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Comment by triplesec | Hacker News Reader

This article commits a grave rhetorical error. The reef is not all dead (about 25% irreversibly I believe) but will be soon unless we stop most emissions. They don't make this clear at all. This leads readers to ignore and shy away from the issue further because we think it's too late. Humans like to pretend bad news isn't there and will jump on any excuse for cognitive avoidance.

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it's because it is actually too late to do anything. If all human carbon emissions stopped tomorrow, the reef would still die. It would take 20 years or more for the environment to be able to support reef life again. At that point it might be a wonderful ground for a new reef, but there's no way the old one can survive that long. Anyway, that will only happen if carbon emissions hit zero tomorrow, which is obviously ludicrously implausible.

The ocean reacts to temperature changes in the order of decades. The effect of things we do today will only really be apparent in approx. 20 years. Even if by some stroke of universal good sense we stop global warming today (this is not going to happen, of course), this only gives us hope for whatever's left unbleached at that time.

That's a good point, but nonetheless the article doesn't provide any figures or estimates. So other readers can point to the continued life on the reef and say 'lies', and bury their heads in the sand too. Even if it will all be dead in 20 years, or 40. The article talks of 450[units] carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We're at 400 now. No data on when we get there nor graphs or estimates of when the rest dies off.

Roughly 50 ppm per 30 years. Early 50s was 300 ppm. That seemed to be the upper limit for a long time. There are a bunch of graphs around. It's seasonal and has a hint of an exponential.

1000 ppm starts affecting performance from co2 poisoning.

2015 was the first year we broke 3 ppm in a year.

Average for the last decade was ~2.25ppm/y

1000ppm by 2100 is probably not going to happen, but considering the significant lag behind the effects, it's starting to look more and more likely that we will hit 1000ppm at some high point, perhaps in the 22nd century, before it starts going down again.

Regarding the poisoning comment, that's not very accurate. It's true, there is reduced performance at high CO2 levels, but 1000 is probably the lowest bound for the most sensitive people and the effects aren't really noticeable until high teens. You can still function indefinitely at those levels.

Yes its quite irresponsible for an article like this to be published. Yes, the reef and life as we know it is under a huge thread from global warming and acidification etc, but this article is just misleading.

To quote the article...

"With no force on earth capable of preventing the oceans from continuing to warm and acidify for centuries to come, Veron had no illusions about the future."

I feel you're missing the point of the article. The reality is that the reef effectively has a terminal illness and there's little anyone can do now.

Stage 5. Acceptance.

> The reality is that the reef effectively has a terminal illness and there's little anyone can do now

Totally understand that - but the article is written from the point of view that its already dead, which it of course is not, which will cause people to ignore the article. If I was diagnosed with a terminal illness today, I would not write to everyone I know saying I was dead, I would say I was dying.

It's called "rhetoric" and it's been around for thousands of years.

Sure, but when do you call time of death? (It's a rhetorical question)

I guess I'm happy to grant the author a little artistic license to make his point.

The author has some freedom to choose how to define death in this case, yes. But then he should include the definition he used. Otherwise it's just fear mongering.

It seems like attendant readers understands what the author was doing. They didn't say the definition explicitly, which would violate pep20 (explicit is better than implicit), but, considering this is an article in Outside Online magazine... I think we can accept this violation.

I can understand that you might think other people would be misled by the rhetorical structure... but I encourage you to not get upset at imagined misunderstandings on behalf of others. (Not that it's wrong, it's just makes your life a little less happy)

> but I encourage you to not get upset at imagined misunderstandings on behalf of others

The problem is, global warming is largely an issue _because_ of the "misunderstandings on behalf of others", so in this case, it is a real issue.

We are in agreement. My comment was to the effect of "the author took literary license, most (native speakers) probably knew that, don't beat a dead horse."

I know you said its rhetorical - but there can only be one answer to that question else we are all dead :p

So we should wait until the last polyp disapears?

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Would it be possible to breedcoralls and fish that coul survive the new oceans? Using diffrent shellmaterial for example?

To use different shell material they would no longer be coral. Breeding corals with different skeleton material is like trying to breed humans with a different skeleton material.

For context: Many shelled organisms (cnidarians - corals, brittlestars, sea urchins; molluscs - shellfish) build shells from CaCO3, either as the polymorphs calcite or aragonite. Other options for shell material are silica (SiO2; e.g. some radiolaria, siliceous sponges) or chitin (C8H13O5N; e.g. shells of crustaceans). Animals make their skeletons from hydroxy apatite Ca5(PO4)3(OH).

There was recent research that coral adapted to cope with changing pH[1], but weren't adapting fast enough and the symbiotic algae that bound reefs together did not seem to adjust at all. Plankton is apparently equally vulnerable to acidification.

The unknown for coral is the rate of change of temperature.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120401160101.h...

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