Coral Griefs: Finding Hope Amidst Loss | Hacker News Reader

Coral Griefs: Finding Hope Amidst Loss

oceans.nautil.us

40 pointsdnetesn12 comments

If corals can only survive in a narrow temperature range, won’t they also spread to new places that were previously too cold?

Coral grows slowly; the Great Barrier Reef is over 6k years old.

If the temperature keeps moving around, the coral isn't going to keep up.

I wonder if anyone is trying to seed them in newly habitable zones.

Wouldn’t this be a natural selection for the fastest growing coral? Or temperature resistant coral?

Anthropogenic climate forcing is happening at a rate similar to that of a major extinction event. Will natural selection take place and fill the gaps? Eventually. It can take millions of years for the ecosystem to recover from a serious disaster.

So then why worry about it? Millions of years is a blink of an eye in geological time. Earth will recover, not be mortally wounded.

I don't live in geological time; I live in human civilization time. What's important to me is the continuance of humanity and our stewardship of the earth.

I'd like to think we can do better than be ants that use up the fossil fuel reserve as fast as possible to make war on each other.

In the same way that, say, the Chicxulub impact and its consequences were natural selection for small and furry or feathered animals. Just give it a few hundred thousand years or so.

> Nearly half a billion people rely on coral reefs for fish protein, says Sheppard, and climate change will kill many of them.

Huh? People don't just lie down and die because their preferred food is gone. I've never heard of 100's of millions of people predicted to die because of coral bleaching. That seems a complete exaggeration. Unless by "many", he means "hardly any".

I think you misunderstood the sentence.

I read it as "Nearly half a billion people rely on coral reefs for fish protein, says Sheppard, and climate change will kill many of [these reefs]"

It is a poorly worded sentence, and the meaning isn't totally clear either. Climate change probably will kill people, especially vulnerable populations in low-lying areas.

I think he means the fish, not the people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com