I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet.
I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it?
More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?
Scientists performing miracles is caring for the planet in the same way doctors providing saline is caring for blood loss. It's important, it helps, and I'm glad we're doing it, but sometimes you gotta address the bleeding first.
I'm not arguing for degrowth, nor am I discrediting the work of science. I'm observing humanity has failed to have a constructive conversation around climate change, leading to the necessity of solutions like this.
I have no idea what the solution is, I've already admitted it's complex. But it's frightening that the conversation immediately devolves into assumptions about one's stance, and immediate disagreement with that stance. Even on a website like HN. That's a big problem, no?
Scientists have been doing things (with good intentions) which initially look like great ideas but ultimately cause new/greater problems in the future for ages.
To f with nature and believe the full impact is understood in advance is human hubris.
Depends. Do we know the ecosystem impact of corals that are more heat tolerant? Do we understand the evolutionary biological reasons why they aren't? Maybe it's not a problem, or maybe it is, like with so many other things we've messed with in the name of acceptable science (at the time) until we realize ecosystems are not that simple to model.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do research like this. But it is not an automatic good, and it must go hand in hand with proper biological field work looked at from an evolutionary lens. Or we risk making things worse with our good intentions.
I'd prefer if we didn't tamper with ecosystems, but the reality is that our current civilization doesn't have the incentives to stop global warming (even less revert it) without major catastrophes that allow some politics and business leaders to appear as saviors instead of traitors.
We don't know the future impact of these modified corals, but we know it will be catastrophic if they disappear. IMO it would be worse to let the corals simply die.
> More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves
We can only do this if humanity disincentivize getting stuck at local maxima. Another confounding factor is how humans make decisions: the highest level decision-makers are national governments and the respective administrations typically last 5-10 years at a time.
Lots of people care. But 1 person caring usually doesn't do much. That person might be able to make some choices that reduce their impact on the planet, but the effect is miniscule and the effort they have to put in might be immense. Asking billions of people to consciously choose a harder life to hopefully prevent an issue they might not be seeing in front of their eyes on a daily basis, is a really big ask.
It needs to be top down action. Government regulation. Technological advancements. Influencial business people choosing to forgo profit for the sake of sustainability.
Unfortunately only a few greedy people are necessary to derail such efforts...
During COVID confinement, I was hopeful home office would stay. The vast majority of office jobs don't need people sat at a specific location, home office alone reduced the carbon footprint of every major city. A rare instance where personal change significantly benefits both the environment and our lives.
I'm painfully aware that the home office is much more harder to secure than regular office, but it seems like efforts to improve it have stalled since de pandemic.
Sorry to pop the party but we need perspective. "Scientists breed successfully corals" is not a big deal, marine aquarium keepers reproduce many easy species for decades and have developed the technology to help with that. The problem is that this is a titanic task. There are >350 species of hard corals with zooxanthelae and they have very long life cycles.
The second part of the title is more problematic. The real meat in the article is that the results, the increase in heat tolerance, were minor. Even the authors say that will be unable to cope with the changes coming. Is interesting and relevant to know that the larvae could grow, but we don't even know if this changes are permanent or will have consequences later on a species able to live for 3000 ears. And sadly half of the coral reefs in the planet present in 1950 were lost in just a generation of humans.
I’ve been scuba diving for 20 years and I’ve seen the devastation first hand. Once healthy eco systems, teeming with life, just completely wiped out. It’s heartbreaking.
Corals grow so slowly, this might improve things 100-200 years from now, which is not nothing, but no one should delude themselves into thinking this is a solution. The fish that depend on these reefs will not be able to wait 100 generations for us to engineer a solution. That biodiversity will be lost and will take millions of years to recover.
You've witnessed actually dead coral or just "bleached" coral? Bleached coral isn't dead. It has just expelled its symbiotic algae. When the water cools it gets its algae back.
All corals are broadcast spawners. The polyp will start growing where ever conditions are right. It may not be the same place it was growing before but the coral doesn't go extinct.
> Bleached coral isn't dead. It has just expelled its symbiotic algae. When the water cools it gets its algae back.
Zooxanthellae provide 90% of a coral's energy. Bleached coral has a few weeks where recovery is indeed possible, but if stresses last longer than that the coral dies.
I have stopped traveling to dive, but because it's too sad, not because I was concerned about destroying the ecosystem by viewing it. I don't touch the reef, I don't fin near coral, I can hold my buoyancy quite well... but the same can't be said for many divers.
That said, there is a factor for people that if something is out of sight, it's out of mind. Being involved with the ecosystem really is the only way I've seen protection of it happen, people just tend not to try to protect something they aren't engaged with. I'd rather everyone dove, even if that brought traffic to certain sites up, because I think they'd make the macro changes we need to make to preserve things while accepting the micro change in boat fuel use or reef traffic, or whatever risks you're thinking of. Seeing a fish trying to escape from a plastic bag is a sobering experience, you only need to see it once.
To my mind, I'd add the heat effects of the various forms of transportation involved, both in direct contribution and the CO2 increase as a result of their use.
Not the GP, but I've moved from bi-weekly diving in South Florida and the Keys in the mid to late 90's, to once every couple of years for this reason, among others.
Even then, you could see the difference in the John Pennekamp State Park reefs from when I first snorkeled them in the 1970's.
Why would it? I’m a scuba diver and I don’t pour hot water on corals.
My primary function for diving is to protect the kelp forest where I usually dive by removing sea urchins, whose population has exploded, killing the kelp. This is done in conjunction with the department of fish and wildlife.
Any scuba diver knows never to touch the coral, the ground, or anything like that. Fairly simple
It seems that the Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, which killed off most sea stars along the western North American coastline, might have been exacerbated by unusually warm water in 2014-2016 which stressed those animals. The death of those predators caused the purple sea urchin population to explode and they ate up most of the kelp. So it's all connected. (I'm sure your aware of this, just providing a little more context for others.)
Examining and quantifying the genes that give heat tolerance in the same species will allow polyp replacement - driven evolutionarily. That way they will occupy the same 'burrows' and can reform the reef more rapidly without the need for the slow growing coral skeleton?
Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.
>Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.
Exactly, which I think is always the key point at issue that needs to be raised any time someone says "well earth has been this hot before." Never at this velocity, at least not without extinction events.
I kinda agree with the GP that this seems weird. Yes, ocean temps are rising very quickly, but this experiment only took 5 years, and was presumably a only a tiny fraction of how many wild coral there are. Ocean warming has taken place over several decades, and with millions of times as large of a natural population. It just seems weird that, if this kinda of adaptation is possible (and they showed it is), it wouldn't be happening in the wild. And that does seem to be true, it just seems weird.
In nature, you don't necessarily have the needed genetic diversity or controlled conditions, in the right combinations, the way you can obtain them in the lab. And "several decades" is probably not enough time in evolutionary terms to adjust, if I had to guess.
Which holds that rather than a slow gradual change, species under go a rapid change and then are stable after that change.
If that hold true, then the driver would be that you have low impact changes going on all the time that do not take hold but once a beneficial change is introduced it spreads rapidly.
I think the notion of its status as a "prevailing theory" is overstated, and is an idea that exists more in the minds of lay audiences than in the profession (see criticism section).
I agree with the criticisms that Gould, unfortunately, spent much of his career attempting to position himself as an intellectual revolutionary, overstating the primacy of PE and was in many important respects an intellectual fraud. Gifted as he was as a critic of intelligent design, I think he set back our understanding of evolution almost as much as he helped.
That depends on the scale of the changes. Life can make a planet habitable, but our sun will eventually die, and the systems that ecosystems raised to control the changes in its favor will be unable to fix that. Only we could do something about it.
I wonder if the fact that mature corals are stationary makes it harder for them to adapt. If the surviving corals are too far apart, it could be that they're unable to reproduce sexually. Coral larvae seem to be mobile until they find a structure to settle on, but if the larvae never have a chance to form...
(Corals can also reproduce asexually via fragmentation, but that won't help with genetic diversity in the wild I'd imagine. Researchers seem to take advantage of this for selective breeding though.)
There are many coral reef systems doing quite well.
The great barrier reef living system is only about 6k-8k years old. Much of that was land not too long ago.
The sea level rose there about 20k years ago (coinciding with the Last Glacial Maximum) and slowed to a near halt 6k years ago allowing coral to grow there.
