Scientists record biggest ever coral die-off on Australia's Great Barrier Reef | Hacker News Reader

Scientists record biggest ever coral die-off on Australia's Great Barrier Reef

reuters.com

280 pointsaf16090169 comments

When I see all these catastrophic events related to the the changes we cause to the climate, I sometimes question the point of living the way most of us do. The values and things we chase, our day-to-day endeavors. None of it matters if we don't drive towards sustenance, because nothing would last, all the pursuits would be forgotten, the light of mankind would fade if sustainability isn't the top priority. There would be no way for humans to become an interplanetary species, for generations to continue through all the ages of the universe. Nothing would matter if we live a life now that destroys the potential life of our successors.

Yep. And it's very hard to change without everyone else changing as well. And it's very hard for everyone else to change unless that change is mandated at a government level. And it's very hard for change to happen at a government level unless every country is doing it. And that's VERY hard.

No-one wants to give everything up while everyone else gets to keep living how they want and ruining the environment for you anyway. I wish we could get more worldwide consensus on real change.

It's not hard to change. If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way. But everyone thinks they are the exception, it's OK if they do it. That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

> If everyone changed what they do day to day (stop flying, stop eating beef, stop driving everywhere), we would not be talking about the future in such a bleak way.

And what would replace these things? Would they not create another catastrophic problem in another area?

What is the magic bullet that fixes all the world's problems??

Stop pumping carbon into the sky?

Have you seen a volcano erupt in real-time via satellite? I have and I've tracked the plume for days and sometimes weeks. Sometimes, there are 5 or 6 of these events a day. A very rare day to not have at least one of earth's visible volcanoes erupt.

Now lets talk about all the volcanoes that are underwater... then we can talk about solar weather and more...

Nobody is impressed by your stupid stories of having been a weatherman in the air-army. Annual average volcano emissions are three orders of magnitude smaller (that's 1/1000, for the innumerate in the audience) than human CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. And you can't fucking _see_ CO2 anyway. It's fucking invisible. Whatever you saw from that volcano was water or dust or ash or whatever, the things that volcanoes spew into the upper atmosphere that counteract the warming effect of their CO2 emissions.

Your tone greatly diminishes the value of your arguments (on which I agree, by the way). Could yo try being less personally aggressive, next time?

No. This is the tone I intend to take with all dimwitted or disingenuous climate change deniers on this site.

Transit that uses renewable energy, or zero fossil fuels. Such as walking & cycling. Obviously one can cut beef out of their diet, or go full vegetarian. Stop flying is a bit trickier for people who need to travel around, but high speed trains that run on electricity are a good consideration.

And a lot of travelling can be replaced with video meetings. (Seriously, what is a good term? I was about to write Skype-meetings, but want a general term (in particularly since Skype predictably sucks more and more since MS bought them).)

Video calls, remote meetings, typically how we call it at work. Use it with clients even in the city

Even cutting down on beef while still eating other meat would be a significant help, I believe. That's achievable though I imagine the beef industry would lobby against any push.

I was thinking about more extreme change than that to be honest, a really noticeable change in quality of life. I already try not to fly or drive too much.

But even with what you list, external factors based on other people still happen, like your work wants you to fly somewhere, or public transport sucks because everyone else is still driving.

I disagree that we feel like the exception when we're acting like everyone else. We feel like the exception when we're trying to be better and others aren't.

I used to think this way. Then I realized how many truly greedy and completely selfish people are living among us, and it's more than half. At that point, I gave up and joined the masses. The only way to fix it is to incentivize technology improvements and create government policy structure to assault climate change from the top down. And that won't get major until the problems become so evident that almost nobody can deny it. The future is bleak and it's hard to see where the good real estate of the future will be.

>>That's why governments introduce taxes to discourage bad behaviour, because people are ultimately stupid.

They aren't stupid, they are selfish. At the end of the day it comes down to what's called Tragedy of the Commons: individuals keep doing things they know are bad for the environment because our economic system prioritizes the exploitation of natural resources (which is a zero-sum game by definition) and if they don't exploit it, someone else will. Therefore, everyone continues to do it. That is why we need top-down (read: government) regulation.

It's hard to change unilaterally. For instance, it's easy to say "stop driving everywhere", but the majority of locales do not cater well to non-drivers. It's easy to say "stop flying", but in practice that's almost equivalent to "don't travel any significant distance from home, ever".

People aren't stupid just because they don't drop everything and make one specific goal their highest priority above all else. Many people haven't even thought about that goal, and even for those who have, it may not even objectively be the highest priority goal.

People could for example elect governments that want to build transit or dis-incentivize carbon heavy activities and incentivize their replacements, but they don't.

We're actually quite lucky to have a decent Green Party and a proportional government system here (NZ), where the Green Party can get up to ~15% of the vote. I wish it was more though.

In a world where no party is proposing reforms that will actually do enough, I feel like I basically have a responsibility to vote for the most environmentally conscious not-totally-insane option.

Indeeed. In the UK, no party has an environmental platform worth mentioning. There isn't even an environment position in the cabinet any more - just industry.

Conservatives promise to dig up the country.

Lib dead promise to dig up the country, slowly.

Labour promise to dig up the country, for the people.

And the greens promise not to dig up the country, but will make us all live in grass huts.

Oh stop. I haven't driven to work more than a handful of times in my entire life. I've recycled my recyclables my whole life. I only fly once or twice a year, and I can even cut that out if necessary. I eat meat once a day or less by now (red meat is only a part of that), and not in very large quantities or expensive cuts either. I walk or bike everywhere and take public transit when I can't.

