9 ms·

Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

211 points by WaitWaitWha 4y ago

radiojasper 4y ago
One big ad-infested crapshoot. Here's a better version: https://archive.ph/dF3F3 https://archive.ph/dF3F3
cyberlurker 4y ago
I felt this article left some things unexplained, like what is a mass bleaching event? The wikipedia article on Coral Bleaching is excellent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching Also, cool note on the economics: “Experts estimate that coral reef services are worth up to $1.2 million per hectare which translates to an average of $172 billion per year.” Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD?
- contingencies 4y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=172aud+in+usd https://www.google.com/search?q=172aud+in+usd I'd add that the recent recovery has been used by some climate change deniers as justification for ignoring the bigger picture, a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. I too dove on the reef in the early 1990s and have seen no reef of that caliber since, anywhere.
  - gedy 4y ago
    > a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
    - h0l0cube 4y ago
      > While I understand per capita for fairness It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - steve_adams_86 4y ago
        I wonder. Is it possible to extrapolate emissions based on imports in a meaningful way? Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions? Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with. You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.
        h0l0cube 4y ago
        That link from Our World in Data provides it methodology: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 From a cursory googling it seems that 'consumption-based accounting' is something that is being heavily researched, and we need to start distinguishing it from the simplistic and flawed 'production-based accounting' in the press, and in political discourse.
        contingencies 4y ago
        Awesome idea. Execute. Could start with the existing system of international cargo categories and order of magnitude production emissions and packing assumptions based upon standard containers (refrigerated or 40" TEU or whatever). Then add trucking, storage and distribution metrics.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Are the reefs back to 1990s quality? this makes it seem like they are
    - boffinAudio 4y ago
      They are not, and won't be for another 1000 years .. after we are gone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- skissane 4y ago
  > Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD? About USD 120 billion. I’m always sceptical of these claims in the media that economists say that something “could be worth up to $X billion/year” or “X costs the economy $Y billion/year”. They are based on assumptions, whose veracity may be unknowable-if not just totally unrealistic; and the error bars on such estimates must be huge, but many journalists will only cite the upper error bar.
  - alanbernstein 4y ago
    That's fair, but I have to assume it's better than the alternative, which is allowing everyone to maintain the implicit assumption that the value is 0. The point of these claims is to try to get people to understand that climate destruction events have meaning, and if negative economic effects are the most straightforward way to explain that, then so be it.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      I fear that, on the contrary, such inaccurate claims may do more harm than good. When people are confronted with claims whose accuracy can easily be doubted, they may conclude that everything else is also exaggerated.
- coryrc 4y ago
  Maybe it's the value of the ongoing coral harvesting? /s https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/22/coral-harvesting-on-the-great-barrier-reef-continues-at-100-tonnes-a-year/ https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/22/coral-harvesting-on-the-gr... At least it seems they've stopped wholesale grinding it up for fertilizer.
grecy 4y ago
Coincidentally I went diving on the GBR last week, and from personal observation, it's in way, way, way worse condition that it was 20 years ago. There are massive sections of bleached coral, huge dead patches and way less fish life. Here's how it looked last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had ever asked UNESCO to be removed before). Though they failed, they are dredging all around it as close as possible, and the run-off from all the intensive mono-crop farming on the mainland is not helping either.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Incredibly depressing. Wow
  - ioseph 4y ago
    Not to try discount the damage (as someone who grew up in North Queensland it's absolutely heart breaking) but coral often looks worse/dead on camera. This is because of the colour shift as you you go deeper into water, a red filter (or light sourcee) is needed to capture the colours as you're seeing them.
- bigbaguette 4y ago
  And in the meantime, Victoria passes laws raising penalties for environmental protesters at logging sites. For the safety of workers they say.
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    Australia is just a few steps away from V for Vendetta.
    - prawn 4y ago
      I think the pot is boiling us frogs a lot, lot slower than that.
codefreeordie 4y ago
