from "bleaching" and can overgrow skeletonised areas (at some extent), but neither all bleaching cases are equal, nor all of the around 3500 species, if I remember correctly) of extant hard corals are equally resilient. The real cause of bleaching is unknown. Vibrio can invade the area and accelerate the killing of coral tissue, but is unclear if they are a cause of the disease or a secondary effect of the disease.
panpanna 7y ago
> I am not qualified to answer that. God I wish more people could admit that. Things would be much more sane then. For one, anti-vaxers would be far fewer Back to the subject, note that this was limited to some colonies and even there it will not be able to grow to any significant size.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  > For one, anti-vaxers would be far fewer probably the pro-vaxers, too
  - bluGill 7y ago
    If it weren't for the anti-vaxers I wouldn't have to become qualified: I'd just do what my doctor said. Instead I now need to become qualified so I can argue with all these idiots trying to spread diseased that could kill my kids before they are old enough to vaccinated. I have better things to do that learn about medical issues, but I've been forced to become semi-qualified. Now if I just knew of an effective way to argue with anti-vax idiots...
    - kls 7y ago
      You don't need to argue with them, vax your kids and let the anti's die of disease that you and your family are immune to. It is their choice and their freedom of choice. The info is out there if they choose to ignore it, it is their own peril. The part I find interesting is that they try to get other people to become anti-vaxers, when they are by effect more protected by heard immunity when the pool of none vaccinated is smaller.
      - bluGill 7y ago
        That doesn't work. Many vaccines are not effective if given at younger than 18 months so they are not given at all. Since I have another kid on the way there is a large window where my kid isn't protected unless everybody else is vaccinated and thus not spreading disease. Herd immunity works only if the herd is immune.
jboggan 7y ago
I've always wondered about this because corals have been around during much warmer and much more acidic periods in the ocean.
schnevets 7y ago
I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia. I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from "Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.
- zpallin 7y ago
  Yes, but the bigger question I think is if the majority of humans on earth will adapt and also "how well". A lot of environmentalists are misled by the promise to save endangered species: we won't. But can we save humanity from destroying our own habitats? That's why environmental measures for cleaner oceans, air, and living conditions matter. It's for us, and the other dying inhabitants of earth will benefit from this too. Edit: Okay, yes we've saved endangered species before. When I was growing up, Brown Pelicans were endangered along California's coast and we turned that around. But we won't save all the frogs, and we didn't save the northern white rhino. That's my point.
  - alluro2 7y ago
    I don't think anything can speak favorably about our impact on endangered species... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mammals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mam... That first graph sure is dramatic....
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      The vast majority of that first graph happened more than 1000 to 10000 years ago. Attention to endangered species seems to have only started 50 to 100 years ago. But you are right that our impact on endangered species is poor; only 28 species have recovered out of ~2000 listed in the US (according to the Wikipedia page for the Endangered Species Act of 1973).
- 7y ago
usebunsby 7y ago
Hmm. That's interesting.
sproketboy 7y ago
Environmentalists wrong again. It's a broken record now.
ping_pong 7y ago
We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected. Put me firmly in the camp of "we need to protect the environment at all costs" (ex. I believe that companies that pollute our waters should get shut down, I believe boats that produce massive amounts of pollution should be sunk by our navy, etc), but I also tend to no longer believe the click-bait headlines that our entire society is rife with. These headlines produced by journalists, not scientists, are the information that gets propagated and that is poisoning our society with misinformation.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gdubs 7y ago
  Well, maybe we should also read beyond headlines — because this article offers a glimmer of hope, but no guarantee that the world’s reefs will bounce back from the very real damage they’re being subjected to.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    Yes, exactly. It's like nobody read to the end of the article: "For sure, it's good news, but what we are seeing now in the Mediterranean Sea and other parts of the world is that these marine heat waves are recurrent—happening every summer or every second summer," Kersting said. These corals also grow very slowly—at a rate of about 3 millimeters a year—"so if you are having every second summer a heat wave, and it's killing 10 to 15 percent of the cover, I mean, the numbers are clear," he added. "They actually need help from us. We need to stop climate change, because it's not going to be enough." Global warming is just starting. Ocean temperatures are on an uptrend. If every human being disappeared right now, temperature would increase for decades.
    - WilTimSon 7y ago