I'm happy to pay higher prices for meat, higher prices for airline flights. I'm happy in general to ration out personal luxuries more thinly than I already do. I really do want to avoid the end of the world.

But at the same time, I want some damned personal security in exchange, and right now I'm not getting any of it. We don't have much personal security if something bad happens in life, and the world is ending anyway.

Carbon tax or bust.

It will require a massive change of mindset. The hard question is how to achieve it in a fair way. There has always been a tension between the freedom of the individual and what's best for society and more broadly all humankind. I don't think people have to give everything up, but there will probably come a time when priorities will have to be re-evaluated and many people will have to live with less in the way of disposable gadgets, mindless entertainment, inefficient transport, over-sized houses etc.. Maybe education is the key, more mindful entertainment, less mindless...

> It will require a massive change of mindset.

...or a dictator?

Kill 90% of humans and our CO2 emissions won't be a concern anymore.

You could do with much less than 90% by targeting the worst offenders.

Sadly I think the only solution to global warming is something like a nuclear holocaust that kills the majority of the planet's inhabitants, and sends the remainder back to the stone ages, walking around rather than flying and driving in fossil fuel vehicles.

Other than that... Things are bad, getting worse, yet there are plenty of deniers, and it doesn't appear we're going to stop screwing up any time soon. We're too stupid and greedy as a species to avoid catastrophe I fear.

No need for a nuclear holocaust, the increasing ineffectiveness of antibiotics will do the job eventually. Nature has a way of getting even.

What's wrong with mindless entertainment, as opposed to mindful entertainment, from an environmental point of view?

it dumbs you down into non-caring whateva state. there is place for both, after very hard brain-day at work for example, but many folks only have the mindless ones.

Or: we move all our shit-producing industries to Moon and Mars, places where there is no ecology to fuck up. Expensive but could be done, especially if we find out that those places have good minerals we can mine and work on right there.

I'm trying to imagine the pollution controls that would make that economical. And the space network that would enable it. I think that even with astronomical fines for pollution on Earth, it would be a difficult value proposition. Consider a planet made of solid gold, and then consider how far away it would need to be to make it uneconomical to retrieve. Moon rocks have been valued at $50,800 per gram based on the cost to retrieve them, which should probably be taken as an upper bound rather than a typical figure, but the current spot price for gold looks like it's around $37 per gram. So if the Moon were made of gold, we would need to reduce our retrieval costs by three orders of magnitude to make it worthwhile. I don't have a remotely rigorous way to estimate from that where our current breakeven point might be, but I think it would be pretty close in.

Your idea is pretty crazy, but not completely crazy. There aren't any other particularly good ideas for making space travel profitable. On the other hand, it's difficult to imagine the advances in technology and the environmental concerns that would make it possible. Barring some absolute prohibition, it seems unlikely that spending millions or billions of dollars to manufacture things on Mars would be easier than improving manufacturing processes here on Earth.

> And it's very hard to change without everyone else changing as well.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just a matter of "if you build it, they will come". As in, if there was a public works style initiative to build green cities from the ground up out in the middle of nowhere, and would enough people reconsider their current situation and trade it for a lifestyle and an environment that is less dependent on energy and other resources?

I've been trying to grasp the basics of 3D modeling and Blender lately, because I have an idea in my head of what sort of 'green city' I'd like to live in. Before I say any more, I should clarify that I understand almost none of the intricacies of city planning, material science, architecture, etc. and I don't want to come off as someone who thinks that learning all that is trivial -- I'm looking at it more as art, I just want to create a pretty model of a city that I can zoom around in from different perspectives.

What I'm envisioning is an dense network of open-air structures separated by wide passageways for walking and biking. The buildings themselves would all be the same height (5 stories maybe?) and the tops of all buildings would be reclaimed as community gardens and interconnected by skyway-like walking bridges. Living units would be minimal and adjustable in size by taking a modular approach [0], with not-so-strict zoning laws that would allow for makeshift small businesses and markets to open up amongst the community. Roads proper might exist once every 10 blocks or so. I'd imagine a city like this would be much cheaper to live in, so that too might be attractive for potential residents.

A lot of what I'm talking about is influenced by living in an extremely population dense area in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I have about 5000 neighbors living in a 100m radius (seriously) and we all get along quite well. Here's a photo from the balcony of my first apartment here looking down our alley:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901....

It's amazing to live with everything you need just a few blocks away, but it would be even nicer if we could integrate greenery and vegetation into stairwells, and reclaim the tops of these buildings as open space for the community. This style of living has allowed me to get by comfortably without a car or moto for four years now, so I suppose that's at least a little bit green!

I hope this doesn't sound like the idle ramblings of a crazy person, but maybe if by some stroke of luck I become very rich, then after 10 years of learning I'll at least be capable of enlisting smart people to help me build a city like this. Or maybe Paul Graham wants to give me a billion dollars? That would be nice :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_building

Unfortunately the end of your URL got cut off. :(

Look up Le Corbusier’s Radiant City for something from way back in the early 20th century that sounds a little bit like your idea.

Also don't give up on Blender, it took me a while too but now I wouldn't use anything else. It's all about learning the main keyboard shortcuts really - which is a big barrier to newbies but a bit speed boost once you get used to it.

Oops, I was having trouble editing my post and so I had to delete it and repost it. It got cut off in the process of copy-pasting.

Here's the URL again:

https://66.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901...

The images I'm seeing of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City are so beautiful. I would love to have the ability to create a Blender model of something like that.

This short documentary on architect Vo Trong Nghia also made a large impact on me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgQoVbEX8-A

What kind of green city has gardens on the roofs instead of solar panels? I guess one that is actually green.