When I was last in Australia, back in 2019, I spent a bit of time out at the reef with local-run dive boat. On the way out, I was chatting with the crew, and they were talking about how exciting it was that some of the conservation efforts were really paying off finally. They were saying that some of the spots they visit were finally visibly improving over time rather than bleaching over time basically for the first time since they started running trips out on the reef. Of course, if the water temperature rises enough, or if the ocean acidifies enough, the conservation efforts will stop being enough to make a difference, but for now it's nice to see the recovery underway.
- somishere 4y ago
  No offense, but whoever you were speaking to was telling whoppers. Conservation efforts on the Great Barrier Reef are extremely limited in both scope and success. [Edit] Sorry, not meaning to be overly negative. Happy to provide further detail of the efforts in place if you let me know where you were!
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Could it be adapting? Standard wisdom has always seemed to be it's a sensitive niche of incredible biological complexity. Couldn't such a system be smarter than we think and evolve to meet climate change?
- somishere 4y ago
  More likely biodiversity will reduce in the north and key species will simply begin moving south
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  From the fact check posted in another comment: > Palumbi added: “Coral cover is actually slightly lower than normal levels in the north, central and southern parts of the huge reef. But coral diversity hasn’t recovered - the increase of cover is due to a set of very fast-growing species. Like a forest of fast-growing trees, not the normal oaks.” > There are many varieties of coral on the reef, with hard coral cover of huge significance to marine scientists. > Pointing to a study (here), President of the International Coral Reef Society (coralreefs.org/) Andrea Grottoli, says, “Australia is at record low of hard coral cover (see Ch 2, page 8), most of this decline due to declines on the GBR.” https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans-idUSL2N2XI1NV https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rr888 4y ago
I've seen this reported a lot with lots of climate change deniers triumphing. I'm not really sure what is going on. The AJ article has more detail including: “While the coral cover is similar to what it was in the 1980s, people should not believe in any way that that means conditions on the reef are the same as they were in the 1980s,” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/4/parts-of-australias-great-barrier-reef-shows-fragile-comeback https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/4/parts-of-australias-...
- stephen_g 4y ago
  We have had an unusually cold summer and winter here in Queensland this year, I expect due to the La Niña weather pattern. Unfortunately, once that breaks, we’ll probably be back to the more and more frequent bleaching events again. I’m surprised the deniers haven’t started trumpeting “global cooling” again like last time we had a couple of unusually cool outlier years…
sacrosancty 4y ago
Haha, this is a hilarious political issue, as evidenced by the existence of fact-checks on it. For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans-idUSL2N2XI1NV https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans... People have their politics entwined with whether or not it recovers.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  I don't know what there is to fact-check. Two decades of increased coral cover doesn't mean it's a comeback, the National Bureau of Coral Research hasn't certified an official comeback yet.
pabs3 4y ago
This is apparently only for one particular kind of fast-growing coral, which means coral diversity is lower and that makes the reef more vulnerable to damage and less supportive of the wider ecosystem: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-report-says-coral-recovering-after-bleaching/101296186 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...
- BariumBlue 4y ago
  I wonder if, like forests, corals tend to colonize an area first with fast growing species, which then get slowly replaced by longer lived species (forest succession). I understand that it takes a while for a forest to go from clean-field to a fully matured forest though.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    As with the loss of old-growth forests that's happening today, we risk species loss, and hence biodiversity. Re-population is predicated on an extant population, a return to suitable conditions, and for the pioneer species to die off. The problem is that, in sustained adverse conditions, the pioneer species may outlive the surviving population of the threatened species.
  - ggm 4y ago
    The faster growing kind is highly susceptible to the crown of thorns starfish so this causes a cycle of explosive growth in the starfish population, which in turn kills the coral it feeds off.
  - snickmy 4y ago
    TIL : https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2016/04/forest-succession-and-management/#:~:text=Forest%20succession%20is%20simply%20the,allowing%20longer%20lived%20plants%20dominance https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2016/04/forest-succession-and....
  - jrslv 4y ago