      Even those who read the full article tend to gloss over the very real consequences that are being promised. It's part of people's nature to just try and suppress issues as long as possible because, hey, there's a marginally good thing happening, it's impossible for a bad thing to be happening as well, right? Depressing but it's not unusual when the news is a constant stream of darkness.
godshatter 7y ago
Taking a step back, coral reefs have been around in some form or other for at least 500 million years. I would be greatly surprised if they weren't resilient enough to survive a lot of things. That's not to say we shouldn't work to protect them, but it does make me skeptical that they could be lost as easily as we seem to be assuming.
- kls 7y ago
  They can and it truly is a huge risk at the moment, the problem is the AGW camp is trying to subvert the research for their gain which is a detriment to what we need to accomplish the fact is agricultural run off, and sunscreen micro metals are a creating toxins which the reefs are unprepared for, Which has caused massive deforestation of reefs in areas close to population centers. as well as more remote areas where said population or agricultural centers, waters off-spring over their reefs. These toxins are a new threat to coral and one that they have not seen before, time will tell if they can adapt but it is known that all of the mainland Florida reefs are now dead due to these toxins and have not regenerated since the 1980's when the last of them died off.
ummonk 7y ago
I've always wondered how coral reefs stuck around for hundreds of millions of years if they're so fragile and prone to death without recovery.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Also, the Earth's climate has been much, much warmer than today in the past.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    yes, but it usually changes over the course of thousands of years, not tens of years. In the past, coral migrated north and south to stay in the optimal temperature. There's not enough time for that at the scale of anthropogenic climate change.
    - masklinn 7y ago
      > yes, but it usually changes over the course of thousands of years The scale we're observing right now is the stuff of millions of years of change, or massive extinction events.
      - hannasanarion 7y ago
        Yeah, exactly. If the change happens as fast as it is happening, you get a mass extinction. If the change happens over thousands of years, biomes have time to migrate. Using the xkcd timeline as a guide, the temperature change in the last 120 years is about the size of the temperature change between 11,000 and 9,000 BC, which was only mildly disruptive to global ecology.
    - garmaine 7y ago
      So move the coral.
      - pvaldes 7y ago
bagswatchesus 7y ago
That all depends on perspective. If you look at a big enough time frame- humans can be considered almost irrelevant. https://www.bvguccibags.com/handbags/womens-gucci-bags.html https://www.bvguccibags.com/handbags/womens-gucci-bags.html
sillydinosaur 7y ago
Buy this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
- Vaslo 7y ago
  Looks like typical far left “replace religion with climate science” and then attack things like Capitalism while we’re at it.
  - sillydinosaur 7y ago
    Uhh..."replace religion with climate science"? You mean you don't believe in science? WAT?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Razengan 7y ago
The planet is going to be fine. It will still be here a billion years from now. We will be gone just as the dinosaurs before us. The universe cares about our fate just as much as we care about some random star in the night sky, and frankly, if we're collectively going to remain as self-defeating as we are, I don't care about our fate either. I just hope I get to respawn somewhere else.
- mikeatlas 7y ago
  No, in a few billion years, the planet will be engulfed by the enlarged, dying sun. https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-giant.html https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-giant.ht...
  - Razengan 7y ago
    "This will last for another 4.5 – 5.5 billion years" right in TFA..and I did mean A billion :)
underbluewaters 7y ago
I'm seeing a lot of comments speculating on how coral reefs got along for hundreds of millions of years. While coral species have existed for this long, that is not how long these ecosystems have existed. What we think of as coral reefs have only been around for ~24 million years. This tweet has a nice diagram and pointers to resources: https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512 https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512
- peter303 7y ago
  Then they would have missed the Eocene hyperthermal 55.2 million years ago a rapid 5 to 8 C warmup due to a huge influx of carbon into the atmosphere (8 to 20 times all human activity). Its not known where all this carbon came from yet.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - lowken10 7y ago
    It came from the ocean after the ocean was heated by the sun.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  24 million years is still ~6-10x as long as hominids have been around, and ~70x as long as Homo Sapiens has walked the earth.
MikeGale 7y ago
Very interesting. Read a 2012 study a few days ago on what kills coral. Have not found a more recent follow up yet. (I was snorkelling on the reef a few days ago, the parts I saw looked pretty good, so wanted to find out more.) They studied a fair number of reefs, on the Great Barrier / Coral Sea area. My quick summary, from memory, about half of reef coral "cover" damaged at that time. Only 10% from bleaching, the rest split between cyclone damage and crown of thorns. Their conclusion, if crown of thorns are eliminated the reefs will recover naturally. Fortunately in my 3 days of snorkelling I didn't see a single crown of thorns. The crown killing operation is hopefully that effective on most of the reef.