: P

Throw in some solar panels too! I have no idea what the balance is, or which route is actually 'greener' in an environmentally-friendly sense, but definitely part of the experience of a green city for me would be to actually have it green-colored and covered in plants. But if you can grow a lot of your food right on top of the building, then at least that cuts down on the need to expend energy transporting it in. And between having lush greenery overhead and building open-air structures with natural ventilation, hopefully it would be cool enough to reduce the need for air conditioning. The building I live in has good natural ventilation and so I actually haven't had AC these four years and I've survived in the blazing Cambodia heat :)

If you look at the graphs that have greater time lines than 100k years, you will see this is a pattern.

No doubt we as humans are speeding up the process and making it worse, but it seems likely that its going to happen regardless of what we do.

For this reason, I'd suggest we are 'gonna change' when the time comes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmbkfTiLQ58

notice 02:29

Humanity is pretty awesome. We're an incredibly tiny, fragile, and short-lived piece of the universe that has become self aware. I believe that comes with a responsibility.

Unfortunately though most individuals are good, _organized_ people produce undesirable outcomes. It's emergent behavior, a structural issue, not user error. CGPgrey explores how this affects governments in rules for rulers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)

> Unfortunately though most individuals are good, _organized_ people produce undesirable outcomes.

I would say the opposite. Humans, individually, are fundamentally the same as we were 1000 years ago. Our base survival instincts and drives produce behavior that is typically not "good", as you put it, and they haven't changed. But yet our behavior in many areas has advanced (human rights, tolerance, civil society). This is the result of culture, of "organized" people as you put it. Remember, the Prisoners Dilemma is a dilemma precisely because the prisoners aren't allowed to organize.

Almost all of society's ills that are self-inflicted are the aggregate result of individuals making self-serving and cynical decisions. For example, sexism in the workplace would have long disappeared if every man who knew it was wrong took a stand against it every time it occurred. But most such men stay silent, or even play along, because it is better for their career (and their family's financial well-being). Doing the right thing will likely only get them ostracized. It will also have little impact on sexism, they rightly believe, because every other guy will have the same calculus. So instead of everyone speaking out, we have everyone staying silent. A self-fulfilling prophesy. This is a flaw of individuals, not groups. All advances we've made regarding women's rights are entirely the result of organized humanity.

There are studies that show that people are more ethical in groups than as individuals. (Unfortunately I can't find the links to those that I had thought I saved.)

Awesome. I'd be interested in those studies. The argument is that society manages behavior. That's reasonable. Not all organization is bad.

Would you agree that the organizations that run our countries and companies tend to behave rather poorly? I'm curious what you'd think of the linked video above.

You shouldn't sometimes question it, you should persistently question and change it. It isn't just possible that we destroy civilization, it's actually quite likely. We know that dominate life forms have exhausted the resources which allowed them to thrive before, leading to their extinction. We can see it in the fossil record. The difference is we are smart enough to see it coming, yet we spend our time worrying about stuff that really won't matter when it comes crashing down.

I wish we could find a way to get an economy that strives at equilibrium rather than mandating growth for prosperity as we do now.

Unfortunate that academics have reasonable solutions (or at least something reasonable to try) to many of the troubles we are encountering but we are unable to hear and internalize them. This poor guy has been singing this song for a long time. http://timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/pwg/

I didn't know about Jackson, thanks for the tip :-)

Living systems are in dynamic equilibrium. They bound from one extreme to another. A large adult gives way to a small child and back again. If they reach static equilibriums we call them dead.

The beautify of life is that it is perpetually moving towards new equilibria. We can't really settle it down without killing it. Instead we need to be sure it keeps going through boom and bust.

It's almost poetical, but we're talking here about a species whose activity keeps on growing while the rest of the ecosystem dies. We're in the middle of a human-driven mass extinction, a third of arable land has been destroyed in the past 40 years. The CO2 crisis (warming and ocean acidification) is a cataclysm that unfolds in slow motion before our very eyes.

So I'll phrase it differently. I wish we could manage to turn what is currently a predatory/parasitic situation into a symbiotic one before the earth can't sustain us anymore. There's a dearth of terraformed planets to move to once we're done with this one.

I want my kids to be able to have kids with a conscience cleaner than mine right now.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People have much bigger problems in life that have immediate impact.

The people struggling at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid aren't the ones making the decisions that cause the problem.

You're making the assumption that life only has meaning if our species survives indefinitely, or at least long enough to become interplanetary or interstellar.

I'm not advocating a nihilist approach to life, merely that I don't think the relative meaning (or lack of meaning) of life isn't derived by the life lead by our successors. What meaning we give it now in these moments we have, no matter how absurd, is all that is required to live a life more in harmony with other living things. The great barrier reef and the other natural wonders are worth saving because now, because they're worth experiencing now.

Life does have meaning now - but if we could colonize the galaxy, there would be a billion stars with a billion people for a billion years. If their lives are equally meaningful, then these existential threats to humanity correspond to the greatest threat to mankind's meaning.

I sort of see all this as a natural progression, maybe our purpose at this point is to eliminate ourselves, the earth will be just fine without us.

If you'd told Australians in the 70s and 80s that the Great Barrier Reef would suffer catastrophic impacts in 40 years time and the government would both deny and ignore it, they would have been shocked and in disbelief. Australia was a different country then. The level of climate change denialism and the severe fixation on ‘houses and holes’ (property speculation and mining) is hard to believe if you haven't lived here. The change in political culture started taking hold around the year 2000.

I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, but I'm Australian and I was around in the '80s, and there were warnings for the barrier reef then too (in the context of greenhouse effect, and also CFCs and crown of thorns).

