The Fight to Save Coral (2017)
scienceline.org
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To me this means that we should invest a focused effort in planting coral reefs in protected areas (and protecting additional areas for the same.) This would have the effect of creating more marine sanctuaries safe from human fishing pressure, which will seed surrounding fishery areas and become a win-win. New Zealand has done this to great effect (creating protected areas, not planting reefs.)
I think however the typically human reaction is see a coral reef that's dying and try to use re-planting to bring it back to life. Unless that's coupled with re-planting higher-temperature corals, that's neither going to work or be sustainable as the Oceans continue to warm for hundreds of years to come. I would rather see more resistant corals being planted, or coral reefs being planted in colder waters.
Lastly, while it is a great tragedy that the coral reefs are dying, it should be noted that the Earth has been here before and come back from it at the end of the last ice age when sea levels rapidly rose 400 feet and drowned all of Earth's reefs at the time. That doesn't make things any less tragic, or absolve us of the blame, but perhaps helps frame things by remembering that Earth is not a steady-state system but a rather a system of constant flux and adaptation.
I hope that in the same way humans have been having massive negative effects on nature and the climate, we can also pool together and create some equally impressive positive effects on the natural world.
There weren't 7 billion humans back then. My big concern is that we're well above the pre-green-revolution carrying capacity of Earth and it wouldn't take all that much to put us in a position where we can't feed 3 billion people. It's possible that a greenhouse earth will give us more arable land to work with, and we'll be just fine. It's likely that things will become ugly during the transition, as formerly arable land becomes desert, the oceans stop providing food, and mass migration causes global unrest. A lot of people are going to starve.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/54/3/195/223056
> When taking all studies into account, the best point estimate is 7.7 billion people; the lower and upper bounds, given current technology, are 0.65 billion and 98 billion people, respectively.
The answer is "anywhere from a tenth of the people currently alive to 13.5 times as many as are currently alive." Absolutely useless. A range covering more than two orders of magnitude. May as well say, "We don't know."
Not at all. To say "we don't know" might mean that we don't know the order of magnitude. Order of magnitude estimates to the first or second decimal place are oftentimes more than enough to hone in on a solution. In this case the two orders of magnitude set a clear bound (assuming the capacity estimate are accurate) for the near future at the high end and provide a warning sign for the present.
That puts about 6 people per acre in all the habitable spots on the globe.
To put that into perspective, Manhattan has about [27,000](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/...) residents per square mile - or 42 people per acre. There are other, denser cities out there as well. People-dense parts like this make other parts more people-sparse.
I'm sure by the time (if) we have 98B people - Manhattan will be much more people-dense, and many more cities will be similarly dense. So it may be that 50B people live in massive, dense cities, leaving the other 50B to be in more suburban-yet-still-dense zones.
However, this is the 'idea' case of all habitable land being used for habitation. There is also the need for farms and industrial land, and all manner of other places for human activity, and the vast things needed to support it. Ideas like vertical farming solve for some of these, but are not perfect.
[1]http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/netherlands-po...
Farming is only 0.07% of the US economy. A small increase in food prices would vastly increase supply. Africa would probably be screwed, but that would have nothing to do with our ability to feed them and be solely due to economics not making it profitable.
There were bread and rice riots around the globe just 10 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_world_food_pri...
0.07% of GDP. It's a higher percentage of workforce, but still under 1% directly employed. Land area is irrelevant to my argument -- greenhouses can feed a lot of people in a small area.
> There were bread and rice riots around the globe just 10 years ago.
All that says is that Capitalism does a really bad job of supplying stuff to people without any money.
So the Earth will still come back from it. And even the human species will likely come back from it. But technological society? That's a lot more iffy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links...
Nobody's worried the reefs will never come back. They are worried they won't be back anytime soon and we'll have to make do for the next hundred thousand years.
But even then, that's a long time from a human perspective, I think we could re-plant reefs the same way we replant forests on timescales of a couple generations or less.
Edit: obviously it would be better if we didn't have to do that, but that ship has sailed.
I'm not a marine biologist, but from my understanding the big threat to coral reefs is ocean acidification. If this trend continues, we won't be able to do anything to save the reefs. There's no use in re-planting corals if the entire ocean is too acidic for them to survive in, coastal or otherwise.
Apparently this is what happened the last two years. Also, apparently it’s never happened two years in a row before.
Source: Was at the Great Barrier Reef a month ago. The marine biologist on board was very informative.
I just want to point out that the main mechanism of adaptation is that the creatures less suited to survival die out.
The Earth may be effectively eternal (from a human standpoint), but human species is not. More likely, humans will be around, but modern human society would likely suffer an extinction event at some point with our trajectory.
I like your idea of higher-temp corals. Are you aware of efforts to repopulate corals based on varieties that are temperature resistant?
That doesn't mean we can't trash the place or experience massive drops in population.
There does appear to be hope on the higher temperature corals, but I don't know of any plan to actually plant reefs like that. Australia, which benefits economically from tourism to the great barrier reef should take a serious look at it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/the-coral-triangle/2...
Why are you ruling that scenario out?
I just don't see it happening. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Could you elaborate/provide links on this? How/why would these happen?
I agree with the first statement, but so far, Trump presidency was not exactly a bad thing for the climate.
Economic war with China and renationalisation have positive impacts on CO2 emissions.
Iran sanctions increased oil prices.
Coal subsidies haven't succeeded in reviving the coal industry.
Poor, uneducated families still die from drug overdoses and immigration has decreased, reducing the US population growth.
I know that not all of these things are glorious, but I just wanted to point out that the bigger picture is more complicated than that.
No one is seriously arguing that the earth is going to be literally destroyed, despite what anti-science Republicans would lead you to believe.
People are saying "the Earth that we know, love, have co-evolved with will be destroyed, and the assumptions that we built our cities, countries, and societies around will be turned on their heads. This will be replaced with a harsh world with wild extremes, natural disasters in places that aren't built for them, and more intense natural disasters in places that might be used to current, weaker ones.
Perpetuating this willful misinterpretation, even by acknowledging it, is a disservice to the future.
The technique called “microfragmenting” works by essentially cutting living corals into 1-5 smaller polyps using a specialized saw.
From "frag tanks" built wide, long, and shallow to allow light to have an easier time reaching the corals, to "frag plugs" made from ceramics that allow people to glue coral frags to to slot into existing rock, egg crate, etc.
I think maybe the accidental discovery was that the researcher found that this very common procedure to cultivating aquarium corals ended up also promoting the growth speed too.
Plus, Ive been in the hobby for 8 years, and I’ve never heard of purposely placing frags from the same colony next to to each other so they fuse.
I’m unaware of anyone studying the impact of fragging specifically on growth rate in this way.
Edit: I’ve found some discussion of at least one reef hobbyist experimenting with the method based on this research. So yes this was somewhat novel.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/my-microfragging-sps-exper...
I think the thing that isn't being covered in these articles is that it's the fusion of these fragments that are what is resulting in the explosive growth. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4614846/
It sounds like you can fragment a larger coral, put them close together, and as they grow they'll actually fuse together, instead of competing, and becoming sexually mature much sooner.
Typically speaking, and based off a very small amount of experience of my own keeping a nano coral tank years ago, coral of the same type (zoanthids of different colors in my case) would run into each other, compete for the same space, and sometimes kill or drive back the other.
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101870644/bay-area-scientists...