    Yes, the branching corals are the fast-growing early colonisers. The habitat they create is attractive for fish and invertebrates. Together they make up a reef ecosystem. The resilient reef-building massive corals typically appear on the reef later and grow much slower.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
what-imright 4y ago
After all that noise that vocal minority made, they were simply wrong. Didn’t check their facts, predicted incorrectly, wasted everyones time and desecrated our freedoms with do good save the children socialist laws. pfft
harry8 4y ago
Nowhere in this article or discussion is any mention of the extremely relevant farm runoff pollution. Particularly from cotton farms. Any progress there? I don't have the answer. There are many aspects to reef conservation. Looking at one aspect in total isolation and claiming anything at all about it with respect the health of the reef is just idiotic. There would have been very, very little reef tourism over the past two years. Any effect from that? There will be others as well. And right there is the risk of using "The reef is nearly dead because global warming" scare campaign lies to try and motivate people to do the right thing. It backfires and ends up encouraging people not to care because they've heard this chicken little stuff before. Lying for the greater good and those who do it just need to be treated with something beyond contempt. Context: I'm pretty worried about global warming and have been hearing the reef is nearly dead because global warming for decades now. I've become totally cynical about the reef being used as evidence of global warming for good reason - and it may well be under very deep threat because of global warming. Just stop with the damn lies.
- mcswell 4y ago
  The reefs off the American Florida Keys have apparently been deteriorating for some years now. A study was done by researchers at a Florida university on why, with the expectation that the primary cause would be global warming. It was not. The main cause was apparently nutrient-rich runoff from south Florida agriculture and fertilized lawns. (Nutrients lead to increased growth of algae and other non-coral things, things which are not good in large quantities for coral.) And the good news is that this kind of runoff is easier to fix than global warming. My fear is that when everything can so easily (and semi-plausibly) be blamed on global warming, no one will look for other causes. ICO coral reefs, those might include runoff, but also over-fishing, over-touristing, dumping or leakage of sewage and trash and oil off boats, and even reportedly sun screen worn by those tourists. And studies like the one above will not get done, because everyone "knows" what the problem is, so the environment--the reefs, in this example--will get worse when they could get better.
- somishere 4y ago
  AFAIK not a lot of cotton farming going on in reef catchment areas. There is lots of sugar cane and bananas however. Also lots of deforestation for grazing. Plus major resource export ports (LNG, coal). Regardless, runoff remains a major topic and there is some progress being made in the space [1]. Regards the article. If you look to the report itself[2] you'll see that this isn't a "she'll be right" triumph of science over scare campaigns. Climate change sits at the top of a growing list of concerns. The summary specifically mentions increased frequency of both marine heatwaves (that lead to bleaching) and major destructive weather events like cyclones. The other serious concern is crown-of-thorns starfish (a sea star that eats coral) ... and while the jury may still be out on the cause of their outbreaks (overfishing of predators? excess nutrients? changing environment?), the effect of this single species on the broader ecosystem is beyond frightening to witness. It's extremely difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the threats to the reef without getting into the weeds. The "scare" campaigns may be light on detail, glossing over (or ignoring) much of the important nuance, but (for the most part) they aren't wrong. [1] https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/declining-water-quality https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/decli... [2] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-condition-summary-2021-22 https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...
eric4smith 4y ago
No doubt that human activity changes things like the climate and the sea. But life finds a way. (Always).
semerda 4y ago
Isn't Adani coal mine meant to start commercial-scale coal mining soon? It's right next to the Great Barrier Reef. "From there, container ships will weave their way through the Great Barrier Reef and out to India and other customers, where the coal will be burned in power stations." https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/energy/carmichael-approval-a-death-knell-for-the-great-barrier-reef-65498 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/energy/carmichael-approv... Glad our governments care so much about the environment.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  Isn't that comeback proof enough that all this environmentalism is hoax and we can do whatever we want to this planet and it will be fine? Also you sure don't want people to freeze and earn a living.. (Sorry, was just missing such a comment here yet.)

