Since 2016, Half of All Coral in the Great Barrier Reef Has Died
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I recommend everyone watch "Chasing Corals" on Netflix if they want a more detailed explanation of problems and potential solutions. Trailer: https://youtu.be/Mmqqi_DnPEE
Does anyone have a link to the research behind these releases? I don't doubt the effect of raising acidity and temperature, but would like to see a comparison to the aftermath of oil spills, radiation leaks etc. throughout the Pacific.
[1] https://archive.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/expeditions/temp-...
[2] http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/managing-the-reef/threats-to-the-re...
For example, your daily CO2 emission is 10-20 tons per year. This is the same amount that can be saved with a donation of only $27 to a highly effective climate charity: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/
Second of all, me reducing my fossil fuel usage to 0 wouldn't magically drop industrial fossil fuel usage to 0, so that's not even a solution to the problem.
A new technology or enforced policy would have a much greater effect.
This attitude in the general public is our death knell. The only, and I do mean ONLY, solution to not fucking up the environment beyond repair is the concept of less.
Less SUVs, less air travel, less fast fashion, less computer monitors, less phones replaced less quickly, less heating and cooling of our homes and more getting acclimated to the climate, less fucking juiceros and interent connected butt-plugs, less non-seasonal vegetables and meat, less eating of beef and pork and chicken and more plants. Reduce.
I love to quote idlewords on this all the time, but we as a species can't even handle male pattern baldness. To somehow expect that we can engineer our way out of the complexities of nature with time to spare and without any impacts on how we live life in the wes is a completely misguided belief. The technological breakthrough that will be our saviour is not just around the corner. Musk and Tesla aren't our saviours. 'Less' is.
Agree on the first, but the second is hardly likely. We would have to devise some miraculous means of global collective decision-making, with an eye to long-term consequences. Not even the most Panglossian UN weeny could imagine we're within decades of this (millennia is more likely).
The moment evolution tossed up a creature with the cognitive flexibility to invade all niches, and evade population-scale threats to fitness, universal overrun was a biological inevitability. Next time perhaps.
It will come when climate change is obvious even to the most arrogant denier troll. It won't be pretty, for anyone. We'll get to watch governments trying to force things whilst our major infrastructures are still built for economics of short term growth and ignoring externalities.
Going from a couple of hundred very disparate nation States to a global benevolent & rational authoritarian regime isn't something I can imagine happening in the next 50 years or so without nukes getting involved. Admittedly predicting the future outside of immediate trends is a mug's game.
There's a huge boom of solar at the moment not because people give a shit about the environment, but because the technology has made it a viable alternative, and tax incentives have reduced the barrier to entry.
There is a "wonderful" movement called the Dark Mountain movement. It is a collection of formerly uber-passionate environmental activists who've essentially thrown in the towel and decided Humanity ist kaput. Their leader now gives lessons on how to use scythes instead of lawn mowers to cut grass. Others have found similarly low tech pastimes to keep themselves occupied.
If we want less we need to understand the order of magnitude that the different forms of less have.
I note that such a reduction is achieved either by having less per person, or by having fewer people.
Other organizations work on political change, which may be much more effective but is harder to measure. https://350.org/ is the biggest organization working on that. http://catf.us/ is focussing on carbon-free energy.
First couple times was exactly like Finding Nemo, now it’s a barren wasteland (and this is going to spots that are supposed to be better). Beaches in QLD still best in the world if you’re visiting, give the diving a pass or manage expectations unless you’re quite south
The ocean has warmed to the point where to coral cannot survive. The reef is H-U-G-E (1,400 miles long according to the article). If there was a technology capable of reducing the ocean temperature around the reef, the waste heat the technology would create would cause more problems elsewhere.
The reef is an indication that the global warming problem has become to big for human technology to fix.
I have been hearing about it being dying and on the way out since the 1980s. This time may be different and it may not be a wolf cry as it turned out to be each time in the past.
If it really is in deep trouble, that card has been played so often that I'm jaded hearing it yet again. Maybe I shouldn't be but you see the downside of playing this card repeatedly as hyperbole.
The point is that it may well be under grave threat your entire life and still exist when you die. That doesn't mean it isn't under grave threat. There have been northern white rhinos in existence my entire life. There still are presently: 2 -- both female. Last chance to see...
There have occasionally be natural predators too, like the Crown of Thorn starfish.
The current threat to the reef is ocean warming -- a vastly different threat. There is not much humans can do in the short term to mitigate the problem.
You can't do it in the sea otherwise, because there is not a lot of accurate and still free areas. Coral needs a lot of light. Must be shallow. Pirate and lawful fishing, commercial sea routes, tourism (coral reef attracts big predators like sharks), and a net of vested interests will block it.
And you'll need to wait 3000 years to have a coral reef at '3000 years level', of course. Corals are terribly slow and fight with their neighbors all the time. Such project would be extremely expensive.
Staghorn could make a good skeleton of a reef in, dunno, maybe 50 or 100 years and would attract a wonderful biodiversity if left alone; but is not enough in reef terms. we are talking of the cream of the cream. One of the finest works of this planet. The staghorn ecosystem is just a baby and a lot of species would be sorely missing.
