Back-to-back bleaching events
NOVA did an episode last year on coral reef bleaching and attempts to speed up the evolution of heat-resistant corals.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been hit by widespread coral bleaching repeatedly in recent years, where marine heat waves have turned large parts of the reef a ghostly white.
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Back-to-back bleaching events are expected to become more common as the climate gets hotter, but it’s happening sooner than expected in Australia – a worrying sign that the vast majority of the world’s coral reefs are at risk of disappearing.
“Climate change is a whole host of bad things for corals,” says Emily Darling, director of coral reef conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “If they’re getting bleached and dying off every year or two years, there’s simply not enough time in between these massive bleaching events for coral reefs to have any chance at meaningful recovery.”
And that’s extremely bad news.
A quarter of marine species depend on coral reefs at some point in their lives, as do millions of people who depend on reefs for food, jobs and shoreline protection from storm surges.
This isn’t down the road a piece, this is now. Yet we continue to shrug and drive around in our SUVs.
I really think that there is really no hope for any serious climate-change mitigation. There’s simply no political will, even in the USA, so a worldwide effort is impossible.
I think the same. Anybody who tried it here or most other places would be out of office in a heartbeat. Dictators aren’t going to do it. Nobody will do it until it’s much much much too late.
And the ones most resistant and “skeptical” to the very concept of anthropogenic climate change will cry “WHY DIDN”T YOU TELL US? WHY DIDN”T YOU DO ANYTHING?!!” If they’re reluctant to have their freedoms impinged by environmental regulations now, they’re going to love what the planet has in store for them under more “business as usual.”
Once the danger at last becomes obvious even to these blockheads, there will likely be huge pressure to mount some heroic, last-ditch, Big Geoengineering measure that will probably fuck things up worse. It will be the equivalent of a global antacid that will require no changes in behaviour, that addresses only the symptoms, and leaves intact the root causes of what brought us to this state in the first place. These will all be considered desirable prerequisites for taking this action at all. But in the meantime? “It’s only coral!”
Industrial civilization has successfully hidden from itself the fact that it is a world-wide army of occupation, whose over-extended supply lines are now vulnerable to the short-term “success” of its advance. It has demanded the surrender of everything to human needs and desires, with no thought that the other inhabitants of the world, human and otherwise, might have needs and desires of their own.
Best thing for us is to exodus off-world to Titan, and treat the Earth as a research station with very limited human inhabitants. The planet, and nature, will recover, but not as long as we live here. Titan would survive being terraformed for a good 150k years, and then our decedants can all be transhhumans in supercomputers or feeding the matrix.