In the last half decade the reef at port douglas has gone from "Straight out of finding nemo" to a ghostly wasteland (from personally diving there). It's a real shame.
There are still smaller good bits you can find, but overall it's no good at all.
There are still smaller good bits you can find, but overall it's no good at all.
It was still beautiful, and if you just happen to be there I wouldn't recommend skipping it, but seriously don't go out of your way to take a trip there.
When there is overwhelming consensus on man made climate change, ocean acidification, and we see bleaching that seems to be highly correlated with dissolved CO2 or ocean temps rising, its hard to imagine that this is just random chance. It could be, but it likely isn't.
Overall, this isn't "random chance", but it's also probably happened before within the span of human existence. The world changes and I am sure the world will adapt, and while that happens mass extinctions and horrible growing pains will likely occur
And it's very easy to write off the effects of climate change as "horrible growing pains," but to be concrete about it: you're talking about the deaths of potentially millions of people. This is a moral issue on par with Auschwitz or the Gulag. And while you're free to shrug your shoulders with, "well, shit happens," it's silly to act as if people concerned about it are histrionic tree huggers.
I thought most of the damage would be monetary via mass relocation. Are those deaths preventable outside of human behavioral change to keep temperatures lower?
Within developed countries, climate change will be costly but not particularly deadly. A few more heat exhaustion deaths, a few fewer cold-related deaths, and it all balances it. If anything, climate change will be good for mortality in developed countries, because cold kills a whole lot more people than heat now. Remediating the effects of climate change will be very expensive, on the other hand, and I buy the equation that throwing away money is throwing away lives, but let's leave that aside for now.
The big issue is in developing countries. All of them are exceptionally vulnerable to climate change, since they're nearer the equator; all of them have severely resource-constrained economies; all of them have less stable political cultures and are more likely to go to war with nearby neighbors; most of them have megalopolises built in areas susceptible to climate change. Mass relocation just simply isn't in the cards for them.
Dhaka is a couple meters above sea level on average: what happens when the sea level rises by a meter? I remind you that it's a city of around 20 million people, and the rich tend to live in higher elevations than the poorest, densest areas. Where do they go? Does Bangladesh go through a massive infrastructure project to build Netherlands-scale dikes? Who pays for it? Donald Trump? Or maybe the USA and Europe open their doors to millions of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh alone?
Dhaka is an extreme case, but this story replays itself all over. And there are other factors to account for: increase malaria prevalence by 10% and you've killed 50k/year. These things add up. And of course you can say, "well, sure, but you can use money to save these lives!" But if we're utterly unwilling to bear any costs of our pollution now, why would we be willing to in 2100? Our grandchildren might fairly say, well, it was our asshole grandparents who selfishly shat all over the world, why should we have to suffer exceptionally for it?
You know, we young folks are right here. We are already suffering and already angry. We already want the maximum preventative and ameliorative efforts taken.
Phytoplankton stimulation is a lot better, in that we can do it year on year. Indeed, it can, optimistically, remove around a billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere, with advancements in technique and extremely widespread use, for a relatively low cost.
Humans emit roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, though. Year on year, we add roughly a billion tons of CO2 emissions to our annual emission rate.
We can go into even more exotic methods if you like. But if governments are unable to implement a tax on carbon that accounts for its externalities, why do you think governments would be willing to pony up even more money to sequester those externalities after the fact?
There is plenty of land that used to have trees, but we now have 7 billion humans and their associated support organisms. https://xkcd.com/1338/
We can get more efficient with our land use, though the benefit would likely be a more stabilized ecosystem rather than reversing climate carbon.
Cfr. [1] for its possible consequences in Asia and Africa:
Both tropical and Arctic SO2 injection would disrupt the Asian and African
summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people.
These regional climate anomalies are but one of many
reasons that argue against the implementation of this kind of geoengineering.
The question you have to ask yourself isn't necessarily absolute temperature, but rather the rate at which such temperature fluctuations occurred in the past. Lots of species may be able to adapt to the planet becoming 2 degrees warmer over the course of 100,000 years. The overwhelming majority can't adapt if such changes occur over the course of 100 years - which is what we are seeing now.