If we just miss nature for our own enjoyment maybe we can throw a bunch of science at it.
I think there's this desire to cling onto what's original or authentic. I'm trying to see past that because it's so delicate that it's basically transient.
Perhaps easier to understand if it's "let's take some time to understand what's there before we go make something new."
Surely this is an unapproved perspective. It goes against the popular will of science and really goes against our inherent desire not to muck stuff up. I just can't bring myself to really see it being wrong.
(The downside being that probably requires dismantling both Mars and Earth for construction materials... But hey - we've fucked The Great Barrier Reef already, so why not???)
I used to have hope; now it seems past the point of no return. I figure we should just try to enjoy it all while we still can, like everybody else.
No. Damage to the environment is done because it's cheap. And why is it cheap? Because the owner of the thing (the state, the town, the "community") doesn't care. Now if there were a real market driven cost (throwing away a plastic bag or a TV would actually cost something), you would reconsider.
Next in line is consumption: How about the houses built everywhere on the planet with low interest rates that will never be inhabited because there are not enough people nearby to inhabit it.
Next is (as an example) military production in the US (>= 10x the military budget of Germany or Russia), using up money to destroy even more things of value.
There are a million reasons and most of them lead down to
- low interest rates (incentivizing producers to produce things people wouldn't want, disincentivizing consumers to save)
- a lack of democracy and/or accountability of the people in charge (those wars weren't exactly a consequence of people protesting on the streets)
- "public ownership" which basically translates to "no one gives a f* because it's not theirs'" - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
I suppose the last point is probably the least orthodox, so here are two sources that discuss the issue:
Audio: https://mises.org/ko/library/5-environmentalism
PDF: https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Environmentalism%20and%...
It also leaves me utterly convinced that nobody really believes in god or an afterlife. People constantly demonstrate that the only thing that matters to them is that today is at least as convenient as yesterday.
No change will ever happen from the bottom up. And while our "leaders" continue to be people with already massively inflated lifestyles, nothing will happen from the top down either.
The bad media sells the latest news or problem as the most important news or problem.
People elect or at least accept the politicians. People pay for or at least accept the bad greedy business practices of small and big companies in the name of holy competition and individual struggle for life.
Too many people have faith that god (notably in the USA) and the traditional conservative political parties do what should be done.
There is a lack of motivation and desire for life changing real science and technology as national priority to end poverty, to bring wealth to all, to prolong life (anti-aging) and to protect nature including coral reefs. Science and technology would allow people to eat all they want and do no sports and still look like models and be perfectly healthy.
Cutting and austerity is not a strategy and not a replacement of urgent progress of science and technology.
Cutting and austerity is an unfortunate tactic because of lack of science and technology.
IMO automation, genetic engineering, implants and replacement of natural body parts by artificial body parts will start social, economic and medical revolutions within the next decade.
One of the worst misbeliefs is that the end of poverty (at least world hunger) and the end of large-scale wars (e.g. Middle East) is just futurist idiocy while it is actually achievable within a year with existing technology. But political priorities prevent it.
Anyway, my point is that effort is required to advance science and technology. To call it a dream and to do nothing to realize it is the wrong way. It only wastes time because the efforts and investments must be made anyway (by future generations).
> There is no way at the moment that we can sustain our current lifestyles without fossil fuels.
True. But again: There was and is not enough effort to create the technological alternatives. Besides, a lot of energy (and burned forests) could be saved by simply not eating animal products any more.
> In addition, if we remain unsustainable then we'll just grow to fill the next level unsustainability if a new technology did come along.
Humanity is always at the frontier of sustainability or possibilities for one reason or another. Science and technology lead to creation of resources (e.g. use of steel, use of fossil fuel, use of Uranium, use of solar power) and more efficient use of resources like e.g. man power (e.g. by better program languages, better programs, better computers, better cars, better houses) and less religious societies and less wars and lower birth rates.
That's not an opinion, it's a belief.
In any case, we're both talking about people cutting their lifestyles which is the correct thing to do. It is an extreme error to simply hope for technology to save us. Most people, especially those that decided to breed, have their heads in the sand and are implicitly hoping technology will make their children's lives OK.
No, they lead to finding and digging up of resources.
"and more efficient use of resources"
Efficiency doesn't make anything better, it just increases the amount of the resources that we create--oops---use.
"and less religious societies and less wars"
Okay, it's clear you have a story in your mind that ultimately leads to jetpacks among the stars.
"and lower birth rates." This doesn't mean much. We went from 3.5 to 7.5 billion in 45 years. We had plenty of science and technology during that time, all doing their thing with the uranium and the fossil fuel and the steel.
Will this encourage Australians to contribute their fair share in the fight against climate change?
CO2 emissions (tons) per capita in 2016
Canada: 18.62 Australia: 17.22 USA: 15.56 Japan: 9.68 Netherlands: 9.61 Germany: 9.47 New Zealand: 7.14 UK: 5.59 Sweden: 4.54
http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2andGHG1970-2...
If the heat is killing them, they just need time to adapt.
"I think we are now getting to this idea that actually, in some cases, these mechanism can arise very quickly, within a few years." (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hot-water-corals-...)