Decades isn't even a blink of the eye in evolutionary timescales. Coral don't just end up breeding more temperature resilient offspring, a bunch has to die first. The ones that don't die may carry on, but that might be 2% of the population. So sure, they might evolve and carry on but 98% might die at the same time.
Yes, but. E. coli is E. coli and coral is coral. It may not be the case that coral can, on its own, evolve in the ways necessary to save itself from heated oceans in the time that E. Coli could.
Can somebody explain to me why this is apparently being downvoted ? Is Richard Lenski very far from the consensus of his field ? Scientific dishonesty ?
It's important that people understand that the mechanism of evolution has been conclusively demonstrated in a laboratory within a single researcher's lifespan.
"Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins."
First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners."
This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.
RIGHT NOW there are coral that are already heat resistant. When the ocean temperature rises, the corals that can’t tolerate it will die off and the ones that can tolerate will survive. Then because of less resources being used by those that died, the coral with heat tolerance will thrive. This is how evolution works.
At least some corals must be able to survive the current transformation? At least some past extinction events must've been very abrupt and things like corals lived through that?
Supposedly one past extinction event killed off all dinosaurs, leaving rats and other small mammals to take over the world.
Dragonflies used to have like two foot or four foot wings spans. Now their relatively small and presumably play a very different role in the ecosystem.
Mother Nature isn't some Christian God that loves you and looks out for you. The fact that nature isn't looking out for our welfare is likely why things like Christianity are popular: Because actual reality scares the hell out of people and they need some kind of emotional opiate so they can go "La la la not listening!" and get through the damn day.
I think the collective expertise of marine biologists all across the globe. But I also think a high school education about evolution would be sufficient to establish that things really do go extinct, and our natural history is not one of perfectly balanced exchanges compensating every loss.
I'm sure you think you can play that game, but that's precisely the problem.
The fundamental confusion here is the notion that, absent one's own personal expert credentials, we have no access to any expertise or authority of any kind that can be brought to bear on this question (funny that that requirement applies only one way).
The vital role of coral in supporting marine ecosystems is a general and well understood phenomenon. So much so that our ordinary access to expertise through science communication in the media, our summary of this understanding as reflected in high school education, and, if needed, in major reports from NGOs is sufficient to address the question and indeed is central to the purpose of those respective institutions. Those are access to pertinent expertise for this kind of question.
I promise you, that this consensus has not overlooked the possibility of everything being made right by adaptations later on as you seem to be implying, and I promise that no version of explanations of evolutionary adaptation has ever taught that adaptation guarantees, as a cosmic law, compensation for the destruction of ecosystems. The same resources noted above are sufficient to dismiss this as an ordinary biology 101 confusion.
What expertise do I need? Lots of coral is dying. It isn't right next to healthy coral. How do you think the fish are going to migrate? And those other coral reefs aren't empty.
As for the effect of coral bleaching on fish, you can google it and I've definitely read about it before, seen ecologists talk about it, etc. The expectation is that it will reduce the number of fish significantly.
Unfortunately, there is no law of the universe that says that change will only occur at a survivable rate. Thousands of species are already going extinct every year, and we're still burning just as many fossil fuels as what got us into this mess. We don't have thousands of years to wait for animals to adapt, we have mere decades.
Correct, there's no law of the universe that says change will occur a survivable rate. Species have been going extinct long before humans. We should help those species who environments we damage and we should mitigate or nullify the damage in the first place, but we should not play God.
That struck me as mostly reasonable until the 'playing god' bit which upended everything. For one, that term almost never means the same thing to any two people. For another, from the context up to this point you seem to have unrealistic assumptions that this is all part of a broader cosmic give and take that balances itself, or stands over us as an indecipherable mystery.
I think that temptation to stand in awe before a cosmic mystery is a common one and, in many cases a laudable one. In this case, that temptation is getting in the way of some very-knowable facts which are spelling out doom. "Not playing god" in this context seems to amount to standing by as an extinction event unfolds, and I don't think the desire to get lost in existential ditherings is an acceptable reason to stand by and let that happen.
Living life as a highly technologically advanced species that uses systems to dominate the plant for resource extraction to the detriment of countless other species with the awareness to know better is playing god, albeit rather poorly. .
> How much are we altering it over coming out of the last ice age and the natural CO2 effects of volcanos? That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.
No, it's not an unknown. Please stop with this cowardly delusion. Human activity is changing the Earth's climate at unbelievable rates compared to the historical norm. XKCD for scale: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Yes we would, and certainly there already is evolutionary pressure. This is just putting our finger on the scale knowing what's coming.
What is "fast enough" is in the eye of the beholder, life doesn't really care about boom and bust cycles or extinctions, but people really don't like change so we can do it faster and do a bit of reef gardening.
My understanding is that there are lots of existing corals well adapted to high heat/low pH, mostly from shallow atolls.
... But, if you transplant them they get outcompeted immediately. Corals are constantly engaged in a WW1-style trench warfare for space, so spending metabolic energy on something other than eradicating one's neighbor is not a great strategy.
Here's the latest data from AIMS, the Australian government agency that monitors the Great Barrier Reef [1]. There are three periods in these graphs:
1. 1985-2013. Climatologists report global warming during this period, but it had no impact on the corals. This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period.
2. 2010-2017. A big drop. This triggered lots of stories about how humanity is killing the corals. In 2019 they were saying the outlook had moved from "poor" to "very poor". [2]
3. 2020-2024. Robust growth to the highest levels ever seen, more than a third larger than the prior stable period.
This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health. Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven, given that the huge growth spurt caught self-proclaimed coral experts completely off guard and they still lack any explanation for what drives these changes. But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant. They exist in a wide range of temperatures across the world, which vary by far wider ranges than climate change is predicted to generate, and they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.
Unfortunately AIMS don't seem interested in a true understanding of the corals. They are only interested in coral doom. Doom = a call to action = money and social status, whereas corals doing fine reduces them to mere observation of natural cycles, which doesn't have much potential for career growth. From the peak of "the Great Barrier Reef is going from poor to very poor" now they are reduced to saying "recent increases in hard coral cover can be quickly undone" and "The high coral cover reported this year is good news but does not mean all is fine". Their reports give the strong impression that they really wish the corals would do badly, but nature is feeling uncooperative right now. Their next best strategy is apparently to just ignore it and pretend scientists have to save the day anyway.
In addition to looking simply at the explosive growth limited to the past 4-5 years, it seems reasonable to look at the entire plot as well. All 3 graphs in [1] date back to 1965, and look at that data it seems that the growth/population of corals was reasonably stable up until the late 00s.
edit: only goes back to 1985, error on my part, but still relatively stable from 1985-late 00s
It may be possible that this recent spike in growth indicates that there is a strong recovery, but looking at the data it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years, with drastic increases and decreases in all 3 populations that are much greater variance than from the mid 60s to early 00s.
While I agree with you that it's possible that this coral death is overhyped, your own conclusions don't seem to be evidence-based themselves.
> It may be possible that this recent spike in growth indicates that there is a strong recovery, but looking at the data it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years
Could you expand on how the recent explosive growth is unstable and fits with the predictions that the coral is dying?
And GPs post was evidence based, your interpretations were not, they were subjective and a bit handwaving, which is why I would like clarfication on your above view.
Explosive growth is generally speaking not stable. I will defer to the dictionary definition of stable. I'm just using words how they are defined.
From an ecosystem perspective, simple "coral coverage" is not a good enough metric to indicate that the coral reef is healthy. We also need to understand the biodiversity, is one coral taking over because it is better adapted and creating a monoculture? It's not clear. I made a point to not jump to conclusions, simply stating that explosive growth does not indicate a healthy ecosystem.
Thank you for the clarification. Some may interpret "not stable" meaning that it could be detrimental to it's life, not just the textbook velocity definition.
Could you answer the second part of my question:
> "How does explosive growth fit with the predictions that the coral is dying?"
To your statement:
> "We also need to understand the biodiversity, is one coral taking over because it is better adapted and creating a monoculture"
I'd say that we should not assume one way or another. It very may well be, or not. That data is probably out there and I'd be interested to know the answer. If the answer is yes, it's very healthy.
I'd also like to know what species these scientists are breeding. If it's only a select few species, is that healthier than the species that have adapted naturally and are growing fine?
Explosive growth does not happen in a vacuum. Sometimes it's due to a pre-existing boom and bust cycle (eg lynx and hares, rabbits and wolves, etc). Sometimes it's due to the elimination of key species or ecological instability (eg hares in australia with no predators, boom of sea urchins in california, cuttlefish booming due to overfishing), or maybe it's something completely different altogether.
