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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

To answer your question: sure, 2000 years from now it's hard to predict total acreage, and it may well be higher (or lower). But there's little uncertainty that on the timescale of centuries, corals will be devastated, and that means really bad things for us and our children, to say nothing of the health of marine ecosystems.

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"corals will be devastated, and that means really bad things for us and our children"

What "really bad things" would you or your children suffer, should all the corals suddenly become sentient and beam into outer space? Just curious.

From the article: "An estimated 30 million small-scale fishermen and women depend on reefs for their livelihoods, more than one million in the Philippines alone. In Indonesia, fish supported by the reefs provide the primary source of protein."

Thanks, so it's a human-food availability concern.

It's also inherently a problem that we're going to lose lots of plant and animal species that depend on the coral reefs, simply because those plants and animals are beautiful and we will have been responsible for their deaths.

"Well don't worry, we'll just get food from somewhere else" is not a real answer. At some point, life on a dead planet just isn't worth it anymore.

I think it's also the problem that we just can't predict what the consequences are of such a large ecological change.

I think that's so shortsighted, it borders on being rude. It's the most direct impact it has on us, yes, but it's not just food availability for humans that's impacted.

We are looking at the devastation of an entire habitat. Many species that rely on that habitat may cease to exist. As a consequence, many species that eat animals from that habitat may disappear too.

Worst-case, we're faced with the disappearance of an entire food chain. And since many large ocean species travel the entire world, the consequences will not remain local.

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