211 points by WaitWaitWha 4y ago

One big ad-infested crapshoot. Here's a better version: https://archive.ph/dF3F3 https://archive.ph/dF3F3

I felt this article left some things unexplained, like what is a mass bleaching event? The wikipedia article on Coral Bleaching is excellent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching Also, cool note on the economics: “Experts estimate that coral reef services are worth up to $1.2 million per hectare which translates to an average of $172 billion per year.” Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD?

contingencies 4y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=172aud+in+usd https://www.google.com/search?q=172aud+in+usd I'd add that the recent recovery has been used by some climate change deniers as justification for ignoring the bigger picture, a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. I too dove on the reef in the early 1990s and have seen no reef of that caliber since, anywhere.
- gedy 4y ago
  > a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    > While I understand per capita for fairness It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      I wonder. Is it possible to extrapolate emissions based on imports in a meaningful way? Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions? Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with. You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.
      - h0l0cube 4y ago
        That link from Our World in Data provides it methodology: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 From a cursory googling it seems that 'consumption-based accounting' is something that is being heavily researched, and we need to start distinguishing it from the simplistic and flawed 'production-based accounting' in the press, and in political discourse.
      - contingencies 4y ago
        Awesome idea. Execute. Could start with the existing system of international cargo categories and order of magnitude production emissions and packing assumptions based upon standard containers (refrigerated or 40" TEU or whatever). Then add trucking, storage and distribution metrics.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Are the reefs back to 1990s quality? this makes it seem like they are
  - boffinAudio 4y ago
    They are not, and won't be for another 1000 years .. after we are gone.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skissane 4y ago
> Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD? About USD 120 billion. I’m always sceptical of these claims in the media that economists say that something “could be worth up to $X billion/year” or “X costs the economy $Y billion/year”. They are based on assumptions, whose veracity may be unknowable-if not just totally unrealistic; and the error bars on such estimates must be huge, but many journalists will only cite the upper error bar.
- alanbernstein 4y ago
  That's fair, but I have to assume it's better than the alternative, which is allowing everyone to maintain the implicit assumption that the value is 0. The point of these claims is to try to get people to understand that climate destruction events have meaning, and if negative economic effects are the most straightforward way to explain that, then so be it.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    I fear that, on the contrary, such inaccurate claims may do more harm than good. When people are confronted with claims whose accuracy can easily be doubted, they may conclude that everything else is also exaggerated.
coryrc 4y ago
Maybe it's the value of the ongoing coral harvesting? /s https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/22/coral-harvesting-on-the-great-barrier-reef-continues-at-100-tonnes-a-year/ https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/22/coral-harvesting-on-the-gr... At least it seems they've stopped wholesale grinding it up for fertilizer.

grecy 4y ago

Coincidentally I went diving on the GBR last week, and from personal observation, it's in way, way, way worse condition that it was 20 years ago. There are massive sections of bleached coral, huge dead patches and way less fish life. Here's how it looked last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had ever asked UNESCO to be removed before). Though they failed, they are dredging all around it as close as possible, and the run-off from all the intensive mono-crop farming on the mainland is not helping either.

bamboozled 4y ago
Incredibly depressing. Wow
- ioseph 4y ago
  Not to try discount the damage (as someone who grew up in North Queensland it's absolutely heart breaking) but coral often looks worse/dead on camera. This is because of the colour shift as you you go deeper into water, a red filter (or light sourcee) is needed to capture the colours as you're seeing them.
bigbaguette 4y ago
And in the meantime, Victoria passes laws raising penalties for environmental protesters at logging sites. For the safety of workers they say.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  Australia is just a few steps away from V for Vendetta.
  - prawn 4y ago
    I think the pot is boiling us frogs a lot, lot slower than that.