Given that there is no history of a pre-existing boom and bust cycle in the data, I think we can rule that out. So clearly something is happening that wasn't happening before. The question you want answered is one-dimensional and ill-posed in this situation to allow you to better understand the dynamics at work.
The GBR is not that old, and it experienced a major boom during it's creation, obviously.
We really don't have enough data to rule anything out as we weren't tracking it that long relatively to say for sure. We also don't know all the variables.
They tried the "but what about biodiversity" argument back in 2020 when the regrowth started.
It is automatically true that in an ecosystem that experiences a population decline, when the population starts growing again the subtypes that grow fastest will become more common than those which grow slower, and thus there will be a temporary decline in biodiversity. That doesn't indicate a problem of any kind. It's just the natural state of affairs.
The graphs date back to 1985. The font is small though, so it's easy to misread.
> it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years
That's extremely arguable! Extrapolating from a tiny number of data points is how AIMS managed to screw up previously. There's really very little data on which to build predictions about long term trends. We have no idea how stable or unstable coral sizes are because it's just not been monitored for long enough to say. We're zoomed in to a tiny, tiny part of the coral's history, which is far longer than humanities own.
I went to Thailand shortly after the covid lockdowns ended, and the corals were all coming back. I talked to a boat captain about it and his comment was: “yeah, there were no tourists to abuse them”.
I can’t help but wonder what effect tourism (and lockdowns) has had on corals. For example, It is common among scuba divers to only use mineral sunscreens because standard off-the-shelf sunscreen floats on the top of the water and blocks UV from the corals
It's possible that this sort of thing is connected, yes. The timing of a rebound in 2020 is interesting. But then again, if it's caused by tourism or sunscreen, the next interesting question is what changed around 2010?
While you bring forward interesting data, I believe your view is uncharitable of the motives behind people wanting to protect coral reefs also you don't account for your own hindsight.
Maybe a more charitable interpretation is that nobody really understood why there was such a massive drop and climate change was the most likely explanation so they went about warning about it given how important they are to their ecosystem ?
Also I think you are wawing off climate change too quickly. Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?
The incentives here are pretty straightforward and plenty of people within academic fields are willing to admit what kind of distortions they create. Look at any HN discussion on academic fraud and you'll find discussions from people who are or were scientists where they tell similar stories.
Climate change wasn't the most likely explanation for the big drop. To make that explanation work you have to hypothesize a lot of hidden variables and/or unknown processes, because CO2 emission is a slow steady process. If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response in the absence of evidence, fine, but at that point anyone can make up any explanation they like and it's just as compelling. There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years. There are probably natural cycles at work here which might be interesting to investigate, or there might even be some sort of human cause that's not climate related (chemicals being washed into the sea or whatever). AIMS is supposed to figure that out but they don't seem to be doing that, they just keep crying wolf. So it's reasonable to point out their incentives.
> Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?
Anything is possible in principle, but that doesn't help us much.
> If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response [...] There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years
I am actually realizing that you are probably talking about the effects of C02 levels in the oceans while I was actually thinking about the global rise in temperature which IIUC has seen a kind of cliff-edge change. And IIRC, ocean warmth is what I have read is threatening coral reefs, so I am bit lost here.
It was much hotter in the past than it is now. Look at any attempt to reconstruct temperatures from proxies. The underlying science is unreliable but everyone agrees the distant past had average temperatures far hotter than today.
It was actually warmer even in the recent past. There's archaeological evidence that it was warmer in the Roman and middle ages than it is now. This was once uncontroversial and if you read archaeology papers you can still sometimes see discussion of this fact. But they don't highlight this because they don't want to pick fights with climatologists.
There's hasn't been any cliff edge rise in temperature. Look at graphs of global temperature but be aware they're heavily manipulated. A graph of 20th C temperatures published in 1999 looks very different to the same graph published today.
It would be nice if people responded to you instead of downvoting silently. Thank you for the information.
It's also worth noting the Great Barrier Reef is fairly new (6-8k years old). It came to be from the sea rise of the Last Glacial Maximum 20k years ago.
Information is fine, overconfident denialist commentary earns a downvote. When you see a comment to the effect of "The self-proclaimed experts are wrong! I know the truth," you should heavily discount the conclusions it draws.
Just because the mechanism of resurgence is unknown does not mean that all previous science on the topic is invalidated.
It can simultaneously be true that ocean warming is devastating the Great Barrier Reef corals and that the GBR has the ability to rebound on its own. Here's a question the parent comment didn't address: Are we seeing the same species in this resurgence that we saw before mass bleaching, or is biodiversity reduced?
> Your last sentence would have been a fine reply to the GP without any meta level commenting.
I get that but I stand by all of it though.
> data from the experts monitoring the reef did not line up with the climate change predictions of the reef.
That's normal.
> He didn't say HE knew the truth,
Well, that was a paraphrase of the unwarranted confidence in each of these statements, which I find extremely dubious:
> This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period
It's easy to imagine that warming would not have any effect up until reaching a certain tipping point, so this is overstated as evidence-against.
> This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health.
Basically a restatement of the above. They're not incompatible.
> Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven
"Unlikely" is also an overstatement. These data can cast doubt but aren't strong enough to say that anthropogenic causes are unlikely, given how likely it frankly is due to the scale of changes in the ocean.
> But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant.
No, we can't say this. Some corals are heat-tolerant.
> they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.
This is... borderline misinformation. It ignores the rate of change, which is just not really a credible way to discuss climate change. Also, specifically, which changes has coral survived? I don't actually know how old coral is or which mass extinctions it has survived which is actually pretty important for making a comparison.
Etc. Not really worth going over every point, you get the idea.
> Just because the mechanism of resurgence is unknown does not mean that all previous science on the topic is invalidated.
This is really the core of the problem. It's why the downvoters are wrong and why it's worth debating the topic here, because it's really a much wider problem than corals or climate.
What government employees have done so far wasn't actually science and they aren't really experts. It was presented to the public as science, it was funded from science budgets, it has the superficial look of science, but it wasn't science. It was merely data collection, followed by wild theorizing based on nothing, followed by political lobbying. It wasn't even extrapolation, as there was no trend to extrapolate!
That isn't how the scientific method is supposed to work. Scientists are supposed to form a hypothesis, gather data that could falsify the hypothesis, publish it, then let others replicate it and so on, until we are certain enough we understand the underlying system to proclaim it a theory. Then you can go to politicians and demand money or changes to laws.
The complete lack of scientific method here is why reef ... people ... I don't want to give them the title of "scientist" ... have managed to not only seriously embarrass themselves but undermine confidence in all ecology and climatology. They had no basis on which to claim that CO2 induced warming was killing corals. The data simply did not fit that hypothesis at any point. Yet by tying their field to climate change they unlocked media interest and a much greater flow of money. They took the easy, tempting path instead of the right path and it is not only completely legitimate but a moral imperative to point out their dishonesty. Their own colleagues and institutional supervisors aren't doing it, so other people have to. If nobody does then this is how science dies, people! When anyone can call themselves a scientist despite not doing science, then eventually the whole concept of science itself will be seen as a discredited joke. That's how dark ages happen. Everyone should be calling out those who claim high confidence in their predictions whilst not having done the work to deserve that confidence.
One must deal with humans as they are, not as we'd wish them to be. The correct solution is that externalities associated with consumption should be priced in by fiat. The government has the (uneviable) task of protecting the environment because it is a perfect example of a common good. Of course, such authority must be given to the government by the people; it is already happening to a very small extent; as climate change becomes more real to people's everyday lives, I expect to see more movement in this direction. Of course, by then it will probably be too late, but we can hope that it will not be.
Yeah, this. Perfect example, our crazy car-based transportation network was popularized by a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign, we went from vilifying "speed demons" to vilifying "jaywalkers" because "they" told us to:
The choice isn't between a mildly worse life -or- a better life.
The choice is between a mildly worse life -or- a horrible life as the planetary life-support system reconfigures itself into a radical new climate regime.
And really, living in harmony with Nature is fun and fulfilling, so the choice is between a mildly inconvenient transitional period to a hip, swinging, easy living, eco-friendly life -or- a horrible life as the planetary life-support system reconfigures itself into a radical new climate regime.
