Environment, International, Politics

Study: 90 Percent of Coral Reefs Will Be Gone By 2050

We have been discussing the mounting evidence of catastrophic impacts from climate change.  A new report is particularly . . .  well . . . chilling.  Scientists believe that the world has now lost half of its coral reefs in the last 30 years and could lose 90 percent 2050.  It is not just the loss of one of the most unique and beautiful areas of Earth but the impact could be enormous on our food and our environment.  Indeed, these reports show how these losses produce a cascading crisis across ecosystems.  The report comes at a time when the Trump Administration is moving to reduce our commitment to climate change programs and agreements — putting the United States on a collision course with much of the world.

I had the opportunity to scuba dive and snorkel in reefs around Guam, Saipan, and Palau last month. The thought of the lost of these already shrinking areas is heartbreaking.  In addition, coral reefs support a quarter of all marine species and half a billion people around the world.  The loss of the reefs will also impact the oxygen that we believe.  They are called the underwater rainforests due to their contributions to oxygen production.  They are also habitats for one in four marine systems.

In addition to the loss of billions in revenue, essential ecosystems, reefs are also (like rainforests) a constant source for new cures and medicines.  We are destroying the two most important habitats for the environment as an unprecedented rate.

I realize that I am known as an environmentalist and outdoor addict, but logic would seem to dictate priority action on this global crisis. It is not just about some clown fish in Palau.  It is not simply stupid it is suicidal.  If these trends continue (and even if the 2050 date is off by a decade or so), it does not take a rocket scientist to see that this will not end well for us.

 

77 thoughts on “Study: 90 Percent of Coral Reefs Will Be Gone By 2050”

  1. Corals remove carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into limestone through building coral polyps. They have a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae, so the composite is both flora and fauna. They recycle nutrients between each other, and the algae creates oxygen and liberates carbon and releases glucose for the coral to consume. That is also why coral reefs grow close to the surface and require crystal clear water.

    The problem with corals is that they are hyper specialized. They require a very tiny window of temperature and crystal clear, clean water. Chemicals, and change in temperature up or down, turbidity in the water, pollution can all cause corals to expel their essential zooxanthellae, which is what makes coral look “bleached.” If they do not reclaim their symbionts, they die. And that will, indeed, impact the food web.

    This is the same problem with polar bears. They adapted to a changing environment, but if that environment ever changes again, they are doomed.

    Now, we can work on removing chemical-leaching plastics from the ocean (and those floating islands of plastic are a blight of shame on us all), the mercury and other heavy metals, reduce toxin runoff to the ocean. But we cannot stop the climate from changing. It always has. The argument is that mankind is speeding that up, not that it will not occur on its own. If our own survival depends on the climate suddenly, and inexplicably, freezing (pardon the pun) at today’s temperature, then we are doomed because that will never happen. That would also stop evolution, as well, as climate change has been a main driver of that mechanism. In fact, climate change produced the polar bear with global cooling, which could not be maintained forever.

    I do agree that we must maintain a gaseous profile optimal for mammalian respiration, reduce toxins and other pollutants in our air and water, and we must above all protect and support the oxygen producers of the planet. If we ever manage to kill the dominant phytoplankton in the ocean, atmospheric oxygen levels will plummet. And yet, we’ve merrily managed to contaminate the entire ocean with enough mercury that pregnant woman are advised against eating fish, and the milk produced by polar bears, seals, Inuit, and killer whales would technically be labeled “toxic waste” by the FDA due to elevated mercury levels. We de-vegetate the planet, removing native chaparral that hold on to every drop of rain that falls in CA like it’s a miser holding onto his last penny, which leads to more drought and dehumidification of the region. We cause one manmade fire after another that denudes mountainsides, killing more plants, leading to erosion and further runoff. We cut down the rainforests to plant palm plantations and other crops for “renewable biofuels”. We cut down forests to grind into wood pellets to sell to Europe to satisfy their quotas for renewable energy, and then they use accounting sleight of hand to write off that they produce more carbon than burning coal with a credit because technically trees are renewable.