codefreeordie 4y ago

When I was last in Australia, back in 2019, I spent a bit of time out at the reef with local-run dive boat. On the way out, I was chatting with the crew, and they were talking about how exciting it was that some of the conservation efforts were really paying off finally. They were saying that some of the spots they visit were finally visibly improving over time rather than bleaching over time basically for the first time since they started running trips out on the reef. Of course, if the water temperature rises enough, or if the ocean acidifies enough, the conservation efforts will stop being enough to make a difference, but for now it's nice to see the recovery underway.

somishere 4y ago
No offense, but whoever you were speaking to was telling whoppers. Conservation efforts on the Great Barrier Reef are extremely limited in both scope and success. [Edit] Sorry, not meaning to be overly negative. Happy to provide further detail of the efforts in place if you let me know where you were!

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Could it be adapting? Standard wisdom has always seemed to be it's a sensitive niche of incredible biological complexity. Couldn't such a system be smarter than we think and evolve to meet climate change?

somishere 4y ago
More likely biodiversity will reduce in the north and key species will simply begin moving south
h0l0cube 4y ago
From the fact check posted in another comment: > Palumbi added: “Coral cover is actually slightly lower than normal levels in the north, central and southern parts of the huge reef. But coral diversity hasn’t recovered - the increase of cover is due to a set of very fast-growing species. Like a forest of fast-growing trees, not the normal oaks.” > There are many varieties of coral on the reef, with hard coral cover of huge significance to marine scientists. > Pointing to a study (here), President of the International Coral Reef Society (coralreefs.org/) Andrea Grottoli, says, “Australia is at record low of hard coral cover (see Ch 2, page 8), most of this decline due to declines on the GBR.” https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans-idUSL2N2XI1NV https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rr888 4y ago

I've seen this reported a lot with lots of climate change deniers triumphing. I'm not really sure what is going on. The AJ article has more detail including: “While the coral cover is similar to what it was in the 1980s, people should not believe in any way that that means conditions on the reef are the same as they were in the 1980s,” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/4/parts-of-australias-great-barrier-reef-shows-fragile-comeback https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/4/parts-of-australias-...

stephen_g 4y ago
We have had an unusually cold summer and winter here in Queensland this year, I expect due to the La Niña weather pattern. Unfortunately, once that breaks, we’ll probably be back to the more and more frequent bleaching events again. I’m surprised the deniers haven’t started trumpeting “global cooling” again like last time we had a couple of unusually cool outlier years…

sacrosancty 4y ago

Haha, this is a hilarious political issue, as evidenced by the existence of fact-checks on it. For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans-idUSL2N2XI1NV https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans... People have their politics entwined with whether or not it recovers.

rufus_foreman 4y ago
I don't know what there is to fact-check. Two decades of increased coral cover doesn't mean it's a comeback, the National Bureau of Coral Research hasn't certified an official comeback yet.

pabs3 4y ago

This is apparently only for one particular kind of fast-growing coral, which means coral diversity is lower and that makes the reef more vulnerable to damage and less supportive of the wider ecosystem: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-report-says-coral-recovering-after-bleaching/101296186 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...

BariumBlue 4y ago
I wonder if, like forests, corals tend to colonize an area first with fast growing species, which then get slowly replaced by longer lived species (forest succession). I understand that it takes a while for a forest to go from clean-field to a fully matured forest though.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  As with the loss of old-growth forests that's happening today, we risk species loss, and hence biodiversity. Re-population is predicated on an extant population, a return to suitable conditions, and for the pioneer species to die off. The problem is that, in sustained adverse conditions, the pioneer species may outlive the surviving population of the threatened species.
- ggm 4y ago
  The faster growing kind is highly susceptible to the crown of thorns starfish so this causes a cycle of explosive growth in the starfish population, which in turn kills the coral it feeds off.
- snickmy 4y ago
  TIL : https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2016/04/forest-succession-and-management/#:~:text=Forest%20succession%20is%20simply%20the,allowing%20longer%20lived%20plants%20dominance https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2016/04/forest-succession-and....
- jrslv 4y ago
  Yes, the branching corals are the fast-growing early colonisers. The habitat they create is attractive for fish and invertebrates. Together they make up a reef ecosystem. The resilient reef-building massive corals typically appear on the reef later and grow much slower.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