Not that that is the case here because 1. It's about ocean temperatures and 2. Coral reefs are highly susceptible to small changes.
2°C is what the Paris Accords expect us to get with significant changes. We're already at 1.3° C.
You can't really make that claim yet. The sun is also at the peak of it's 30 year output cycle (and I believe there's also a greater cycle as well). We can't know the full effect for decades probably. Which is kind of the point of my statement.
We can freak out all we want, but the world will survive and the world (probably humanity) has faced much harder times with much worse technology.
Just trying to keep things in perspective.
Source? I can't find anything to back that up.
http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall12/atmo...
Turns out the sun has more to do with global temperatures than just about anything. I don't know if it's in one of those lectures (it should be), but the sun had a pretty hot 1000 years there where it also released more radiation. This actually impacts radiocarbon dating.
Regarsless, the point of my comment is still relevant. This has happened before, it will happen again. We should try and minimize damage, but also keep the perspective that in the past tempratures have fluctuated more and faster. It's been warmer and colder on our planet, and everything will adapt.
yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't done a lot of research on this. Short of super volcano winter you aren't going to see more than a tenth of that in annual variation.
> Regarsless, the point of my comment is still relevant
No, it's really not. Not only was your initial claim wrong, but your point seems to just be that "changes happen", which is vacuous in and of itself.
Some day we'll reach the heat death of the universe. Why do anything at all, am I right?
You'd be wrong, I have done a lot of research. The fact is, we can only sample averages based on decades at a time. Meaning, even if a temperature is (like I said) 5°c warmer in year 1, then 0.5°c cooler until year 20, then rise again 0.5°c for the next 10 years, the gaussian of the sample would put the temperature is roughly 2.5°c cooler than today for that 30 year window.
You have to look at how this data is gathered, it's through melting ice mostly. Which is not an exceptionally accurate measurement.
And all my points have been the same (before a bunch of people came and down voted), life will go on and this is normal. Extinction events happen every few thousand years. Yes we are the cause, and no I don't think we shouldn't do anything. However, I also don't think we should ignore the fact that historically this isn't rare.
Please see helpful chart:
Because I can't be absolutely sure why you are in the state you are in, best not to do anything.
""The coral is essentially cooked," professor Andrew Baird, a researcher at James Cook University who was part of the reef surveys, told Reuters by telephone from Townsville in Australia's tropical north."
"While bleaching occurs naturally, scientists are concerned that rising sea temperatures caused by global warming magnifies the damage, leaving sensitive underwater ecosystems unable to recover."
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-environment-idUS...
This seems to indicate they're not sure how much impact global warming is having. Is it 10%? 90%? Would be good to know.
Is it 10%? 90%? Would be good to know.
It would be a great shame to discover that our fears about man-made climate change were correct, but it's too late for any changes to have a meaningful effect.
We also monitor the atmospheric gases and an event of this size would be easily detectable.
I would stare at a large monitor and pick out a volcanic plume easily while the city of Quito was not even recognizable. I would really have to hunt for LA or San Francisco in comparison to a giant haboob in the ME. Your standard cold front is more recognizable than any major city from the satellites we used (30m, 15m, 10m mostly).
Pondering how often these volcanoes erupt and send horrific gases aloft, it is hard to say; "Humans are doing it ALL!" Not to mention the thousands (tens, or hundreds of thousands?) of underwater volcanoes that emit all sorts of horribleness.
Then you contemplate that the Earth has been here for 4 billion years + or - a few million... How much hubris do we have to measure for a couple hundred years and say unequivocally; "Humans DID this!!!" It seems a bit...
It is not up for debate.
Predicted 17 years ago.
Key point, though: we are currently in a lull of the total amount of oceanic volcano activity. Compared to what's usual, they're contributing less CO2 pollution to global temperatures than what they usually do.
And yet temperatures are still rising, despite the countervailing influence of volcano activity. Whatever could it be? Sun spots? Saturn entering the first house of Sagittarius? The anger of Zeus? Slenderman getting his jollies on?
Too bad there aren't any people who study this professionally.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...