341 points by howard941 7y ago

NoblePublius 7y ago

Don’t tell Greta.

Ardon 7y ago
The article says the corals are regrowing in the period between heat waves, not that the coral reefs will survive global warming - or that temperatures are improving. Go ahead and tell Greta. Or tell the people who keep grasping by their fingernails for tiny instances where global warming isn’t as bad as it could be, they’re the ones who need it.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Unfortunately this doesn't do anything for the people who believe that global warming is a geoengineered conspiracy, rather than the result of carbon emissions by industry.
  - gmuslera 7y ago
    They should learn about Hanlon's Razor. Anyway, the denialism movement could be described as a socialengineered conspiracy, and that part is pure malice.
    - nerdponx 7y ago
      Sadly it's the left-wing hippie version of the climate change denialism. Some choice quotes, in case you weren't aware of this weird and fascinating movement, which descended from Chemtrails-ism, demonstrating the truly bizarre cognitive dissonance involved: - "The earth is way too big for industry to affect the climate" - "The government has much more advanced technology than they will ever admit" - "There is no consensus among climate scientists that carbon can cause climate change" - "The media is lying to you, only a small vocal minority of climate scientists thinks that climate change is due to carbon emissions" - "This guy on Youtube is a climate scientist and he says HAARP can modify the weather! Why should I trust you and not a climate scientist? Why would this person lie?" The funny thing is that these people are typically hard-core environmentalists.
      - nerdponx 7y ago
        Interesting wave of downvotes. Care to explain?
- NoblePublius 7y ago
  Can’t hear you while crunching my Sweetgreen salad trucked to freezing New York with diesel fuel /shrug/

vangourd 7y ago

Global Warming politics aside as easily as a catastrophe can be pushed aside. Is anyone more informed able to explain how the KT Extinction event affected corals? How were they able to survive the mass extinction event of the dinosaurs if they're so sensitive to temperature changes?

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
Googling "coral kt extinction" gave me this BBC article- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45133197 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45133197 So it looks like either corals evolved after the KT extinction event or they survived in very small amounts (maybe a few species) before re-exploding in diversity after the extinction event. This can be seen in global warming today- some corals take to the hotter water better than other corals, and even some regions that have had hotter water historically have corals that aren't really affected, while the Great Barrier Reef and similar are undergoing a mass dying. EDIT: Also, deep water corals do exist, so it's possible they survived from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-water_coral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-water_coral
- vangourd 7y ago
  Thank you for you response. I should have LBYL instead of EAFP
  - MichaelApproved 7y ago
    I hate acronyms so much. LBYL - Look Before You Leap EAFP - Easier to Ask Forgiveness than Permission
    - polycaster 7y ago
      Thank you very much
    - tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
      You must have really hated the early internet then!

iagovar 7y ago

Honestly this tastes like nothing. With phytoplankton, acidification and the threat of the methane trigger

MichaelApproved 7y ago
I’m having trouble understanding this comment. What are you trying to say?
- pvaldes 7y ago
  That this will not be enough to survive long term. Those are really ancient animals in any case and know a few tricks.
topmonk 7y ago
Methane is a nothing burger. It breaks down so quickly it doesn't affect much.
- sterkekoffie 7y ago
  It breaks down to form water and CO2...which are both greenhouse gases.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    Methane is measured in parts per billion, co2 in parts per million... So, what is your point?
- brilee 7y ago
  Methane breaks down quickly, yes, but it also has a much, much more potent greenhouse effect. Taking both factors into account, releasing 1 ton of methane is estimated to be about equivalent to releasing 25 tons of CO2.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    Yes, but is the amount of methane released anywhere near the same as CO2? Hint: methane is measured in parts per billion, whereas co2 is measured in parts per million.

buboard 7y ago

I thought politics wasn’t allowed here

MichaelApproved 7y ago

> But the researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several years, growing back and starting a new skeleton. Is it that 38% use this method or they all try to use this method and only 38% are successful?