Sadly for your casual climate denier they interpret this as 'meh, they've been saying the reef will die for years, and it's still here'.

I don't agree with that thinking, and I understand that the threats then are a mix of the same and different ones now. But the '80s were no more enlightened on the matter than now.

Don't mind me. The older I get the more I grump at people's perceptions of the past ;)

What "Only Australians" could have done to avoid this ?

The majority of the damage to the reef is actually crown of thorns, and runoff from dredging / mining operations - not climate change. Definitely not building a port could have helped.

I was curious, and found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown-of-thorns_starfish#Ecolo...

They are 25-30 cm starfish with up to 21 arms, and they damage the reefs. It does say that "warmer sea temperatures enhance larvae development", with this reference: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep08402

This was interesting too:

"An autonomous starfish-killing robot called COTSBot has been developed and as of September 2015 was close to being ready for trials on the Great Barrier Reef.[84] The COTSbot, which has a neural net-aided vision system, is designed to seek out crown-of-thorns starfish and give them a lethal injection of bile salts."

More on dredging: https://fightforthereef.org.au/risks/dredging/

Also an issue in Florida: http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/17/from-miami-t...

"Florida is home to the U.S.’s only living barrier reef and world’s third-largest coral reef system"

Fertilizer run off from agriculture (mainly sugar cane farming) is also a huge problem [1]. Not sure if they're actually getting any better with this or not...

[1] https://www.qld.gov.au/environment/agriculture/sustainable-f...

I'm not sure about that. CoT has been a problem for a long time. Silt is a problem close to shore, but the extent of bleaching in recent years is unprecedented in terms of sheer area of decimation: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-29/reef-great-barrier-ree...

It pisses me off.

I bet those mongrels and everyone else rich have gone to visit it. But me? Now that I am old enough to have money to visit it it's gone.

Go to the southern reefs. Heron Island for example. They are still in good shape and just as impressive as the northern reefs. Don't miss your chance.

https://twitter.com/ProfTerryHughes/status/72251222306772172...

My anecdotal response is that it's not denial that is the problem, but ignorance and indifference.

No one in my social circle talks about it. It might be on the news, but no one I know watches the news anymore either.

I am going to be honest and say outside of this particular HN post and a guy in a mall some months ago, I have not once been exposed to it.

I don't think it's as much ignorance as it is a specific reaction and pushback. I imagine we've all got someone in our social circle who pushes back against "political correctness gone made", or the green agenda or whatever else. Oddly, it's very rarely against the big end of town. Maybe that's because wealth is still something that almost everyone aspires to?

If not that, a feeling of helplessness? You can cut down on beef, but you can hardly convince everyone or stop industry lobbying against the environment.

> would have been shocked and in disbelief

Not directly related to your point, but I feel people are just constantly shocked and in disbelief about a whole bunch of things, and all that shock and disbelief amounts to practically nothing in the end.

People will stand there slack-jawed as the steam-roller barrels toward them. "Oh this is shocking", "I can't believe this is happening".

Incredulity is not a useful thought-pattern.

In the last half decade the reef at port douglas has gone from "Straight out of finding nemo" to a ghostly wasteland (from personally diving there). It's a real shame.

There are still smaller good bits you can find, but overall it's no good at all.

Is it possible this has nothing to do with human activity, and naturally happens on its own? (Thinking along the lines of a forest fire)

its possible that aliens wrote my code for me today and I was just a host, but possible and likely are important distinctions.

When there is overwhelming consensus on man made climate change, ocean acidification, and we see bleaching that seems to be highly correlated with dissolved CO2 or ocean temps rising, its hard to imagine that this is just random chance. It could be, but it likely isn't.

I don't argue that humans impact climate change... But I do want to mention that around 3000BC the world was roughly 2°C warmer, which is what most climatologist claim we will be at after we continue to burn fossil fuels (until we probably run out)

Overall, this isn't "random chance", but it's also probably happened before within the span of human existence. The world changes and I am sure the world will adapt, and while that happens mass extinctions and horrible growing pains will likely occur

What's your point? You've written this as a disagreement but you still think everything will be bad.

Sure, but atmospheric CO2 concentrations haven't been this high in anywhere from a million to twenty five million years. Coral reef death is as much related to ocean acidification as it is to temperature increase.

And it's very easy to write off the effects of climate change as "horrible growing pains," but to be concrete about it: you're talking about the deaths of potentially millions of people. This is a moral issue on par with Auschwitz or the Gulag. And while you're free to shrug your shoulders with, "well, shit happens," it's silly to act as if people concerned about it are histrionic tree huggers.

How will climate change cause millions of people to die? Honest question.

I thought most of the damage would be monetary via mass relocation. Are those deaths preventable outside of human behavioral change to keep temperatures lower?

You say mass relocation like it's a vacation to the French Riviera.

Within developed countries, climate change will be costly but not particularly deadly. A few more heat exhaustion deaths, a few fewer cold-related deaths, and it all balances it. If anything, climate change will be good for mortality in developed countries, because cold kills a whole lot more people than heat now. Remediating the effects of climate change will be very expensive, on the other hand, and I buy the equation that throwing away money is throwing away lives, but let's leave that aside for now.

The big issue is in developing countries. All of them are exceptionally vulnerable to climate change, since they're nearer the equator; all of them have severely resource-constrained economies; all of them have less stable political cultures and are more likely to go to war with nearby neighbors; most of them have megalopolises built in areas susceptible to climate change. Mass relocation just simply isn't in the cards for them.