    One of the most easily observed ways in which mankind affects climate is through de-vegetation. Lebanon used to be a forest of cedar, until it was all cut down to make masts for ships. Goat over-grazing caused desertification in much of the Middle East. Here in CA, we removed native chaparral that helped plant water into the ground, which led to the loss of much rainfall as runoff and erosion, which led to the state becoming drier, which led to less rain, and depleted underground aquifers. And I’ve posted before what the effect of restoring the wolf to Yellowstone had on its habitat. So mankind’s removal of apex predators can actually affect local habitats, which in part affects microclimates. Then there is the city hardscape with heat island effect and more runoff of water, and the concentrated pollution of cities which blows over and destroys nearby forests (San Francisco, I’m talking to you. Get off your moral high horse and own up to the fact that you are killing the Sequoia National Forest with the pollution wafted inland with oceanic breezes. Your “clean city” just dumps its problems somewhere else.)

    So I would dearly love to invest in improving our environment for us and our future generation. I would love to have crisp clean air to breathe, healthy fish to eat, and a lovely, green planet. But we blow all of our treasure and glamor on anthropogenic global warming. Meanwhile, there isn’t a lot of money left over to combat the mercury contamination of our seas which may well kill the oxygen factories, or to combat deforestation, or to clean up clean renewable energy and its impact on the rainforest and pesticide use (such as growing GMO corn for ethanol with massive amounts of herbicide and pesticide or clearcutting the rainforest to grow biofuel or chopping down tress for renewable wood pellets), or to restore native plant habitats so critical for drought states, or to lower our overpopulation stresses on our resources with calming down our immigration figures, or to clean up pollution, or to sieve out that massive island of trash that impacts the food web and may, in fact, be contributory to destroying corals.

    Nope, we blow our allowance on global warming, and only global warming, and all other worthy projects that can help our climate, environment, health and longevity all get the crumbs. It’s very frustrating.

    http://www.climatecentral.org/news/europe-aims-to-close-loophole-on-wood-energy-20591

  2. Study: 90 Percent of Coral Reefs Will Be Gone By 2050

    Study: Gimme Grant Money, Sumbitch

    FIFY

  6. Let me get this straight: we cannot stop the flow of illegal drugs into our country, gang violence, diabetes epidemic, etc., but somehow we can stop mankind’s negative impact on global climate and ocean life.

    “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” George Bernard Shaw

    This is should be the face of the progressive ideals:

    http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/1705F/production/_95130349_margaretjohnson-1.jpg

    1. I do not want coral reefs to decline or die off. However, the photo above is so ugly that it needs to be drowned off of Ellis Island or someplace. Yuk!

  7. It’s not whether or not people are the cause of global warming. It is a fact that people contribute to global warming. Therefore there is one uncontrollable cause-nature and one controllable cause-people. The fact of the matter is that even if people contribute substantially less than nature, it is this one controllable ingredient that will push the conditions past the tipping point. Throughout the ages, stupidity, in varying degrees, has been illustrated, if not defined, by those refusing to help themselves. Add bravado to this stupidity and you can view the results on this blog.

  9. I’ll add it to the long list of failed predictions made my con men and charlatans who pretend they can predict the future. Here’s a small sample:

    1973: “By 1980 the life expectancy of all Americans will be 42 years.” -Paul Ehrlich, Stanford Biologist, at Earth Day

    1973: “280 million people in 2040 is likely to be too many.” John Holdren, “Population and the American Predicament,” Caltech Population Program, Occasional Papers. [Current U.S. population is about 315 million.]

    1986: “A billion people could die from global warming by 2020.” – Attributed to John Holdren by Paul Ehrlich in The Machinery of Nature, (published 1986), p. 274.

    1989: “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” -Noel Brown, ex UNEP Director

    2004: “European cities will be plunged beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020.” -Paul Harris, UK Eco journalist

    2008: “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.” – Ted Turner, billion dollar donor to the U.N.

  11. Who owns the coral reefs? Is there disappearance a tragedy of the commons problem?

  13. Who are the real terrorists?

    The ones who kill a few people and can be handled by police actions? This includes those who did 9/11

    Or us. We the people who have attacked the Earth. Attacked Gaia. Started the ball rolling for the Anthropocene, the geology period after the Holocene — the name is not yet official but as more creatures die off, and more acid in the sea, and ice melts, and …..

    The Frenchman Bruno Latour is my choice for the most important thinker alive today. He wrote in Nov 2015

    …..If you rightly use the word nihilism to describe these militant madmen, it would seem to me that the word also applies, but with more far-reaching implications, to those who, in a twisted way, are expressing a death wish of their own. Just like those who kill themselves in the act of killing, people in positions of responsibility who fail to take on the issue of global climate change with the greatest seriousness is shouting in unison with the terrorists: Long live death!