So while I 100% agree we have man-made climate change, there are two principles to live by:
1. Not everything is climate change. This has come up a lot with Hurricanes Helene and Milton recently, saying they're "unprecedented" or similar superlatives. Consider the 1916 flood of Asheville [1], also caused by a hurricane. Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity. A moving statistical distribution takes a lot of data points to quantify, however; and
2. We really have no idea of how the EArth will respond to climate change. This comes up when people talk about "runaway climate change" a la Venus. My argument is that if that was going to happen, it would've happened at some point in the last 4 billion years. That's a really long time.
So in relation to coral and the seas, the argument is made that warming is a lot more rapid than what naturally occurs. It turns out that's not true either. Consider abrupt climate change in the last Ice AGe (~100K years) [3]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
That's a massive change and it's happened many times in the last 100,000 years. So what's happened over 4 billion years?
This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?
I understand the motivation here but fearmongering (even if justified) just doesn't work to educate people and ultimately change policy [4]. Psychologically, catastrophic predictions will tend to get ignored because hey, there's nothing you can do.
>> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
My understanding is that this was local to a region and not global, and constituted extinction or near extinction-level events for plant and animal populations that suffered through them. And even though those changes were fast, my understanding is that our present change is (1) even faster, (2) is not a back-and-forth oscillation controlled at the bounds by natural dynamics but a one-directional trend upward (3) from human activity stacked on top of the dynamics of natural systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
We live on a planet saturated in one of the most corrosive pollutants (to life that evolved before it). If an anaerobic intelligent life had evolved before the world was conquered by cyanobacteria, in a society with a profit motive for manufacturing sugar, would they have farmed the very thing that would wipe them out?
Right, and said slightly differently: this is the context against which we have to judge whether there was any natural experiment we can refer to. There's no reason to think that the history of life on earth thus far has presented a sufficiently comparable case, to reassure us that what's happening is a re-run of a familiar event we've already seen, where everything works out well.
Yes that is nicely concise, but in addition I was trying to say that the line of reasoning that life has persisted through cataclysmic environmental changes and therefore worrying about them is fearmongering is a facile argument as the persistence of lichens and prototaxites etc has no bearing on the survival of humans. The nature of a cataclysm is very relative, as the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans would be meaningless to geochemical anaerobic bacteria that live miles below us.
We only have coal because trees grew and fell on each other for like 60 million years before anything figured out how to decompose lignin.
Kind of. Climate change has occurred in the past, and climate and weather are chaotic systems. But we can still determine where the attractor lies, and that it’s moving.
I still think we shouldn’t focus on climate change, since the majority of the population won’t understand, nor care.
Instead focus on environment, which is what you’re living in right now. The benefit is that doing what’s good for the environment year on year would also accomplish what’s good for climate
> This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?
Well, before you pat yourself and feel safe, you'd better answer those questions instead of just asking them and deciding the answer will go on a direction you like.
Coral is a weird kind of organism, we can't expect it to adapt like insects. It changing can be quite bad.
But yeah, we won't have runaway warming. I don't know what the people that invented that risk were thinking.
>Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity.
I checked your source here, and the emphasis of the article is almost completely the inverse of how you presented it. The article is emphatic at the urgency of understanding how much more forceful the storms are, while noting there is not a larger total number of storms. In the article, that latter point is an aside to the urgency of understanding storms are becoming more intense.
It actually explicitly says that storms of greater intensity are indeed becoming more frequent. Your portrayal, however, is to reference the central point in passing while emphasizing a side point and implying something completely at odds with the article. And this isn't just tomayto-tomahto, one point is critical to understanding the intensity of storms and the other isn't.
Not sure this is a good idea. What if the disappearance of corals at higher temps is part of a natural regulation system for Earth, where if they are artificially preserved, homeostasis will be perturbed?
In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
> I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them
How about humans pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year? Are you against that ecosystem engineering type project? Because it's happening. And it's having severe consequences. And it seems it's not going to stop. So people are trying to look into ways to attempt to mitigate its effects and you end up with one engineering type project to mitigate another. Doing nothing isn't going to work. We know that. So a lot of people are willing to accept less than fully understood solutions.
At its essence, status quo extremism is not the denial of dangers, SQE's are quite alert to them. Instead, it's about an axiomatic re-definition of danger as being about whether or not something is presently happening. If it is already happening, then by definition it's not dangerous.
Of course there’s no engineered homeostasis to mess up on Earth. There might be a general tendency toward homeostasis: lots of, in some generalized sense “mass” and “momentum” in the system, and a tendency for species to die off by consuming all their resources and running out of places to put their byproducts. But that seems more likely to be something that humans fall afoul of, not coral, which seems more like an accidental victim and evidence that homeostasis has some pretty big gaps.
There is no natural regulation system for the earth, and the earth makes no attempt at homeostasis. It has been tipped over into states almost completely inhospitable for then-existing life more than once.
I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet.
I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it?
More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?
Scientists "performing miracles" is humanity caring for the planet.
Ask yourself why you (apparently) prefer degrowth to this.
Scientists performing miracles is caring for the planet in the same way doctors providing saline is caring for blood loss. It's important, it helps, and I'm glad we're doing it, but sometimes you gotta address the bleeding first.
I'm not arguing for degrowth, nor am I discrediting the work of science. I'm observing humanity has failed to have a constructive conversation around climate change, leading to the necessity of solutions like this.
I have no idea what the solution is, I've already admitted it's complex. But it's frightening that the conversation immediately devolves into assumptions about one's stance, and immediate disagreement with that stance. Even on a website like HN. That's a big problem, no?
Scientists have been doing things (with good intentions) which initially look like great ideas but ultimately cause new/greater problems in the future for ages.
To f with nature and believe the full impact is understood in advance is human hubris.
> Scientists "performing miracles" is humanity caring for the planet.
Scientists "performing miracles" is one of the ways humanity is caring for the planet.
Depends. Do we know the ecosystem impact of corals that are more heat tolerant? Do we understand the evolutionary biological reasons why they aren't? Maybe it's not a problem, or maybe it is, like with so many other things we've messed with in the name of acceptable science (at the time) until we realize ecosystems are not that simple to model.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do research like this. But it is not an automatic good, and it must go hand in hand with proper biological field work looked at from an evolutionary lens. Or we risk making things worse with our good intentions.
I'd prefer if we didn't tamper with ecosystems, but the reality is that our current civilization doesn't have the incentives to stop global warming (even less revert it) without major catastrophes that allow some politics and business leaders to appear as saviors instead of traitors.
We don't know the future impact of these modified corals, but we know it will be catastrophic if they disappear. IMO it would be worse to let the corals simply die.
Feels like a convenient way for you to give up your own responsibility to the planet to justify not changing your impact.
I'm not saying this is you alone. We all do this, but this comment is particularly egregious for it.
> More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves
We can only do this if humanity disincentivize getting stuck at local maxima. Another confounding factor is how humans make decisions: the highest level decision-makers are national governments and the respective administrations typically last 5-10 years at a time.
Lots of people care. But 1 person caring usually doesn't do much. That person might be able to make some choices that reduce their impact on the planet, but the effect is miniscule and the effort they have to put in might be immense. Asking billions of people to consciously choose a harder life to hopefully prevent an issue they might not be seeing in front of their eyes on a daily basis, is a really big ask.
It needs to be top down action. Government regulation. Technological advancements. Influencial business people choosing to forgo profit for the sake of sustainability.
Unfortunately only a few greedy people are necessary to derail such efforts...
During COVID confinement, I was hopeful home office would stay. The vast majority of office jobs don't need people sat at a specific location, home office alone reduced the carbon footprint of every major city. A rare instance where personal change significantly benefits both the environment and our lives.
I'm painfully aware that the home office is much more harder to secure than regular office, but it seems like efforts to improve it have stalled since de pandemic.
Sorry to pop the party but we need perspective. "Scientists breed successfully corals" is not a big deal, marine aquarium keepers reproduce many easy species for decades and have developed the technology to help with that. The problem is that this is a titanic task. There are >350 species of hard corals with zooxanthelae and they have very long life cycles.
The second part of the title is more problematic. The real meat in the article is that the results, the increase in heat tolerance, were minor. Even the authors say that will be unable to cope with the changes coming. Is interesting and relevant to know that the larvae could grow, but we don't even know if this changes are permanent or will have consequences later on a species able to live for 3000 ears. And sadly half of the coral reefs in the planet present in 1950 were lost in just a generation of humans.
I’ve been scuba diving for 20 years and I’ve seen the devastation first hand. Once healthy eco systems, teeming with life, just completely wiped out. It’s heartbreaking.