Dhaka is a couple meters above sea level on average: what happens when the sea level rises by a meter? I remind you that it's a city of around 20 million people, and the rich tend to live in higher elevations than the poorest, densest areas. Where do they go? Does Bangladesh go through a massive infrastructure project to build Netherlands-scale dikes? Who pays for it? Donald Trump? Or maybe the USA and Europe open their doors to millions of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh alone?

Dhaka is an extreme case, but this story replays itself all over. And there are other factors to account for: increase malaria prevalence by 10% and you've killed 50k/year. These things add up. And of course you can say, "well, sure, but you can use money to save these lives!" But if we're utterly unwilling to bear any costs of our pollution now, why would we be willing to in 2100? Our grandchildren might fairly say, well, it was our asshole grandparents who selfishly shat all over the world, why should we have to suffer exceptionally for it?

>Our grandchildren might fairly say, well, it was our asshole grandparents who selfishly shat all over the world, why should we have to suffer exceptionally for it?

You know, we young folks are right here. We are already suffering and already angry. We already want the maximum preventative and ameliorative efforts taken.

Death by famine probably, or as war casualties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Instead of self-imposing pseudo-malthusian constraints, why can't we just embrace the fact that we are geo-engineering on a massive scale and actively do it instead of the accidental kind we have right now? It would only take an increase in tree biomass of 1.5% to offset human CO2 production. Phytoplankton stimulation would be an incredibly cost effective method to counteract human industrial activity yet why is it completely ignored in favor of regulating everything and constraining progress?

As far as trees go, how many decades can you increase tree biomass continuously 1.5% year on year? Where does the extra land to do this come from? How do we build new land that can effectively grow new trees? It's fine, as far as it goes, but we'll run out of trees to plant long before we run out of fossil fuels to burn.

Phytoplankton stimulation is a lot better, in that we can do it year on year. Indeed, it can, optimistically, remove around a billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere, with advancements in technique and extremely widespread use, for a relatively low cost.

Humans emit roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, though. Year on year, we add roughly a billion tons of CO2 emissions to our annual emission rate.

We can go into even more exotic methods if you like. But if governments are unable to implement a tax on carbon that accounts for its externalities, why do you think governments would be willing to pony up even more money to sequester those externalities after the fact?

The Kyoto protocol considered cut tree carbon to be released back into the atmosphere.

There is plenty of land that used to have trees, but we now have 7 billion humans and their associated support organisms. https://xkcd.com/1338/

We can get more efficient with our land use, though the benefit would likely be a more stabilized ecosystem rather than reversing climate carbon.

This xkcd comic is based in poor data, probably. Rats and domestic mice don't appear on it. Cats and dogs should appear also (and be in a big group). I would take it with a pinch of salt.

Why should we accept that the planet is our playground, that we are supposed to "engineer" our way out of a problem our "engineering" created?

Personally I think it'd be better if we all adjusted our lifestyles to reduce our affect on the planet, but I just don't expect that to happen. Geo-engineering seems like a worse solution which is far more feasible to actually get done.

Geoengineering is such a dangerous (both morally and in terms of its possible consequences) approach that it shouldn't seriously be considered as an option.

Cfr. [1] for its possible consequences in Asia and Africa:

   Both tropical and Arctic SO2 injection would disrupt the Asian and African
   summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people.
   These regional climate anomalies are but one of many
   reasons that argue against the implementation of this kind of geoengineering.

[1]: http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/GeoengineeringJGR9inPr...

Worse than doing nothing? I simply don't believe we'll get enough people to change their lifestyle, so nothing or Geoengineering are the only options.

>>But I do want to mention that around 3000BC the world was roughly 2°C warmer

The question you have to ask yourself isn't necessarily absolute temperature, but rather the rate at which such temperature fluctuations occurred in the past. Lots of species may be able to adapt to the planet becoming 2 degrees warmer over the course of 100,000 years. The overwhelming majority can't adapt if such changes occur over the course of 100 years - which is what we are seeing now.

If that was true then you'd expect an El Nino to cause mass extinction. You can get > 2 degree warming over massive areas of the globe during an El Nino year.

2 Degrees warming over some areas. Global warming causes 2 degrees warming across the world on average, that means much more than 2 degree in many places.

Not that that is the case here because 1. It's about ocean temperatures and 2. Coral reefs are highly susceptible to small changes.

Woah woah woah, the 2° C scenario is definitely not what happens if we burn all remaining fossil fuels. IPCC's A1FI scenario which more or less describes that 'plan' (A1FI actually still predicts an eventual transition to renewables...) has a predicted temperature increase of 2.4 - 6.4° C.

2°C is what the Paris Accords expect us to get with significant changes. We're already at 1.3° C.

> We're already at 1.3° C

You can't really make that claim yet. The sun is also at the peak of it's 30 year output cycle (and I believe there's also a greater cycle as well). We can't know the full effect for decades probably. Which is kind of the point of my statement.

We can freak out all we want, but the world will survive and the world (probably humanity) has faced much harder times with much worse technology.

Just trying to keep things in perspective.

>But I do want to mention that around 3000BC the world was roughly 2°C warmer

Source? I can't find anything to back that up.

according to xkcd, it's warmer now than in 3000BC: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Quickest thing I could find:

http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall12/atmo...

Turns out the sun has more to do with global temperatures than just about anything. I don't know if it's in one of those lectures (it should be), but the sun had a pretty hot 1000 years there where it also released more radiation. This actually impacts radiocarbon dating.

That's not 2 degrees and that graph is before 1950, not today.

You do realize that taking historic temperatures are pretty difficult and we can only get an approximation? Meaning, you may only get the historic average over a given 5, 10, 50 years when looking at historic data. Meaning some years may have been 5°c warmer on average, while others were 5°c lower on average. We simply can't know.

