Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef
hawkesburygazette.com.au
hawkesburygazette.com.au
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...
On the 10-20 year window, its a damaged, diminished ecosystem and it will need decades to recover. There is room for hope, it has to be tempered.
The legislated 43% target is largely symbolic and is a floor not a ceiling. It is not by itself going to change anything. What will change things are concrete steps like our Environment Minister stating that she will stop the Palmer coal mine from going ahead.
The Green party certainly have their issues - subjugation and subversion most of all - but to lump the damage on the Greens is an inexcusable farce.
Until Australians realize that their political system is beholden to Big Coal, nothing will change. Australia has a long history, as a nation, of being run by the corporations that provide food to the populace, and Big Coal know this better than most, with their billion-dollar social engineering programs.
Hum, compared to whom?
It is legitimate to be critical of the position they took as well as the other parties.
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-court-physicist-intellectual-f...
>Australia's highest court Wednesday dismissed an intellectual freedom claim by a university physicist who was fired in part over his public statements that scientists exaggerated damage to the Great Barrier Reef caused by climate change.
Looks like it went back in forth in court for a few years, with the university ultimately winning on appeal that he was fired for cause (posting confidential info).
https://sterlinglawqld.com/peter-ridd-loses-high-court-appea...
http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCA//...
“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.”
(And yes, I’m aware that one can tag Crichton with a thought-terminating label such as “climate denier.”)
Start being real, Aussies: Our nation is ruled by corporate fascists who want nothing more than to extract its resources, whatever the cost, and build their new world order with it. Those avocadoes don't smash themselves!
A better response to this news, emotionally, is to drop the hubris and self-congratulatory tone and use it as a means of informing the stupidly gleeful in your environment that there is a BIG situation behind this story, and we better start paying more attention to it than whats on telly.
Optimism, no. I live in the area. We are going through a record cold snap, as in literally the lowest every temperatures recorded in some areas. And yes, the coral loves the respite. It's been accompanied by record floods, doing a record amount of damage. Which is to be expected - it's the La Nina pattern.
But record low temperatures, in a time when the base temperature is up 1C? That means the "other prediction" of climate change is coming true. The extremes are getting more extreme. And it's not the warming that's hurting us or the coral really, it's the extremes - just a few continuous days in a year when the temperature is +5C. That's what kills the coral - not the 1C average rise.
The reef isn't shrinking because the temperature gets so high it can't survive. That's always happened periodically. Once it gets that high it doesn't matter whether it's 1C over what the coral can tolerate, or 10C, or lasts for a couple of days or a month, the outcome is the same - the coral is dead. But if the high temperature is followed by 5 years or continuous growth, the coral re-colonises the area. What's been happening is we have been hitting extreme temperatures (both low and high) more often, and because the highs are more frequent the coral doesn't get a chance to grow back.
Remember those bush fires Australia has a few years ago - they were the worst we've even seen. Now we are laying down another fuel load. And it looks like the La Nina will persist for 3 years - another rare event, so the size of this fuel load will be another extreme. This cold snap will be followed by another record hot period, and we will move from losing billions to floods to losing billions to fire, again.
I'm not optimistic. I'm fearful.
If we have a oil palm monocultures, "technically" we have a forest. We have an area covered by trees, but this is not the same as having a mature rainforest, that play in a much upper level and a totally different league.
Acropora dominated reefs are the equivalent to really young forests composed mostly with 2m trees. Yes, a poor reef is better than nothing, but we must understand that they sustain a much lower Shannon index than a mature reef and that we should keep protecting it for a long, long time.
Plus a bit of evolution for that coral, I'm guessing. Nature will eventually adapt to whatever we throw at it, but I'm not so sure if it will be fast enough for humans to survive.
Not true in the slightest; evolution is solely driven by differential reproduction rates. You'll see evolutionary dynamics even if every organism you study is immortal and invulnerable.
Dying is just one of many things that affect your ability to reproduce.
Are rich countries like US/EU etc. going to just allow tens/hundreds of millions of Africans to immigrate into their country when large parts of their continent become uninhabitable ?
Or are we going to quietly just let them die like is happening now.
If they could manage the sort of wealth generation seen in China or India, they probably could make it through any amount of climate change due to having lots of cheap energy.
Eg https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2...
Also, cool note on the economics: “Experts estimate that coral reef services are worth up to $1.2 million per hectare which translates to an average of $172 billion per year.”
Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD?
I'd add that the recent recovery has been used by some climate change deniers as justification for ignoring the bigger picture, a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita.
I too dove on the reef in the early 1990s and have seen no reef of that caliber since, anywhere.
While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions?
Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with.