Corals grow so slowly, this might improve things 100-200 years from now, which is not nothing, but no one should delude themselves into thinking this is a solution. The fish that depend on these reefs will not be able to wait 100 generations for us to engineer a solution. That biodiversity will be lost and will take millions of years to recover.
A great doc about this: https://youtu.be/aGGBGcjdjXA?si=fnYuvjTDqAkRE3Ad
It must be heartbreaking to witness that devastation firsthand
You've witnessed actually dead coral or just "bleached" coral? Bleached coral isn't dead. It has just expelled its symbiotic algae. When the water cools it gets its algae back.
All corals are broadcast spawners. The polyp will start growing where ever conditions are right. It may not be the same place it was growing before but the coral doesn't go extinct.
> Bleached coral isn't dead. It has just expelled its symbiotic algae. When the water cools it gets its algae back.
Zooxanthellae provide 90% of a coral's energy. Bleached coral has a few weeks where recovery is indeed possible, but if stresses last longer than that the coral dies.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/coral-recovery-...
Have you stopped scuba diving? Aren't you concerned that your scuba diving contributes to the destruction?
I have stopped traveling to dive, but because it's too sad, not because I was concerned about destroying the ecosystem by viewing it. I don't touch the reef, I don't fin near coral, I can hold my buoyancy quite well... but the same can't be said for many divers.
That said, there is a factor for people that if something is out of sight, it's out of mind. Being involved with the ecosystem really is the only way I've seen protection of it happen, people just tend not to try to protect something they aren't engaged with. I'd rather everyone dove, even if that brought traffic to certain sites up, because I think they'd make the macro changes we need to make to preserve things while accepting the micro change in boat fuel use or reef traffic, or whatever risks you're thinking of. Seeing a fish trying to escape from a plastic bag is a sobering experience, you only need to see it once.
Electric drones could suffice if you still want people to be able to view it up close.
There's plenty of nature reserves that have tourism limitations for the very reason that high traffic has negative effects.
The best thing for the reefs in Thailand was Covid (ie, the absence of people)
This is a valid concern as Thailand barrier reefs made great recovering during the covid period (hinting that tourism could have had major effects)
I am aware of only three ways that diving could affect coral.
1) Boat's anchor doing physical damage, which is why popular dive spots have mooring buoys.
2) Many popular sun screen lotions are really bad for coral.
3) Physically touching the coral can do damage, even if gently.
Are there any other factors of which I am unaware?
To my mind, I'd add the heat effects of the various forms of transportation involved, both in direct contribution and the CO2 increase as a result of their use.
Spilling fuel into the water, dumping garbage into the water (nearby restaurants and hotels)
Not the GP, but I've moved from bi-weekly diving in South Florida and the Keys in the mid to late 90's, to once every couple of years for this reason, among others.
Even then, you could see the difference in the John Pennekamp State Park reefs from when I first snorkeled them in the 1970's.
This feels pretty combative, and unhelpful. Which leads me to think it's bad faith.
What active contributions are you making to the wellbeing of our reefs?
Why would it? I’m a scuba diver and I don’t pour hot water on corals.
My primary function for diving is to protect the kelp forest where I usually dive by removing sea urchins, whose population has exploded, killing the kelp. This is done in conjunction with the department of fish and wildlife.
Any scuba diver knows never to touch the coral, the ground, or anything like that. Fairly simple
In the Florida Keys, shooting invasive Lionfish is also a way that divers can contribute to reef health.
Added C02 from boats may have an effect. And people may know not to touch it, and you may not, but that doesn't mean other's don't.
The best way not to effect nature is to not interact with it.
Obviously that's not 100% possible nor pleasurable, but for more sensitive systems, it's more necessary.
Thanks for helping with the urchin removal.
It seems that the Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, which killed off most sea stars along the western North American coastline, might have been exacerbated by unusually warm water in 2014-2016 which stressed those animals. The death of those predators caused the purple sea urchin population to explode and they ate up most of the kelp. So it's all connected. (I'm sure your aware of this, just providing a little more context for others.)
https://www.nps.gov/im/swan/ssws.htm
Examining and quantifying the genes that give heat tolerance in the same species will allow polyp replacement - driven evolutionarily. That way they will occupy the same 'burrows' and can reform the reef more rapidly without the need for the slow growing coral skeleton?
Perhaps a dumb question, but wouldn't we expect the rise in ocean temperatures to be cause nature to be doing this selective breeding right now?
Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.
There was a good episode of PBS Weathered on this recently if you want an idea of how quickly this has happened: https://youtu.be/YEH9nX5sudk?si=iCivRPwK8AI4sjKU
>Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.
Exactly, which I think is always the key point at issue that needs to be raised any time someone says "well earth has been this hot before." Never at this velocity, at least not without extinction events.
Yes, and in fact the extinction event associated with this high-velocity change is termed the "Holocene Extinction" [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
I kinda agree with the GP that this seems weird. Yes, ocean temps are rising very quickly, but this experiment only took 5 years, and was presumably a only a tiny fraction of how many wild coral there are. Ocean warming has taken place over several decades, and with millions of times as large of a natural population. It just seems weird that, if this kinda of adaptation is possible (and they showed it is), it wouldn't be happening in the wild. And that does seem to be true, it just seems weird.
In nature, you don't necessarily have the needed genetic diversity or controlled conditions, in the right combinations, the way you can obtain them in the lab. And "several decades" is probably not enough time in evolutionary terms to adjust, if I had to guess.
I think the prevailing theory of evolution is punctuated equilibrium(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium)
Which holds that rather than a slow gradual change, species under go a rapid change and then are stable after that change.
If that hold true, then the driver would be that you have low impact changes going on all the time that do not take hold but once a beneficial change is introduced it spreads rapidly.
I think the notion of its status as a "prevailing theory" is overstated, and is an idea that exists more in the minds of lay audiences than in the profession (see criticism section).
I agree with the criticisms that Gould, unfortunately, spent much of his career attempting to position himself as an intellectual revolutionary, overstating the primacy of PE and was in many important respects an intellectual fraud. Gifted as he was as a critic of intelligent design, I think he set back our understanding of evolution almost as much as he helped.
Nature doesn't have the right conditions to deal with the changes in nature?
That depends on the scale of the changes. Life can make a planet habitable, but our sun will eventually die, and the systems that ecosystems raised to control the changes in its favor will be unable to fix that. Only we could do something about it.
It's the cosmic scale equivalent to Mike Tyson's saying about everyone has a plan. Life finds a way, until your sun explodes.
Why the disbelief? You are literally describing the process of species extinction due to failure to adapt. This should not be a new concept.
I wonder if the fact that mature corals are stationary makes it harder for them to adapt. If the surviving corals are too far apart, it could be that they're unable to reproduce sexually. Coral larvae seem to be mobile until they find a structure to settle on, but if the larvae never have a chance to form...
(Corals can also reproduce asexually via fragmentation, but that won't help with genetic diversity in the wild I'd imagine. Researchers seem to take advantage of this for selective breeding though.)
It is happening in the world. It just looks more like Asian carp and zebra mussels and kudzu than a nice diverse ecosystem.
Something will live on coral reefs in a thousand years. We’ll have still lost something beautiful.
There are many coral reef systems doing quite well.
The great barrier reef living system is only about 6k-8k years old. Much of that was land not too long ago.
The sea level rose there about 20k years ago (coinciding with the Last Glacial Maximum) and slowed to a near halt 6k years ago allowing coral to grow there.
Decades isn't even a blink of the eye in evolutionary timescales. Coral don't just end up breeding more temperature resilient offspring, a bunch has to die first. The ones that don't die may carry on, but that might be 2% of the population. So sure, they might evolve and carry on but 98% might die at the same time.
What makes you think it isn't happening in the wild? Evolution does not happen on the timescales of human lifetimes.
Richard Lenski would disagree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
Yes, but. E. coli is E. coli and coral is coral. It may not be the case that coral can, on its own, evolve in the ways necessary to save itself from heated oceans in the time that E. Coli could.
Can somebody explain to me why this is apparently being downvoted ? Is Richard Lenski very far from the consensus of his field ? Scientific dishonesty ?
I imagine it's because 73k generations of bacteria takes a lot less time than 73k generations of coral or other larger organisms.
It's important that people understand that the mechanism of evolution has been conclusively demonstrated in a laboratory within a single researcher's lifespan.
Which offers no relief to the predicament of coral, which was the original context of this convo.