dev_dull 7y ago
Also, who’s to say they “developed” that? That makes it sound like they’re dealing with something completely new (fits into man-made climate change narrative). Is it possible that through millions of years of evolution the earth had many such warming experiences and they developed this technique well before we arrived on the scene?
- sterkekoffie 7y ago
  If you'd RTA you'd have answered your question. We've long had evidence for this type of recovery happening. The problem is that the evidence is from the Paleozoic fossil record. It's vanishingly unlikely that /no/ corals ever undertook this process in the past 300 million years but it's not typical behavior and it's extremely significant that it's been observed in modern corals. We know that catastrophic climate change has occurred in the past. Climate scientists are not proposing this is new on a geological time scale. But it's new to us and to most extant species. We don't all have these tricks up our sleeves.
  - TearsInTheRain 7y ago
    It's not new to us and most extant species. There were several rapid ~10 C temperature changes at the end of the pleistocene period 10-15k years ago: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-proble...

gatestone 7y ago

Corals naturally suffer from many hazards, and they naturally recover. Climate change makes it worse. How much worse? I am not qualified to answer that. "...disturbances such as bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks are occurring more often, are longer-lasting and more severe. This means coral reefs have less time to recover..." https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-great-barrier-reefs-doom-are-exaggerated/news-story/500e73695109b027df6f5b4a8a398f80 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-gre...

ColanR 7y ago
> Climate change makes it worse. You should probably cite that.
- neuronexmachina 7y ago
  I'm not the original commenter, but here's a citation: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralreef-climate.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralreef-climate.html > As temperatures rise, mass coral bleaching events and infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent. Additionally, carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean from the atmosphere has already begun to reduce calcification rates in reef-building and reef-associated organisms by altering seawater chemistry through decreases in pH. This process is called ocean acidification.
- ehnto 7y ago
  Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. It isn't exactly a controversial opinion amongst people who believe in climate change. Here is a great summary from the Australian government, a government that is doing everything it can to worsen the situation yet at least acknowledges that it is something real and happening right now: http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climate-change http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climat...
  - tossAfterUsing 7y ago
    > Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to judge One of the arguments that I find compelling, from individuals who would advocate for a less dramatic reading of the climate news, is that there's A LOT MORE MONEY available for researchers to find out how bad the situation is & not a lot of money (or encouragement from peers) available for folks who consistently find that there's less reason for alarm. Bit of a confirmation bias, there? Maybe.

pvaldes 7y ago

Of course they do, but this is not the real question here. Zooxanthellae in temperate reef corals like C. Caespitosa are relativelly tolerant to temperature change. Tropical reef corals are machines infinitely more complicated. Having a lot of Acropora growing really fast is not necessarily a good symptom, for example.

boomlinde 7y ago
You say "of course they do" as though it's not a novel finding and "this is not the real question" as though this is the answer to a question and not a scientific finding. Neither is the case.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  1) Bleaching in corals is not one disease. They are (at least) five different types associated to four different genuses of bacteria. All of them could be symptoms of another problem instead the real causes, as seen in research done in Oculina, the other ubiquitous species from Mediterranean Sea with Cladocora (see Ainsworth et al 2008). And there are other kinds of necrosis caused by viruses, echinoderms and polychaetes. That some species of corals at least can recover relatively fast after bleaching is know since... dunno, but probably since 80's at least. A bibliographic search should find early documents about it. Other species never bleach and other just die (Levas et al 2018) 2) The real juicy question to answer there, is not if corals bleach and recover, we knew that they do it since decades even if was not reported for Cladocora. The question is what corals bleach and what corals recover, in my not so humble opinion.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    1) OK, but I'm not sure how it pertains to your point that there are multiple causes of bleaching. 2) In this case, Cladocora caespitosa
    - pvaldes 7y ago
      Corals can recover from "bleaching" and can overgrow skeletonised areas (at some extent), but neither all bleaching cases are equal, nor all of the around 3500 species, if I remember correctly) of extant hard corals are equally resilient. The real cause of bleaching is unknown. Vibrio can invade the area and accelerate the killing of coral tissue, but is unclear if they are a cause of the disease or a secondary effect of the disease.

