100% coral mortality found in coral reef off Florida as ocean temperatures soar
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
on a less lighthearted note, if you're interested in coral reefs, i highly recommend the beautiful and heartbreaking film "chasing coral". it follows a group of divers who set out to film a coral bleaching event in real time by designing an underwater timelapse camera. it's a wonderful intersection of technical engineering challenges and ecology that i think would appeal to a lot of HN readers
movie: https://www.chasingcoral.com/ subsurface repo: https://github.com/subsurface/subsurface
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Maybe I should really take a sabbatical and go plant trees in a tropical forest...
We are killing our home.
I'm not being overly dramatic.
If we don't stop now...
And for what? Some comfort? Some more profits for the few?
We will not solve this by continuing the way we lived for the last 100 years
Ideally, we should try to reduce emissions as much as possible in every way possible, prioritizing those that don't reduce standards of living, but to the degree that we need to, say, drive less, we should do that too. I honestly think that most peoples lives would be better, not if they just drove less with all else being the same, but if our cities and towns were changed in such a way that we didn't NEED to drive nearly as much. The less driving we need to do, the easier it is to decarbonize it.
To be tongue-in-cheek: just tax carbon lol.
Not disagreeing with you, but everything by itself is a drop in the ocean compared with the total - the "coordinated effort to de-carbonize" starts with doing what's possible and reducing CO2 use of land travel is a lot easier than for the military, commercial shipping, and air travel at the moment.
Or animal agriculture.
Perhaps we will "achieve" it this century already!
With an average speed of 1 inch per year they better start sprinting now
I'm not sure about that. The vast majority of coral reef destruction around the world has not been due to climate change but other human activity. Fishing, as well as agriculture, forestry, erosion, cities, dredging and shipping, that cause sediment and nutrient and chemical poisons.
Like the northern cooler part survives and the reef moves that way?
What makes temperature induced die off significant is that they’re essentially instantaneous: any part of the reef that exceeds some critical temperature dies completely and immediately. The core problem is the temperature increases are far faster than can be grown away from.
Acidification is slower but persistent and inescapable. It attacks existing coral and prevents new growth.
Typically exceeding CTmax results in bleaching, the expulsion of symbiotic microalgae from the animal polyps, and there is a window of weeks to months in which they will return if temperatures decrease. In the terrible Great Barrier Reef bleaching years of the past decade where individual reefs were facing near complete bleaching, many have made full recoveries.
Worth noting coral reefs are highly diverse, even with very high mortality of corals there are crustose coralline algaes and other habitat building species still at work so the reef doesn't die completely, and 'weedier' coral species start ecological succession quickly.
To your point though these are novel and trying times for low latitude reefs, at least historically speaking.
Reefs do not grow or expand quickly, and mass die offs due to temperature are funamentally not recoverable.
But even if they could it is not a long term solution, as ocean acidification means that reefs are become gradually non viable everywhere.
On the other hand your username and attitude both imply you’re “libertarian”, which in general means appealing to basic science is of questionable value here.
More metabolic stress and lower calcification rates but to my knowledge there isn't research to support projected ocean pH making reefs nonviable globally. The photic zone in which reefs grow will still be a good ways off from the CaCO3 saturation depth, although some deepwater mesophotic reefs and regions, less so. Heatwaves will remain the dominant threat for a while yet.