Thanks for sharing
But, most historical changes are quite dramatic and quick. And evolution is meant to happen quickly too, no?
Nature doesn't do selective breeding.
"Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins."
First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners."
This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.
Wrong. This is not how evolution works.
RIGHT NOW there are coral that are already heat resistant. When the ocean temperature rises, the corals that can’t tolerate it will die off and the ones that can tolerate will survive. Then because of less resources being used by those that died, the coral with heat tolerance will thrive. This is how evolution works.
At least some corals must be able to survive the current transformation? At least some past extinction events must've been very abrupt and things like corals lived through that?
Supposedly one past extinction event killed off all dinosaurs, leaving rats and other small mammals to take over the world.
Dragonflies used to have like two foot or four foot wings spans. Now their relatively small and presumably play a very different role in the ecosystem.
Mother Nature isn't some Christian God that loves you and looks out for you. The fact that nature isn't looking out for our welfare is likely why things like Christianity are popular: Because actual reality scares the hell out of people and they need some kind of emotional opiate so they can go "La la la not listening!" and get through the damn day.
Are you willing to wait a few thousand years for a new coral to appear and spread? Maybe tens of thousands of years?
Evolution does tend to fill open niches, but not all that instantly.
Yes I am. That's how it happens and how it should happen.
Coral systems live, spread, and die. That's what they do.
These processes happen over thousands of years.
Then the consequence will be vastly reduced fish populations for thousands of years, which may affect human populations.
Or the fish will continue to live in the reef skeletons and move on to healthier reef systems.
I think that is very, very unlikely.
Based on what expertise?
I think the collective expertise of marine biologists all across the globe. But I also think a high school education about evolution would be sufficient to establish that things really do go extinct, and our natural history is not one of perfectly balanced exchanges compensating every loss.
that's not at all a relevant response to the discussion.
but to play that game, you also learn about adaptation in high school
I'm sure you think you can play that game, but that's precisely the problem.
The fundamental confusion here is the notion that, absent one's own personal expert credentials, we have no access to any expertise or authority of any kind that can be brought to bear on this question (funny that that requirement applies only one way).
The vital role of coral in supporting marine ecosystems is a general and well understood phenomenon. So much so that our ordinary access to expertise through science communication in the media, our summary of this understanding as reflected in high school education, and, if needed, in major reports from NGOs is sufficient to address the question and indeed is central to the purpose of those respective institutions. Those are access to pertinent expertise for this kind of question.
I promise you, that this consensus has not overlooked the possibility of everything being made right by adaptations later on as you seem to be implying, and I promise that no version of explanations of evolutionary adaptation has ever taught that adaptation guarantees, as a cosmic law, compensation for the destruction of ecosystems. The same resources noted above are sufficient to dismiss this as an ordinary biology 101 confusion.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/central-pacific-coral-reef-sho...
I think you need to be more careful about what your unqualified promises are.
What expertise do I need? Lots of coral is dying. It isn't right next to healthy coral. How do you think the fish are going to migrate? And those other coral reefs aren't empty.
As for the effect of coral bleaching on fish, you can google it and I've definitely read about it before, seen ecologists talk about it, etc. The expectation is that it will reduce the number of fish significantly.
You need a lot more expertise than just uneducated guesses before you say something is "very very unlikely."
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/central-pacific-coral-reef-sho...
Unfortunately, there is no law of the universe that says that change will only occur at a survivable rate. Thousands of species are already going extinct every year, and we're still burning just as many fossil fuels as what got us into this mess. We don't have thousands of years to wait for animals to adapt, we have mere decades.
Correct, there's no law of the universe that says change will occur a survivable rate. Species have been going extinct long before humans. We should help those species who environments we damage and we should mitigate or nullify the damage in the first place, but we should not play God.
That struck me as mostly reasonable until the 'playing god' bit which upended everything. For one, that term almost never means the same thing to any two people. For another, from the context up to this point you seem to have unrealistic assumptions that this is all part of a broader cosmic give and take that balances itself, or stands over us as an indecipherable mystery.
I think that temptation to stand in awe before a cosmic mystery is a common one and, in many cases a laudable one. In this case, that temptation is getting in the way of some very-knowable facts which are spelling out doom. "Not playing god" in this context seems to amount to standing by as an extinction event unfolds, and I don't think the desire to get lost in existential ditherings is an acceptable reason to stand by and let that happen.
We are playing God now by artificially and dramatically altering Earth’s set point.
How much are we altering it over coming out of the last ice age and the natural effects of volcanos and vents?
That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.
Yes we should minimize our effects on the environment as much as possible, and we are doing a lot better in that goal, but we still need to live.
I wouldn't say living our lives is playing God.
Living life as a highly technologically advanced species that uses systems to dominate the plant for resource extraction to the detriment of countless other species with the awareness to know better is playing god, albeit rather poorly. .
> How much are we altering it over coming out of the last ice age and the natural CO2 effects of volcanos? That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.
No, it's not an unknown. Please stop with this cowardly delusion. Human activity is changing the Earth's climate at unbelievable rates compared to the historical norm. XKCD for scale: https://xkcd.com/1732/
The pace of climate change is far faster than natural evolutionary processes can keep up with.
Over a long enough time scale, sure, but sometimes populations just die.
Yes we would, and certainly there already is evolutionary pressure. This is just putting our finger on the scale knowing what's coming.
What is "fast enough" is in the eye of the beholder, life doesn't really care about boom and bust cycles or extinctions, but people really don't like change so we can do it faster and do a bit of reef gardening.
It's rising way too fast https://xkcd.com/1732/
My understanding is that there are lots of existing corals well adapted to high heat/low pH, mostly from shallow atolls.
... But, if you transplant them they get outcompeted immediately. Corals are constantly engaged in a WW1-style trench warfare for space, so spending metabolic energy on something other than eradicating one's neighbor is not a great strategy.
(I work in a tangential area)
I thought nitrogen pollution was now considered the main cause of harm to corals?
Nitrogen pollution compounds with heat stress, it makes the coral more susceptible to heat stress: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1915395117
Nitrogen pollution and warming ocean temperatures a deadly combination
I think it's not the only one
According to what?
Here's the latest data from AIMS, the Australian government agency that monitors the Great Barrier Reef [1]. There are three periods in these graphs:
1. 1985-2013. Climatologists report global warming during this period, but it had no impact on the corals. This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period.
2. 2010-2017. A big drop. This triggered lots of stories about how humanity is killing the corals. In 2019 they were saying the outlook had moved from "poor" to "very poor". [2]
3. 2020-2024. Robust growth to the highest levels ever seen, more than a third larger than the prior stable period.
This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health. Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven, given that the huge growth spurt caught self-proclaimed coral experts completely off guard and they still lack any explanation for what drives these changes. But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant. They exist in a wide range of temperatures across the world, which vary by far wider ranges than climate change is predicted to generate, and they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.
Unfortunately AIMS don't seem interested in a true understanding of the corals. They are only interested in coral doom. Doom = a call to action = money and social status, whereas corals doing fine reduces them to mere observation of natural cycles, which doesn't have much potential for career growth. From the peak of "the Great Barrier Reef is going from poor to very poor" now they are reduced to saying "recent increases in hard coral cover can be quickly undone" and "The high coral cover reported this year is good news but does not mean all is fine". Their reports give the strong impression that they really wish the corals would do badly, but nature is feeling uncooperative right now. Their next best strategy is apparently to just ignore it and pretend scientists have to save the day anyway.
[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/30/great-ba...
In addition to looking simply at the explosive growth limited to the past 4-5 years, it seems reasonable to look at the entire plot as well. All 3 graphs in [1] date back to 1965, and look at that data it seems that the growth/population of corals was reasonably stable up until the late 00s.
edit: only goes back to 1985, error on my part, but still relatively stable from 1985-late 00s
It may be possible that this recent spike in growth indicates that there is a strong recovery, but looking at the data it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years, with drastic increases and decreases in all 3 populations that are much greater variance than from the mid 60s to early 00s.
While I agree with you that it's possible that this coral death is overhyped, your own conclusions don't seem to be evidence-based themselves.
> It may be possible that this recent spike in growth indicates that there is a strong recovery, but looking at the data it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years
Could you expand on how the recent explosive growth is unstable and fits with the predictions that the coral is dying?
And GPs post was evidence based, your interpretations were not, they were subjective and a bit handwaving, which is why I would like clarfication on your above view.