panpanna 7y ago

> I am not qualified to answer that. God I wish more people could admit that. Things would be much more sane then. For one, anti-vaxers would be far fewer Back to the subject, note that this was limited to some colonies and even there it will not be able to grow to any significant size.

tossAfterUsing 7y ago
> For one, anti-vaxers would be far fewer probably the pro-vaxers, too
- bluGill 7y ago
  If it weren't for the anti-vaxers I wouldn't have to become qualified: I'd just do what my doctor said. Instead I now need to become qualified so I can argue with all these idiots trying to spread diseased that could kill my kids before they are old enough to vaccinated. I have better things to do that learn about medical issues, but I've been forced to become semi-qualified. Now if I just knew of an effective way to argue with anti-vax idiots...
  - kls 7y ago
    You don't need to argue with them, vax your kids and let the anti's die of disease that you and your family are immune to. It is their choice and their freedom of choice. The info is out there if they choose to ignore it, it is their own peril. The part I find interesting is that they try to get other people to become anti-vaxers, when they are by effect more protected by heard immunity when the pool of none vaccinated is smaller.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      That doesn't work. Many vaccines are not effective if given at younger than 18 months so they are not given at all. Since I have another kid on the way there is a large window where my kid isn't protected unless everybody else is vaccinated and thus not spreading disease. Herd immunity works only if the herd is immune.

jboggan 7y ago

I've always wondered about this because corals have been around during much warmer and much more acidic periods in the ocean.

schnevets 7y ago

I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia. I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from "Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.

zpallin 7y ago
Yes, but the bigger question I think is if the majority of humans on earth will adapt and also "how well". A lot of environmentalists are misled by the promise to save endangered species: we won't. But can we save humanity from destroying our own habitats? That's why environmental measures for cleaner oceans, air, and living conditions matter. It's for us, and the other dying inhabitants of earth will benefit from this too. Edit: Okay, yes we've saved endangered species before. When I was growing up, Brown Pelicans were endangered along California's coast and we turned that around. But we won't save all the frogs, and we didn't save the northern white rhino. That's my point.
- alluro2 7y ago
  I don't think anything can speak favorably about our impact on endangered species... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mammals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mam... That first graph sure is dramatic....
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    The vast majority of that first graph happened more than 1000 to 10000 years ago. Attention to endangered species seems to have only started 50 to 100 years ago. But you are right that our impact on endangered species is poor; only 28 species have recovered out of ~2000 listed in the US (according to the Wikipedia page for the Endangered Species Act of 1973).
7y ago

usebunsby 7y ago

Hmm. That's interesting.

sproketboy 7y ago

Environmentalists wrong again. It's a broken record now.

ping_pong 7y ago

We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected. Put me firmly in the camp of "we need to protect the environment at all costs" (ex. I believe that companies that pollute our waters should get shut down, I believe boats that produce massive amounts of pollution should be sunk by our navy, etc), but I also tend to no longer believe the click-bait headlines that our entire society is rife with. These headlines produced by journalists, not scientists, are the information that gets propagated and that is poisoning our society with misinformation.

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gdubs 7y ago
Well, maybe we should also read beyond headlines — because this article offers a glimmer of hope, but no guarantee that the world’s reefs will bounce back from the very real damage they’re being subjected to.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Yes, exactly. It's like nobody read to the end of the article: "For sure, it's good news, but what we are seeing now in the Mediterranean Sea and other parts of the world is that these marine heat waves are recurrent—happening every summer or every second summer," Kersting said. These corals also grow very slowly—at a rate of about 3 millimeters a year—"so if you are having every second summer a heat wave, and it's killing 10 to 15 percent of the cover, I mean, the numbers are clear," he added. "They actually need help from us. We need to stop climate change, because it's not going to be enough." Global warming is just starting. Ocean temperatures are on an uptrend. If every human being disappeared right now, temperature would increase for decades.
  - WilTimSon 7y ago
    Even those who read the full article tend to gloss over the very real consequences that are being promised. It's part of people's nature to just try and suppress issues as long as possible because, hey, there's a marginally good thing happening, it's impossible for a bad thing to be happening as well, right? Depressing but it's not unusual when the news is a constant stream of darkness.

godshatter 7y ago

Taking a step back, coral reefs have been around in some form or other for at least 500 million years. I would be greatly surprised if they weren't resilient enough to survive a lot of things. That's not to say we shouldn't work to protect them, but it does make me skeptical that they could be lost as easily as we seem to be assuming.