what-imright 4y ago

After all that noise that vocal minority made, they were simply wrong. Didn’t check their facts, predicted incorrectly, wasted everyones time and desecrated our freedoms with do good save the children socialist laws. pfft

harry8 4y ago

Nowhere in this article or discussion is any mention of the extremely relevant farm runoff pollution. Particularly from cotton farms. Any progress there? I don't have the answer. There are many aspects to reef conservation. Looking at one aspect in total isolation and claiming anything at all about it with respect the health of the reef is just idiotic. There would have been very, very little reef tourism over the past two years. Any effect from that? There will be others as well. And right there is the risk of using "The reef is nearly dead because global warming" scare campaign lies to try and motivate people to do the right thing. It backfires and ends up encouraging people not to care because they've heard this chicken little stuff before. Lying for the greater good and those who do it just need to be treated with something beyond contempt. Context: I'm pretty worried about global warming and have been hearing the reef is nearly dead because global warming for decades now. I've become totally cynical about the reef being used as evidence of global warming for good reason - and it may well be under very deep threat because of global warming. Just stop with the damn lies.

mcswell 4y ago
The reefs off the American Florida Keys have apparently been deteriorating for some years now. A study was done by researchers at a Florida university on why, with the expectation that the primary cause would be global warming. It was not. The main cause was apparently nutrient-rich runoff from south Florida agriculture and fertilized lawns. (Nutrients lead to increased growth of algae and other non-coral things, things which are not good in large quantities for coral.) And the good news is that this kind of runoff is easier to fix than global warming. My fear is that when everything can so easily (and semi-plausibly) be blamed on global warming, no one will look for other causes. ICO coral reefs, those might include runoff, but also over-fishing, over-touristing, dumping or leakage of sewage and trash and oil off boats, and even reportedly sun screen worn by those tourists. And studies like the one above will not get done, because everyone "knows" what the problem is, so the environment--the reefs, in this example--will get worse when they could get better.
somishere 4y ago
AFAIK not a lot of cotton farming going on in reef catchment areas. There is lots of sugar cane and bananas however. Also lots of deforestation for grazing. Plus major resource export ports (LNG, coal). Regardless, runoff remains a major topic and there is some progress being made in the space [1]. Regards the article. If you look to the report itself[2] you'll see that this isn't a "she'll be right" triumph of science over scare campaigns. Climate change sits at the top of a growing list of concerns. The summary specifically mentions increased frequency of both marine heatwaves (that lead to bleaching) and major destructive weather events like cyclones. The other serious concern is crown-of-thorns starfish (a sea star that eats coral) ... and while the jury may still be out on the cause of their outbreaks (overfishing of predators? excess nutrients? changing environment?), the effect of this single species on the broader ecosystem is beyond frightening to witness. It's extremely difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the threats to the reef without getting into the weeds. The "scare" campaigns may be light on detail, glossing over (or ignoring) much of the important nuance, but (for the most part) they aren't wrong. [1] https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/declining-water-quality https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/decli... [2] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-condition-summary-2021-22 https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...

eric4smith 4y ago

No doubt that human activity changes things like the climate and the sea. But life finds a way. (Always).

semerda 4y ago

Isn't Adani coal mine meant to start commercial-scale coal mining soon? It's right next to the Great Barrier Reef. "From there, container ships will weave their way through the Great Barrier Reef and out to India and other customers, where the coal will be burned in power stations." https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/energy/carmichael-approval-a-death-knell-for-the-great-barrier-reef-65498 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/energy/carmichael-approv... Glad our governments care so much about the environment.

throw827474737 4y ago
Isn't that comeback proof enough that all this environmentalism is hoax and we can do whatever we want to this planet and it will be fine? Also you sure don't want people to freeze and earn a living.. (Sorry, was just missing such a comment here yet.)