You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
From a cursory googling it seems that 'consumption-based accounting' is something that is being heavily researched, and we need to start distinguishing it from the simplistic and flawed 'production-based accounting' in the press, and in political discourse.
Could start with the existing system of international cargo categories and order of magnitude production emissions and packing assumptions based upon standard containers (refrigerated or 40" TEU or whatever). Then add trucking, storage and distribution metrics.
About USD 120 billion.
I’m always sceptical of these claims in the media that economists say that something “could be worth up to $X billion/year” or “X costs the economy $Y billion/year”. They are based on assumptions, whose veracity may be unknowable-if not just totally unrealistic; and the error bars on such estimates must be huge, but many journalists will only cite the upper error bar.
The point of these claims is to try to get people to understand that climate destruction events have meaning, and if negative economic effects are the most straightforward way to explain that, then so be it.
https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/22/coral-harvesting-on-the-gr...
At least it seems they've stopped wholesale grinding it up for fertilizer.
There are massive sections of bleached coral, huge dead patches and way less fish life.
Here's how it looked last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY
In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had ever asked UNESCO to be removed before). Though they failed, they are dredging all around it as close as possible, and the run-off from all the intensive mono-crop farming on the mainland is not helping either.
This is because of the colour shift as you you go deeper into water, a red filter (or light sourcee) is needed to capture the colours as you're seeing them.
And now plenty of mud and wild 4x4 in cape york (see today’s video for just the beginning)
Epic mountains in Tasmania, plenty of wild stuff
I turned onto the Oodnadatta Track the other month (going up for Tourism Australia shoots) and got two flat tyres with one spare as the sun set. Same trip, one of my drones got taken by a wedge-tailed eagle. Diesel at $2.70/L. Not a cheap trip. The surrounds were very wet when I went through, but looks like you copped it muddy.
There isn't any "life wagering" going on.
Please don't buy into the hyperbole. With a little planning and prep, Australia is extremely developed and safe. The chances of dying are very slim, unless a person really tries. Sat beacons and phones are cheap and easy to carry, and the family that recently got stuck in the Simpson had to wait all of 4 hours for a chopper to show up when they hit the button after getting hopelessly stuck in the mud.
Africa is also not what you're making it out to be either. Don't take my word for it, talk to people that have spent a lot of time there. Good friends from Cairns drove right around like I did for 2 years, they went to 30+ countries, West Coast, Southern and all of East Coast. They loved it. In fact, they loved it so much they are right now shipping their Australian-plated vehicle back to Africa for another two year tour. They are perfectly middle class in Australia and live a great life there, but choose to spent another two years touring Africa. That should tell you a lot about what it's really like there.
got two flat tyres with one spare as the sun set
What tyres are you running, at what PSI, at what speed and with what load? Were they just punctures in the tread, or a failure of the sidewall?
In three weeks I'm leaving my safe middle class Adelaide existence to re-renovate my 300k km mileage bus and drive it around the USA again with my young children. Not because it's safer, just because it's more fun and adventurous!
Stock tyres at walking pace. Pulled off the road to photograph an old Ghan bridge and there might've been barbed wire underneath the grading gutter that got both tyres on that side.
It's nice to see visual evidence that backs up your personal beliefs. That said, it's also problematic to take a video of one tiny, tiny part of the great barrier reef and use it as evidence as to the state of the broader ecosystem (a system so large it would run almost the entire length of the US West Coast, consisting of over 4,000 reefs, some as large as 90km² with widely varying conditions). In fact, there are many groups who deny climate change, the science around it, and the decline of the GBR. In Australia, the IPA are one of these ... who visit pristine reefs (there are many pristine reefs) and take video to further these kind of bogus claims.
On your video. First place was Fitzroy Island, which has a shallow, fringing reef around it. I've been visiting Fitzroy since the 80s and it has certainly changed over the years. That said, in-shore fringing reefs are not a good indication of much, as they are susceptible to pretty much every kind of disturbance. There is an area around the corner from where you were filming on the Island called Shark Fin bay that has 100% coral cover, probably due to slightly better currents (it's just outside of the lee of the island and few people go there). Your dive site was probably Milln or Flynn reef which are both outer reefs, about 40km off the coast. They are both in fairly good shape as far as tourist reefs go, with great visibility and decent coral cover. There's another reef very nearby called Hastings, which has good coral cover (and a lot of life, people often sight Mantas and other bigger stuff there) but the visibility is terrible due to sediment being picked up by currents. On all these reefs the condition would be entirely variable on different aspects of the same reef alone (i.e. north, south, east, west, windward / lee).