kls 7y ago
They can and it truly is a huge risk at the moment, the problem is the AGW camp is trying to subvert the research for their gain which is a detriment to what we need to accomplish the fact is agricultural run off, and sunscreen micro metals are a creating toxins which the reefs are unprepared for, Which has caused massive deforestation of reefs in areas close to population centers. as well as more remote areas where said population or agricultural centers, waters off-spring over their reefs. These toxins are a new threat to coral and one that they have not seen before, time will tell if they can adapt but it is known that all of the mainland Florida reefs are now dead due to these toxins and have not regenerated since the 1980's when the last of them died off.

ummonk 7y ago

I've always wondered how coral reefs stuck around for hundreds of millions of years if they're so fragile and prone to death without recovery.

garmaine 7y ago
Also, the Earth's climate has been much, much warmer than today in the past.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  yes, but it usually changes over the course of thousands of years, not tens of years. In the past, coral migrated north and south to stay in the optimal temperature. There's not enough time for that at the scale of anthropogenic climate change.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    > yes, but it usually changes over the course of thousands of years The scale we're observing right now is the stuff of millions of years of change, or massive extinction events.
    - hannasanarion 7y ago
      Yeah, exactly. If the change happens as fast as it is happening, you get a mass extinction. If the change happens over thousands of years, biomes have time to migrate. Using the xkcd timeline as a guide, the temperature change in the last 120 years is about the size of the temperature change between 11,000 and 9,000 BC, which was only mildly disruptive to global ecology.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    So move the coral.
    - pvaldes 7y ago

bagswatchesus 7y ago

That all depends on perspective. If you look at a big enough time frame- humans can be considered almost irrelevant. https://www.bvguccibags.com/handbags/womens-gucci-bags.html https://www.bvguccibags.com/handbags/womens-gucci-bags.html

sillydinosaur 7y ago

Buy this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Vaslo 7y ago
Looks like typical far left “replace religion with climate science” and then attack things like Capitalism while we’re at it.
- sillydinosaur 7y ago
  Uhh..."replace religion with climate science"? You mean you don't believe in science? WAT?

deleted 7y ago

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Razengan 7y ago

The planet is going to be fine. It will still be here a billion years from now. We will be gone just as the dinosaurs before us. The universe cares about our fate just as much as we care about some random star in the night sky, and frankly, if we're collectively going to remain as self-defeating as we are, I don't care about our fate either. I just hope I get to respawn somewhere else.

mikeatlas 7y ago
No, in a few billion years, the planet will be engulfed by the enlarged, dying sun. https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-giant.html https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-giant.ht...
- Razengan 7y ago
  "This will last for another 4.5 – 5.5 billion years" right in TFA..and I did mean A billion :)

underbluewaters 7y ago

I'm seeing a lot of comments speculating on how coral reefs got along for hundreds of millions of years. While coral species have existed for this long, that is not how long these ecosystems have existed. What we think of as coral reefs have only been around for ~24 million years. This tweet has a nice diagram and pointers to resources: https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512 https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512

peter303 7y ago
Then they would have missed the Eocene hyperthermal 55.2 million years ago a rapid 5 to 8 C warmup due to a huge influx of carbon into the atmosphere (8 to 20 times all human activity). Its not known where all this carbon came from yet.
- deleted 7y ago
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- lowken10 7y ago
  It came from the ocean after the ocean was heated by the sun.
pmiller2 7y ago
24 million years is still ~6-10x as long as hominids have been around, and ~70x as long as Homo Sapiens has walked the earth.

MikeGale 7y ago

Very interesting. Read a 2012 study a few days ago on what kills coral. Have not found a more recent follow up yet. (I was snorkelling on the reef a few days ago, the parts I saw looked pretty good, so wanted to find out more.) They studied a fair number of reefs, on the Great Barrier / Coral Sea area. My quick summary, from memory, about half of reef coral "cover" damaged at that time. Only 10% from bleaching, the rest split between cyclone damage and crown of thorns. Their conclusion, if crown of thorns are eliminated the reefs will recover naturally. Fortunately in my 3 days of snorkelling I didn't see a single crown of thorns. The crown killing operation is hopefully that effective on most of the reef.