4 ms·
Coral Griefs: Finding Hope Amidst Loss
- johnspiralnew 6y agoThe lack of comments on this article are testament to how far removed most of hacker news' audience is from things that really count, i.e the survival of the planet we inhabit.
- lopmotr 6y ago> Nearly half a billion people rely on coral reefs for fish protein, says Sheppard, and climate change will kill many of them. Huh? People don't just lie down and die because their preferred food is gone. I've never heard of 100's of millions of people predicted to die because of coral bleaching. That seems a complete exaggeration. Unless by "many", he means "hardly any".
- i_cannot_hack 6y agoI think you misunderstood the sentence. I read it as "Nearly half a billion people rely on coral reefs for fish protein, says Sheppard, and climate change will kill many of [these reefs]"
- hannob 6y agoI think he means the fish, not the people.
- wffurr 6y agoIt is a poorly worded sentence, and the meaning isn't totally clear either. Climate change probably will kill people, especially vulnerable populations in low-lying areas.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoIf corals can only survive in a narrow temperature range, won’t they also spread to new places that were previously too cold?
- danielheath 6y agoCoral grows slowly; the Great Barrier Reef is over 6k years old. If the temperature keeps moving around, the coral isn't going to keep up.
- xwdv 6y agoWouldn’t this be a natural selection for the fastest growing coral? Or temperature resistant coral?
- wffurr 6y agoAnthropogenic climate forcing is happening at a rate similar to that of a major extinction event. Will natural selection take place and fill the gaps? Eventually. It can take millions of years for the ecosystem to recover from a serious disaster.
- xwdv 6y agoSo then why worry about it? Millions of years is a blink of an eye in geological time. Earth will recover, not be mortally wounded.
- wffurr 6y agoI don't live in geological time; I live in human civilization time. What's important to me is the continuance of humanity and our stewardship of the earth. I'd like to think we can do better than be ants that use up the fossil fuel reserve as fast as possible to make war on each other.
- Sharlin 6y agoIn the same way that, say, the Chicxulub impact and its consequences were natural selection for small and furry or feathered animals. Just give it a few hundred thousand years or so.
- faitswulff 6y ago