Regarsless, the point of my comment is still relevant. This has happened before, it will happen again. We should try and minimize damage, but also keep the perspective that in the past tempratures have fluctuated more and faster. It's been warmer and colder on our planet, and everything will adapt.

> Meaning some years may have been 5°c warmer on average, while others were 5°c lower on average

yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't done a lot of research on this. Short of super volcano winter you aren't going to see more than a tenth of that in annual variation.

> Regarsless, the point of my comment is still relevant

No, it's really not. Not only was your initial claim wrong, but your point seems to just be that "changes happen", which is vacuous in and of itself.

Some day we'll reach the heat death of the universe. Why do anything at all, am I right?

> yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't done a lot of research on this. Short of super volcano winter you aren't going to see more than a tenth of that in annual variation.

You'd be wrong, I have done a lot of research. The fact is, we can only sample averages based on decades at a time. Meaning, even if a temperature is (like I said) 5°c warmer in year 1, then 0.5°c cooler until year 20, then rise again 0.5°c for the next 10 years, the gaussian of the sample would put the temperature is roughly 2.5°c cooler than today for that 30 year window.

You have to look at how this data is gathered, it's through melting ice mostly. Which is not an exceptionally accurate measurement.

And all my points have been the same (before a bunch of people came and down voted), life will go on and this is normal. Extinction events happen every few thousand years. Yes we are the cause, and no I don't think we shouldn't do anything. However, I also don't think we should ignore the fact that historically this isn't rare.

Now explain where the energy is going to come from to warm the atmosphere by 5 degrees in one year and where it's going to go the next?

Yeah, the only thing I found indicated it was colder in 3000BC due to the Piora Oscillation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piora_Oscillation

"around 3000BC" the temperature change 2 degrees in < 200 years? Because it is definitely not just a temperature change, but a rapid temperature change that is the issue.

Historically, there have been much larger and quicker changes in temperature, such as when a super volcano erupts. The whole point of my original comment was to point out that yes we (as humans) are causing issues and yes we should try to mitigate said issues, but at the same time keep a perspective. Based on what we know, this is not really rare in the history of our planet.

Yes, it was warmer.

Please see helpful chart:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

I didn't know we had mapped the entire ocean floor and were measuring the dissolved gasses from all the sub-surface volcanoes. Can you share how they relate or correlate to that of human based emissions?

I can't be sure why you are lying in the road struggling to breathe with multiple fractures. It could be that truck I heard go by that may have just hit you at 90 mph, i didn't see it so I can't be sure.

Because I can't be absolutely sure why you are in the state you are in, best not to do anything.

"Warm seas around Australia's Great Barrier Reef have killed two-thirds of a 700-km (435 miles) stretch of coral in the past nine months, the worst die-off ever recorded on the World Heritage site, scientists who surveyed the reef said on Tuesday."

""The coral is essentially cooked," professor Andrew Baird, a researcher at James Cook University who was part of the reef surveys, told Reuters by telephone from Townsville in Australia's tropical north."

"While bleaching occurs naturally, scientists are concerned that rising sea temperatures caused by global warming magnifies the damage, leaving sensitive underwater ecosystems unable to recover."

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-environment-idUS...

"While bleaching occurs naturally, scientists are concerned that rising sea temperatures caused by global warming magnifies the damage, leaving sensitive underwater ecosystems unable to recover."

This seems to indicate they're not sure how much impact global warming is having. Is it 10%? 90%? Would be good to know.

   Is it 10%? 90%? Would be good to know.

It would be good to know, and it would be very good to know whilst the effect is still reversible.

It would be a great shame to discover that our fears about man-made climate change were correct, but it's too late for any changes to have a meaningful effect.

This is an area of hundreds of square kilometers, if there was a volcano causing it we'd know.

We also monitor the atmospheric gases and an event of this size would be easily detectable.

What a stupid, dismissive response. I am not doubting human activity has impacted the change in climate. I'm just curious to know more about this specific symptom. Do coral reefs go through the same kind of cycles that forests do? Or have these reefs been around for thousands of years uninterrupted?

You feeling ok? Discourse here is usually a bit more civilized.

I really wish you were taken more seriously. I worked at AFWA (Offutt AFB) from 2002 to 2004. I worked at the Global Wx and Event desk where we tracked hurricanes, volcanic activity, haboob's and more! I am no Phd scientist, but thoroughly enjoyed the conversations|discussions|arguments on "climate change."

I would stare at a large monitor and pick out a volcanic plume easily while the city of Quito was not even recognizable. I would really have to hunt for LA or San Francisco in comparison to a giant haboob in the ME. Your standard cold front is more recognizable than any major city from the satellites we used (30m, 15m, 10m mostly).

Pondering how often these volcanoes erupt and send horrific gases aloft, it is hard to say; "Humans are doing it ALL!" Not to mention the thousands (tens, or hundreds of thousands?) of underwater volcanoes that emit all sorts of horribleness.

Then you contemplate that the Earth has been here for 4 billion years + or - a few million... How much hubris do we have to measure for a couple hundred years and say unequivocally; "Humans DID this!!!" It seems a bit...

Seems a bit what? I really wish I could take you more seriously. There is undoubted, undeniable evidence that human factors caused this bleaching effect. Yes humans are doing it ALL.

It is not up for debate.

"The results suggest that the thermal toler- ances of reef-building corals are likely to be exceeded every year within the next few decades. Events as severe as the 1998 event, the worst on record, are likely to become commonplace within 20 years. Most information suggests that the capacity for acclimation by corals has already been exceeded, and that adap- tation will be too slow to avert a decline in the quality of the worldís reefs. The rapidity of the changes that are predicted indicates a major problem for tropical marine ecosystems and suggests that unrestrained warming cannot occur without the loss and degradation of coral reefs on a global scale."