Explosive growth is generally speaking not stable. I will defer to the dictionary definition of stable. I'm just using words how they are defined.
From an ecosystem perspective, simple "coral coverage" is not a good enough metric to indicate that the coral reef is healthy. We also need to understand the biodiversity, is one coral taking over because it is better adapted and creating a monoculture? It's not clear. I made a point to not jump to conclusions, simply stating that explosive growth does not indicate a healthy ecosystem.
Thank you for the clarification. Some may interpret "not stable" meaning that it could be detrimental to it's life, not just the textbook velocity definition.
Could you answer the second part of my question:
> "How does explosive growth fit with the predictions that the coral is dying?"
To your statement:
> "We also need to understand the biodiversity, is one coral taking over because it is better adapted and creating a monoculture"
I'd say that we should not assume one way or another. It very may well be, or not. That data is probably out there and I'd be interested to know the answer. If the answer is yes, it's very healthy.
I'd also like to know what species these scientists are breeding. If it's only a select few species, is that healthier than the species that have adapted naturally and are growing fine?
Explosive growth does not happen in a vacuum. Sometimes it's due to a pre-existing boom and bust cycle (eg lynx and hares, rabbits and wolves, etc). Sometimes it's due to the elimination of key species or ecological instability (eg hares in australia with no predators, boom of sea urchins in california, cuttlefish booming due to overfishing), or maybe it's something completely different altogether.
Given that there is no history of a pre-existing boom and bust cycle in the data, I think we can rule that out. So clearly something is happening that wasn't happening before. The question you want answered is one-dimensional and ill-posed in this situation to allow you to better understand the dynamics at work.
The GBR is not that old, and it experienced a major boom during it's creation, obviously.
We really don't have enough data to rule anything out as we weren't tracking it that long relatively to say for sure. We also don't know all the variables.
They tried the "but what about biodiversity" argument back in 2020 when the regrowth started.
It is automatically true that in an ecosystem that experiences a population decline, when the population starts growing again the subtypes that grow fastest will become more common than those which grow slower, and thus there will be a temporary decline in biodiversity. That doesn't indicate a problem of any kind. It's just the natural state of affairs.
The graphs date back to 1985. The font is small though, so it's easy to misread.
> it also seems inarguable the ecosystem has become highly unstable as well over the past 20 years
That's extremely arguable! Extrapolating from a tiny number of data points is how AIMS managed to screw up previously. There's really very little data on which to build predictions about long term trends. We have no idea how stable or unstable coral sizes are because it's just not been monitored for long enough to say. We're zoomed in to a tiny, tiny part of the coral's history, which is far longer than humanities own.
I agree, but I would assert that it is no more arguable than your own interpretations
Edit: Ah I see that it is 1985, that certainly is a significantly shorter cycle of data.
I went to Thailand shortly after the covid lockdowns ended, and the corals were all coming back. I talked to a boat captain about it and his comment was: “yeah, there were no tourists to abuse them”.
I can’t help but wonder what effect tourism (and lockdowns) has had on corals. For example, It is common among scuba divers to only use mineral sunscreens because standard off-the-shelf sunscreen floats on the top of the water and blocks UV from the corals
It's possible that this sort of thing is connected, yes. The timing of a rebound in 2020 is interesting. But then again, if it's caused by tourism or sunscreen, the next interesting question is what changed around 2010?
It appears that oxybenzone and octinoxate sunscreens may be directly toxic to corals. Blocking UV light doesn't seem to be the issue.
https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/coral-reefs/truth-about-cora...
While you bring forward interesting data, I believe your view is uncharitable of the motives behind people wanting to protect coral reefs also you don't account for your own hindsight.
Maybe a more charitable interpretation is that nobody really understood why there was such a massive drop and climate change was the most likely explanation so they went about warning about it given how important they are to their ecosystem ?
Also I think you are wawing off climate change too quickly. Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?
The incentives here are pretty straightforward and plenty of people within academic fields are willing to admit what kind of distortions they create. Look at any HN discussion on academic fraud and you'll find discussions from people who are or were scientists where they tell similar stories.
Climate change wasn't the most likely explanation for the big drop. To make that explanation work you have to hypothesize a lot of hidden variables and/or unknown processes, because CO2 emission is a slow steady process. If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response in the absence of evidence, fine, but at that point anyone can make up any explanation they like and it's just as compelling. There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years. There are probably natural cycles at work here which might be interesting to investigate, or there might even be some sort of human cause that's not climate related (chemicals being washed into the sea or whatever). AIMS is supposed to figure that out but they don't seem to be doing that, they just keep crying wolf. So it's reasonable to point out their incentives.
> Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?
Anything is possible in principle, but that doesn't help us much.
Thanks for the elaboration.
That part left unconvinced though:
> If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response [...] There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years
I am actually realizing that you are probably talking about the effects of C02 levels in the oceans while I was actually thinking about the global rise in temperature which IIUC has seen a kind of cliff-edge change. And IIRC, ocean warmth is what I have read is threatening coral reefs, so I am bit lost here.
It was much hotter in the past than it is now. Look at any attempt to reconstruct temperatures from proxies. The underlying science is unreliable but everyone agrees the distant past had average temperatures far hotter than today.
It was actually warmer even in the recent past. There's archaeological evidence that it was warmer in the Roman and middle ages than it is now. This was once uncontroversial and if you read archaeology papers you can still sometimes see discussion of this fact. But they don't highlight this because they don't want to pick fights with climatologists.
There's hasn't been any cliff edge rise in temperature. Look at graphs of global temperature but be aware they're heavily manipulated. A graph of 20th C temperatures published in 1999 looks very different to the same graph published today.
It would be nice if people responded to you instead of downvoting silently. Thank you for the information.
It's also worth noting the Great Barrier Reef is fairly new (6-8k years old). It came to be from the sea rise of the Last Glacial Maximum 20k years ago.
Information is fine, overconfident denialist commentary earns a downvote. When you see a comment to the effect of "The self-proclaimed experts are wrong! I know the truth," you should heavily discount the conclusions it draws.
Just because the mechanism of resurgence is unknown does not mean that all previous science on the topic is invalidated.
It can simultaneously be true that ocean warming is devastating the Great Barrier Reef corals and that the GBR has the ability to rebound on its own. Here's a question the parent comment didn't address: Are we seeing the same species in this resurgence that we saw before mass bleaching, or is biodiversity reduced?
Your last sentence would have been a fine reply to the GP without any meta level commenting.
And GP's main point was that the data from the experts monitoring the reef did not line up with the climate change predictions of the reef.
He didn't say HE knew the truth, he's saying the truth from scientific reports are not matching the predictions.
If anything, he's pointing out the real "experts" data. The opposite of what you are accusing him of.
> Your last sentence would have been a fine reply to the GP without any meta level commenting.
I get that but I stand by all of it though.
> data from the experts monitoring the reef did not line up with the climate change predictions of the reef.
That's normal.
> He didn't say HE knew the truth,
Well, that was a paraphrase of the unwarranted confidence in each of these statements, which I find extremely dubious:
> This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period
It's easy to imagine that warming would not have any effect up until reaching a certain tipping point, so this is overstated as evidence-against.
> This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health.
Basically a restatement of the above. They're not incompatible.
> Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven
"Unlikely" is also an overstatement. These data can cast doubt but aren't strong enough to say that anthropogenic causes are unlikely, given how likely it frankly is due to the scale of changes in the ocean.
> But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant.
No, we can't say this. Some corals are heat-tolerant.
> they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.
This is... borderline misinformation. It ignores the rate of change, which is just not really a credible way to discuss climate change. Also, specifically, which changes has coral survived? I don't actually know how old coral is or which mass extinctions it has survived which is actually pretty important for making a comparison.
Etc. Not really worth going over every point, you get the idea.
> Just because the mechanism of resurgence is unknown does not mean that all previous science on the topic is invalidated.
This is really the core of the problem. It's why the downvoters are wrong and why it's worth debating the topic here, because it's really a much wider problem than corals or climate.
What government employees have done so far wasn't actually science and they aren't really experts. It was presented to the public as science, it was funded from science budgets, it has the superficial look of science, but it wasn't science. It was merely data collection, followed by wild theorizing based on nothing, followed by political lobbying. It wasn't even extrapolation, as there was no trend to extrapolate!
That isn't how the scientific method is supposed to work. Scientists are supposed to form a hypothesis, gather data that could falsify the hypothesis, publish it, then let others replicate it and so on, until we are certain enough we understand the underlying system to proclaim it a theory. Then you can go to politicians and demand money or changes to laws.