    This was an op-ed

    In another piece he says that Trumpism is the first election run on climate denial. And many have pointed out that a false flag operation here in the USA could lead to a police state like Hitler pulled off. With the crap about Russia from the democratic party who refuses to face their loss and the lies of Trumpism and the attack on science and the constitution, there is a clear and present danger to our culture and the Earth.

    The last paragraph from the 2015 piece is

    It would be truly tragic if, by rightly seeking out and destroying those who, within a limited time and place, go about killing innocent people, we delay yet again the necessary work of addressing those who would kill on a deliriously massive scale, over a long period, sweeping away life in all its forms, human or otherwise. Though it is legitimate that a well-calibrated state of emergency allows for secure street demonstrations, the powers that be have to remember that they could declare a different state of emergency, an extreme one this time, that could teach the citizenry how to identify and grapple with the larger enemy. All the more so, since this is a war that finds us very much divided, among nations, territories and peoples, and tragically, within ourselves, as we argue endlessly over the causes and the cures of global warming. Government alone is helpless: it needs all its citizens in this effort. And government should not impede those citizens who, by demonstrating, are trying to help their elected officials — it might even be an occasion to invent demonstrations more innovative than yet another march from Place de la République to Place de la Nation.

    The Other State of Emergency

    In a more recent op ed he states that The Climate Regime has been the most important political actor for the last 30 years.

    1. Don midwest – emailgate with Michael Mann and his cohorts showed us that climate change (formerly global warming) is a crock! Mann has so perverted statistics to make his point that he cannot with good conscience be called a scientist. In fact, the entire climate change (read global warming) scam should be prosecuted under the RICO statutes of either the feds or any state.

      1. Surprise! Scientists are human. Scientists have back and forth discussions and they advocate for their positions. Politics cannot be separated from science, nor religion.

        The 2010 “Climategate” episode — the unauthorized release of emails from Britain’s East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit — vindicated much of Latour’s work. Those emails showed climate scientists engaging in precisely the kind of subjective conversations over what what data was relevant and what data should be thrown away. It showed the scientists engaging in small-p politics — strategizing, for instance, about how to keep articles they disagreed with out of mainstream scientific journals. Skeptics pointed to the emails as evidence that scientists make up facts — and thus that global warming is not happening. Defenders of climate science defensively insisted that the emails revealed absolutely nothing of importance. But by idealizing climate scientists as dispassionate, objective, and neutral voices, liberal policy makers and environmentalists made it easy for skeptics to dismiss the whole of climate science on evidence of their passions and politicking.

        The Monsters of Bruno Latour

        Bruno points out that one of the main reasons that the dialogue between climate scientists and climate skeptics seems to get nowhere is that both operate out of the same frame. Here is Bruno himself

        One way to seize upon the breakthrough from environmentalism to postenvironmentalism is to reshape the very definition of the “precautionary principle.” This strange moral, legal, epistemological monster has appeared in European and especially French politics after many scandals due to the misplaced belief by state authority in the certainties provided by Science.8

        When action is supposed to be nothing but the logical consequence of reason and facts (which the French, of all people, still believe), it is quite normal to wait for the certainty of science before administrators and politicians spring to action. The problem begins when experts fail to agree on the reasons and facts that have been taken as the necessary premises of any action. Then the machinery of decision is stuck until experts come to an agreement. It was in such a situation that the great tainted blood catastrophe of the 1980s ensued: before agreement was produced, hundreds of patients were transfused with blood contaminated by the AIDS virus.9

        The above quotation is from

        Love Your Monsters:
        Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children

  14. Part of the problem is these damn snorkelers swimming in the coral and taking some to give to the kids. BTW, the sky is falling. The sky is falling.

  15. Not a word about pipelines and the inevitable sludge left over for centuries, but when it comes to good snorkeling around coral reefs . . . There’s no part-time environmentalism. Jus’ sayin’.

    1. Yikes!! Even you? Coral is an amazing indicator into multiple aspects of our overall climate, particularly but by no means exclusively, the health of the oceans. The oceans, rumor has it, are useful for more than snorkeling.