Predicted 17 years ago.

http://www.publish.csiro.au/MF/pdf/MF99078

Well isn't that exactly it? Volcanos and all these natural outputs have been here for a while. But we're breaking records on global earth temperature and CO2 levels.

It's true that undersea volcanoes emit lots of stuff.

Key point, though: we are currently in a lull of the total amount of oceanic volcano activity. Compared to what's usual, they're contributing less CO2 pollution to global temperatures than what they usually do.

And yet temperatures are still rising, despite the countervailing influence of volcano activity. Whatever could it be? Sun spots? Saturn entering the first house of Sagittarius? The anger of Zeus? Slenderman getting his jollies on?

Too bad there aren't any people who study this professionally.

Here's a great, and thorough analysis:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...

No, a huge part of the damage to the reef is from literally digging a port within the reef and the runoff from that. And not dealing with crown of thorns. And then climate change, which is obviously humans are by far the largest contributor (the evidence for that is actually stronger than the physical port)

Did you see recently that Pauline Hanson took some of her mob to a still-vibrant part of the reef to prove 'it's all lies, what they say about the dying reef'? What can you do to convince the wilfully ignorant, I wonder?

Puzzlingly she didn't go to the reef but went to the coral around Keppel Island. I've been up and down the coast a few times and I don't know if the coral at Keppel could ever have been called vibrant. It seemed like a pretty strange choice of location to me.

I did a diving trip nearby there just last summer (winter in Australia), and it was not what I imagined it would be. A couple on our boat said they had been there 15 years ago and it was nothing like what they remembered.

It was still beautiful, and if you just happen to be there I wouldn't recommend skipping it, but seriously don't go out of your way to take a trip there.

Glad to see the promised investment from PM but its sad that it appears the only reason is because its likely impacting tourism and therefore jobs/income which is likely real reason. I vacationed in Cairns (and elsewhere) in 2001 and was best 3 week vacation ever and GBR was definitely a highlight. If it was dead then I'm not sure we would have gone there.

I almost feel that its wasted effort at this point as its like putting your finger in a dam and it will only hold for a short time. We really need to make a serious redesign in behavior and its hard to get any country to do anything and with recent political changes seems less likely and Kyoto will probably fall in short order.

We are in a seriously bad place [0] when it comes to our impact on the world.

With how politics are right now, I don't see it turning around.

[0] http://theconversation.com/how-climate-denial-gained-a-footh...

Understanding a little science implies that you are interested in how the world works. It also helps to be close to nature to keep that sense of fascination. Get your mind thinking about the improbability of life in the universe.

Then you wonder... why are we the only planet with intelligent life? Why don't we see / hear evidence of life on other planets?

Then you realize that our planet has accomplished this amazing thing... to balance the levels of solar energy with our native chemistry so that life can flourish.

We know that conditions for life are the result of millions of years of balancing. With life consuming oxygen & producing CO2.

Now we have the problem that the people in charge do not share this fascination. They are only interested in their gain & immediate situation.

We live on a planet where if you change the thermostat just 1 degree in either direction, massive changes occur.

It's like seeing a top that is spinning, and giving it a good swift kick.

Sadly, very few politicians in Australia give a damn about it. It's all about "jobs and growth" over here.

That's the only thing politicians seem to care about anywhere. And strangely, 'jobs' seems always to be referring to manufacturing or construction type jobs. Just bizarre.

Obviously. Manufacturing and construction jobs are the opposite of "bullshit jobs". You can point to something you built and feel satisfied. Anybody can understand it. Service jobs are demeaning because the service worker always has lower social status than the person they serve. Of course politicians care about the same jobs the voters care about.

the service worker always has lower social status than the person they serve

I'm not sure about that. Does a doctor have a lower social status than his patient? Does a politician have lower status than his constituents? Does a banker have lower status than the one applying for a loan?

Those aren't pure service workers because they also have an obstructionist/rationing role. They have the power to prevent you from getting medical treatment/loans/etc., which raises their social status.

It's zombies from the 1800s. It's some sort of denial of the current state of the world.

US, UK, & australia are all fixated on the 1950s. How good it was then. It should be that good now.

They forget that during that time the US & allies had the only real functioning industry. So obviously with no competitors times were going to be good.

We are all supposed to be digging iron ore & making steel all of a sudden. Damn it all to science. I live just once and who cares about a million years of evolution.

The reason all this is happening is because technologists give control of their knowledge to people who have no knowledge. We allow them to co-opt us to their plans. It's one way to fix things. Get hard assed about handing out technology to idiots. Have a technologist / humanist sort of president. Bill G would be pretty good.

Freedom is (maybe?) psychologically (perhaps biologically?) untenable in humans.

GNU/Linux ---> too much user choice

Freely shared scientific inquiry ---> technologists giv[ing] control of their knowledge to people who have no knowledge

Everyone probably does want the iron fist in the velvet glove.

   The large majority – me included – wants to be passive and rely on an 
   efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire 
   social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace. Walter Lippmann 
   wrote in his Public Opinion (1922) that the herd of citizens must be 
   governed by “a specialised class whose interests reach beyond the 
   locality" – this elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that 
   circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the 
   "omni-competent citizen". This is how our democracies function – with our consent: 
   there is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is an obvious fact; the mystery 
   is that, knowing it, we play the game. We act as if we are free and freely deciding, 
   silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction 
   (inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think. 
   “People know what they want” – no, they don’t, and they don’t want to know it. 
   They need a good elite, which is why a proper politician does not only advocate people’s interests, 
   it is through him that they discover what they “really want.”
   http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher

It's the "masses" who may be the least delusional: The whole point is to know you're not in charge. The elites actually believe they're in control.