Long story short, the science here is about data. Big data. And while highly local, anecdotal evidence can definitely play a part it has to be considered within the correct context.
If you're interested, I built a tool[1] a couple of years ago based on surveys we were doing across the length of the reef. It gives a sense of coral cover, health, and the importance of individual reefs to the broader system.
I'm not saying that coral bleaching etc isn't a problem, in fact I don't see how we can avoid massive coral die-off if global warming continues, but we should also avoid generalizing "the reef is dying!" or "the reef is recovering!" based on samples of a single point.
I've been following your travels for quite a while!
Keep up the great content :)
Standard wisdom has always seemed to be it's a sensitive niche of incredible biological complexity.
Couldn't such a system be smarter than we think and evolve to meet climate change?
> Palumbi added: “Coral cover is actually slightly lower than normal levels in the north, central and southern parts of the huge reef. But coral diversity hasn’t recovered - the increase of cover is due to a set of very fast-growing species. Like a forest of fast-growing trees, not the normal oaks.”
> There are many varieties of coral on the reef, with hard coral cover of huge significance to marine scientists.
> Pointing to a study (here), President of the International Coral Reef Society (coralreefs.org/) Andrea Grottoli, says, “Australia is at record low of hard coral cover (see Ch 2, page 8), most of this decline due to declines on the GBR.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans...
They were saying that some of the spots they visit were finally visibly improving over time rather than bleaching over time basically for the first time since they started running trips out on the reef.
Of course, if the water temperature rises enough, or if the ocean acidifies enough, the conservation efforts will stop being enough to make a difference, but for now it's nice to see the recovery underway.
[Edit] Sorry, not meaning to be overly negative. Happy to provide further detail of the efforts in place if you let me know where you were!
There are many aspects to reef conservation. Looking at one aspect in total isolation and claiming anything at all about it with respect the health of the reef is just idiotic.
There would have been very, very little reef tourism over the past two years. Any effect from that?
There will be others as well.
And right there is the risk of using "The reef is nearly dead because global warming" scare campaign lies to try and motivate people to do the right thing. It backfires and ends up encouraging people not to care because they've heard this chicken little stuff before.
Lying for the greater good and those who do it just need to be treated with something beyond contempt.
Context: I'm pretty worried about global warming and have been hearing the reef is nearly dead because global warming for decades now. I've become totally cynical about the reef being used as evidence of global warming for good reason - and it may well be under very deep threat because of global warming. Just stop with the damn lies.
My fear is that when everything can so easily (and semi-plausibly) be blamed on global warming, no one will look for other causes. ICO coral reefs, those might include runoff, but also over-fishing, over-touristing, dumping or leakage of sewage and trash and oil off boats, and even reportedly sun screen worn by those tourists. And studies like the one above will not get done, because everyone "knows" what the problem is, so the environment--the reefs, in this example--will get worse when they could get better.
Regards the article. If you look to the report itself[2] you'll see that this isn't a "she'll be right" triumph of science over scare campaigns. Climate change sits at the top of a growing list of concerns. The summary specifically mentions increased frequency of both marine heatwaves (that lead to bleaching) and major destructive weather events like cyclones. The other serious concern is crown-of-thorns starfish (a sea star that eats coral) ... and while the jury may still be out on the cause of their outbreaks (overfishing of predators? excess nutrients? changing environment?), the effect of this single species on the broader ecosystem is beyond frightening to witness.
It's extremely difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the threats to the reef without getting into the weeds. The "scare" campaigns may be light on detail, glossing over (or ignoring) much of the important nuance, but (for the most part) they aren't wrong.
[1] https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/decli... [2] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...
The cotton industry is buffering the problem - its not a direct cause - but it definitely contributes to the lack of local nutrient capture, which, when dumped, drastically effects our ocean water quality.
I think its important not to minimize the effect that altering Victoria/NSW's water table has on the waterway ecosystems.
This picture, straight from the horses mouth, shows you just how interdependent the waterways - and thus, the GBR - are:
https://cottonaustralia.com.au/assets/general/Landscapes-ima...
Its a mess of epic proportions, but unfortunately the cotton profits are too damned high.
"From there, container ships will weave their way through the Great Barrier Reef and out to India and other customers, where the coal will be burned in power stations."
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/energy/carmichael-approv...
Glad our governments care so much about the environment.
(Sorry, was just missing such a comment here yet.)
“While the coral cover is similar to what it was in the 1980s, people should not believe in any way that that means conditions on the reef are the same as they were in the 1980s,”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/4/parts-of-australias-...
I’m surprised the deniers haven’t started trumpeting “global cooling” again like last time we had a couple of unusually cool outlier years…
But life finds a way. (Always).