      But also,

      Coral reefs provide food to millions of humans. Corals, like trees, provide three-dimensional structure and substrate to house and feed fish and other marine animals that humans eat. Some estimates say that over 1 billion people depend on food from coral reefs, and reefs as a whole might be worth around $172 billion for every year they continue to provide essential services to humans, like food.

      http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/saltwater-science/why_are_coral_reefs_important

      I did a simple search (my search engine is duckduckgo.com) on, the importance of coral reefs and got back so many results I just picked the above at random, which just goes to show how much time we spend on useless information; cause, as many here will tell you, it can’t be us harming those useless things, look how nice we are to each other…

    2. As to gross, nay, criminal negligence closer to home, your charge is spot on, even if somewhat narrowly put. What is it they say about our congress critters? Like trying to herd cats? Don’t know why that makes me think of many in the gentle commentariat here, but regardless, perhaps the snorkel approach was a shot in the dark at something some might identify with as starting to get serious. … 🙂

  16. At some point Mother Nature will retaliate always does. However I see the major attack on the largest area of coral the Chagos Archipelago is still underway by ….sorry but it’s true the greediest species on theplanet – lawyers. The idea is to create a citizenship that never existed of descedents of the formeer French slaves who worked the copra planatations on Diego Garcia some how get them installed as the government and then Club Med here we come on every square centimeter.

    Right now there’s a permanent presence with hard as nails legal consequences for violatiing just about anything, Run by Brits the owners with Royal Marines as the police and he US paying the costs. Chagos is the largest intact archipelago left in the world and the whole area is a designatied off lmits to commercial anything natural preserve. located about 76 degrees East and 7 degrees south in the Indian Ocean. I had the privelege to work in the area on seven or eight occasions.

    I’ve also dove on the north side of Samoa where a hurricane blasted one reef out of existence. It isn’t all man and Nature is much more thorough leaving nothing alive.

    Still the rule is ‘be a good steward of the land and that means standing up against predators like BLM…Bureau of Land Managment and their depradations are a concern of the new President while the last one turned a very blind eye.

  17. “Scientists believe that the world has now lost half of its coral reefs in the last 30 years and could lose 90 percent 2050.”

    I’m not really interested in scientists beliefs. Also, where’s the direct link between climate change and us? Show me the direct cause, direct impact and the direct outcome from proposed changes.

    1. You weren’t born into a world that revolves around you. Biologically, your existence rests on a mountain of underlying organisms (your ecosystem). It’s mind-bogglingly complex. Yet, you were made possible by it.
      So, start by accepting this reality. You are part of something much bigger than yourself, and you inherited responsibilities for your ecosystem and its preservation just by being born into it as a high-functioning ape.

  18. We need coral reefs. Some people need reefer. Global warming is real. It is from cigarette smoking. Not the smoke exhaled but the dumb brains that occupy the smoking bodies. Guns are quicker. If you know some dumb smoker then give him a pistol. Loan it. And let him know that guns are quicker and cancer is not painless. Smokers drive up our medical costs.

  19. But, Turley, you see, Jim Inhofe polled a bunch of people and they said they didn’t give a rat’s patooty. They were, however, concerned about the price of beer staying cheap and gas of course. Did you vote for this catastrophe? It was a question of evils and we not only got the greater evil but one that is incompetent with a proven track record of hypocrisy, lies, and just plain idiocy. But, when you are born into wealth, privilege, and connections, you can hide that; most people are too stupid to see.

    1. Every time I read something Peilosillyni said i think of Isaac and realize just how deep stupid runs. You had your one day back in your box clone.

  20. I could care less! First of all nobody on earth has the ability to stop this from happening, or fix what ever problem these scientists think is causing it to disappear.

    Second a big deal is being made over the loss of a beautiful thing that we get to go look at! Nobody needs to go to a area that has these reefs and see them to make your life complete!

    3rd if depletion of the reefs causes the food chain to be disturbed then we as humans will just find something else to eat.

    So in all I really don’t see what the problem is and why so many people are losing their minds over this!

    3. The “I don’t care about this” attitude is a sign of irresponsibility. You were lucky enough to be born into life on this planet. What people wonder when reading your comment is whether you take it for granted, but are dismissive of the rights to livelihood of people 500 years from now. The starting question in any of these environmental debates is: Do you care about the people who will come after you? If the answer is no, then many wasted words over specific policies can be avoided.

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