   In The King's Speech the cause of the king-to-be's stuttering is precisely his inability 
   to assume his symbolic function and identify with his title. He displays little common sense, 
   seriously accepting that one is a king by divine will; and the task of the Australian coach is 
   to render him stupid enough to accept his sovereignty as natural property. In the film's key scene, 
   the coach sits on the throne. The furious king asks him how he dare do this, to which he replies: 
   "Why not? Why should you have the right to sit on this chair and me not?" The king shouts back: 
   "Because I am a king by divine right!" At which point the coach just nods with satisfaction; 
   now the king believes he is a king. The film's solution is reactionary: the king is "normalised", 
   the force of his hysterical questioning is obliterated.
   ---Slavoj Žižek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Phrasing like this pisses me off:

"Climate scientists argue that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat radiating from earth, creating global warming."

The words "argue that" imply that the matter is still in dispute.

Especially because the fact that increased carbon dioxide traps heat radiating from Earth is just that: a proven physical fact. There is absolutely 0 disagreement on that from anyone who isn't a complete fraud.

There is some debate about what the end consequences of that physical fact are, about how much feedback loops affect the overall temperature, about the total contribution of man-made vs natural causes, etc. But saying "Climate scientists argue ..." is like saying "Chemists argue that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen."

It is a grave disservice to climate change prevention to attribute all ills to it. From Wikipedia [1]:

"Coral reefs are dying around the world. Human impact on coral reefs is significant. Coral reefs are dying around the world. In particular, coral mining, pollution (organic and non-organic), overfishing, blast fishing and the digging of canals and access into islands and bays are serious threats to these ecosystems."

I believe we as a global society should err on the side of caution, but I doubt scientists like Freeman Dyson are frauds. Probably climate science is way more complex than generally perceived, but that shouldn't lead us to inaction. I heartily recommend [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_with_co...

[2] https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-th...

Argument to complexity is not sound logic, yes, it is complex, if there is an issue with models or margins of error, then that issue needs to be raised, but handwaving "complexity" helps no one.

Otherwise, well said, do agree, humans can be amazingly over-cautious with certain matters like air-travel but with large scale phenomena like climate change we are terribly foolhardy. There is nothing wrong with being prudent.

Regarding the Great Barrier Reef, farm runoff (sediment, nitrogen) has a massive contribution to coral bleaching. Not mentioned once in this article. Warmer waters do contribute but it's not enough for the scale of dieoffs seen. It's been nearly ten years since farmers signed an agreement to reduce runoff, so far they've achieved about 10% and are unlikely to meet 2018 targets, if they keep going at this rate it will take 40 years to reach the stated reduction goals. Farmers hold a lot of sway in Australian politics and I dont see that changing anytime soon.

Thanks for your reply, and sorry I found it this late. I think I digressed more than I should have. My first main point was that not every skeptic is a fraud, as I think we can generally tell their motivations, backgrounds and paycheck signers.

Just like you said, climate change plays a very minor in the destruction of coral reefs, if any at all. My second point is that pretending otherwise is not sound logic, not even smart, as it may hurt the badly needed credibility of climate change warnings.

Moreover, there's a great deal more, as you point out, in terms of environmental threats, than climate change. It is OK if sometimes they are essentially independent issues.

But it's reality. Climate scientists ARE arguing. They know it's very important & yet most people don't think so. My own mother is very progressive, but somehow fails to see the urgency of the situation.

Most people do not understand science one bit. And yet they are living in one great big ball of science.

7 billion human is a lot, but it could still work and not destroy the planet if people wasn't so much overconsuming resources. I think I've 10% or less of the average human environmental impact in my area

Can you plz tell my mom to stop buying me shitty clothes for holidays I didn't ask for.

According to the best climate models: Mexico, most of the US, Spain, Italy are completely fucked in terms of ariable land. Alaska, Ethiopia and parts of India are projected to be the only real benefactors. When food and water run out, Mad Max will be a comparative fairy tale.

Here's some quality videos by actual climate scientists (trigger warning: science):

https://youtu.be/ntOgBMgENTU

https://youtu.be/8iEj76iX-xE

https://youtu.be/UOm2t3QMR6k

https://youtu.be/iOztwk6bjjU

Don't worry. This is not what is important folks. Reef schmeef. Fish! ha. who cares about millions of years of evolution. We can wait another million years to get it back!

What is important right now is making sure that people who can barely read who live in west Virginia can continue to count on burning coal so they can afford a big truck.

Agreed. Don't forget to ship them out of season foods produced through wasteful industrial processes with special oil-linked subsidies, regularly re-clothe them in garments from the other side of the world, and sell them needless nick-knacks from China. Better yet, let's make sure nothing at all lasts so we have to throw it out and buy new ones.

(Non-sarcasm: IMHO government could do many things - tax irreparable goods heavily, subsidize low-transport or low carbon production solutions, add sustainability to national education syllabuses, fund national and international networks of alternate energy transportation systems (starting with trains and boats), reward repairs, and heavily dis-incentivize fiscal middle-men for venture funding.)

Does anyone know if it would be possible/useful to create some artificial "cool zone" to help the coral to survive in some place in order to ease recolonization after such events ?

A timely news story. Just watched the latest episode of Years of Living Dangerously on NatGeo. Check it out. It explains why this is such a big deal.

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