The complete lack of scientific method here is why reef ... people ... I don't want to give them the title of "scientist" ... have managed to not only seriously embarrass themselves but undermine confidence in all ecology and climatology. They had no basis on which to claim that CO2 induced warming was killing corals. The data simply did not fit that hypothesis at any point. Yet by tying their field to climate change they unlocked media interest and a much greater flow of money. They took the easy, tempting path instead of the right path and it is not only completely legitimate but a moral imperative to point out their dishonesty. Their own colleagues and institutional supervisors aren't doing it, so other people have to. If nobody does then this is how science dies, people! When anyone can call themselves a scientist despite not doing science, then eventually the whole concept of science itself will be seen as a discredited joke. That's how dark ages happen. Everyone should be calling out those who claim high confidence in their predictions whilst not having done the work to deserve that confidence.
God forbid we stop consuming everything in sight like a fat kid in a candy shop.
Try to promote walkable, mixed-use development that supports a car-optional lifestyle.
Feel free to stop taking flights, delete your Amazon account, and never buy another plastic-based product again.
More like a crew of a spaceship dismantling their life-support system to create disposable junk.
Funny how improving self-awareness and self-control is always at the bottom of the list of solutions. It's always a new machine, product or pill.
(But I think that public access to hallucinogens is a step in the right direction, actually)
I think you fall in the typical trap of thinking that social issues are easier to solve than technical ones. This is not the case.
"Why take vaccines ? Can't we just be well-behaved, wear a mask, air spaces correctly or put air filters everywhere ?" The answer is no.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...
One must deal with humans as they are, not as we'd wish them to be. The correct solution is that externalities associated with consumption should be priced in by fiat. The government has the (uneviable) task of protecting the environment because it is a perfect example of a common good. Of course, such authority must be given to the government by the people; it is already happening to a very small extent; as climate change becomes more real to people's everyday lives, I expect to see more movement in this direction. Of course, by then it will probably be too late, but we can hope that it will not be.
The technologies of education and advertising have proven to be quite good at changing people.
Yeah, this. Perfect example, our crazy car-based transportation network was popularized by a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign, we went from vilifying "speed demons" to vilifying "jaywalkers" because "they" told us to:
"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
"Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street", Peter D. Norton https://www.jstor.org/stable/40061474
If we can convince people that it's their own fault for getting hit by cars, we can do anything.
I mean its easy to say this, but asking people to live worse lives is basically impossible.
This is a common misconception.
The choice isn't between a mildly worse life -or- a better life.
The choice is between a mildly worse life -or- a horrible life as the planetary life-support system reconfigures itself into a radical new climate regime.
And really, living in harmony with Nature is fun and fulfilling, so the choice is between a mildly inconvenient transitional period to a hip, swinging, easy living, eco-friendly life -or- a horrible life as the planetary life-support system reconfigures itself into a radical new climate regime.
So while I 100% agree we have man-made climate change, there are two principles to live by:
1. Not everything is climate change. This has come up a lot with Hurricanes Helene and Milton recently, saying they're "unprecedented" or similar superlatives. Consider the 1916 flood of Asheville [1], also caused by a hurricane. Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity. A moving statistical distribution takes a lot of data points to quantify, however; and
2. We really have no idea of how the EArth will respond to climate change. This comes up when people talk about "runaway climate change" a la Venus. My argument is that if that was going to happen, it would've happened at some point in the last 4 billion years. That's a really long time.
So in relation to coral and the seas, the argument is made that warming is a lot more rapid than what naturally occurs. It turns out that's not true either. Consider abrupt climate change in the last Ice AGe (~100K years) [3]:
> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
That's a massive change and it's happened many times in the last 100,000 years. So what's happened over 4 billion years?
This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?
I understand the motivation here but fearmongering (even if justified) just doesn't work to educate people and ultimately change policy [4]. Psychologically, catastrophic predictions will tend to get ignored because hey, there's nothing you can do.
[1]: https://www.frenchbroadrafting.com/blog/remembering-the-floo...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-5146477/how-climate-cha...
[3]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
[4]: https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-fearmongering-i...
>> One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006)
My understanding is that this was local to a region and not global, and constituted extinction or near extinction-level events for plant and animal populations that suffered through them. And even though those changes were fast, my understanding is that our present change is (1) even faster, (2) is not a back-and-forth oscillation controlled at the bounds by natural dynamics but a one-directional trend upward (3) from human activity stacked on top of the dynamics of natural systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event We live on a planet saturated in one of the most corrosive pollutants (to life that evolved before it). If an anaerobic intelligent life had evolved before the world was conquered by cyanobacteria, in a society with a profit motive for manufacturing sugar, would they have farmed the very thing that would wipe them out?
Right, and said slightly differently: this is the context against which we have to judge whether there was any natural experiment we can refer to. There's no reason to think that the history of life on earth thus far has presented a sufficiently comparable case, to reassure us that what's happening is a re-run of a familiar event we've already seen, where everything works out well.
Yes that is nicely concise, but in addition I was trying to say that the line of reasoning that life has persisted through cataclysmic environmental changes and therefore worrying about them is fearmongering is a facile argument as the persistence of lichens and prototaxites etc has no bearing on the survival of humans. The nature of a cataclysm is very relative, as the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans would be meaningless to geochemical anaerobic bacteria that live miles below us.
We only have coal because trees grew and fell on each other for like 60 million years before anything figured out how to decompose lignin.
Kind of. Climate change has occurred in the past, and climate and weather are chaotic systems. But we can still determine where the attractor lies, and that it’s moving.
I still think we shouldn’t focus on climate change, since the majority of the population won’t understand, nor care.
Instead focus on environment, which is what you’re living in right now. The benefit is that doing what’s good for the environment year on year would also accomplish what’s good for climate
I agree. Should be campaigning against fossil fuels like against tobacco and lead in the water.
> This is likely associated with sea changes too so what happened to all the coral? Did it die and regrow? Did it adapt?
Well, before you pat yourself and feel safe, you'd better answer those questions instead of just asking them and deciding the answer will go on a direction you like.
Coral is a weird kind of organism, we can't expect it to adapt like insects. It changing can be quite bad.
But yeah, we won't have runaway warming. I don't know what the people that invented that risk were thinking.
>Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity.
I checked your source here, and the emphasis of the article is almost completely the inverse of how you presented it. The article is emphatic at the urgency of understanding how much more forceful the storms are, while noting there is not a larger total number of storms. In the article, that latter point is an aside to the urgency of understanding storms are becoming more intense.
It actually explicitly says that storms of greater intensity are indeed becoming more frequent. Your portrayal, however, is to reference the central point in passing while emphasizing a side point and implying something completely at odds with the article. And this isn't just tomayto-tomahto, one point is critical to understanding the intensity of storms and the other isn't.
Not sure this is a good idea. What if the disappearance of corals at higher temps is part of a natural regulation system for Earth, where if they are artificially preserved, homeostasis will be perturbed?
In general I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them, and we cannot test in isolation.
> I am against these ecosystem engineering type projects: because the systems are so complex, we do not understand them
How about humans pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year? Are you against that ecosystem engineering type project? Because it's happening. And it's having severe consequences. And it seems it's not going to stop. So people are trying to look into ways to attempt to mitigate its effects and you end up with one engineering type project to mitigate another. Doing nothing isn't going to work. We know that. So a lot of people are willing to accept less than fully understood solutions.
At its essence, status quo extremism is not the denial of dangers, SQE's are quite alert to them. Instead, it's about an axiomatic re-definition of danger as being about whether or not something is presently happening. If it is already happening, then by definition it's not dangerous.
Of course there’s no engineered homeostasis to mess up on Earth. There might be a general tendency toward homeostasis: lots of, in some generalized sense “mass” and “momentum” in the system, and a tendency for species to die off by consuming all their resources and running out of places to put their byproducts. But that seems more likely to be something that humans fall afoul of, not coral, which seems more like an accidental victim and evidence that homeostasis has some pretty big gaps.
There is no natural regulation system for the earth, and the earth makes no attempt at homeostasis. It has been tipped over into states almost completely inhospitable for then-existing life more than once.
Multicellular lifeforms are the machinery that microbes build to improve homeostasis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
I think the theory is doubtful. Sounds too outcome oriented/group-selection-y.
Are you at all familiar with the work of Michael Levin et. al.?
E.g. "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg