Bleaching of Great Barrier Reef

[Frission]

I think this is worth knowing.

A lot of you probably heard recently that the Great Barrier Reef, one of the World Heritage Sites is experiencing a mass bleaching event. A variety of stressors are taking the health on one of the world's largest marine ecosystems, which will heavily negatively impact marine life and may be a sign to come of future environmental disasters.

I would normally go on a tirade about the irresponsibility of Australian officials and then general human interactions with the ocean, but I'm just too tired. Loss of coral reefs is a global phenomenons and this is "just" one of the largest cases of this.

Newstory:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-28/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-95-per-cent-north-section/7279338
What causes Coral Bleaching:
http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/managing-the-reef/threats-to-the-reef/climate-change/what-does-this-mean-for-species/corals/what-is-coral-bleaching

 

[WolfThomas]

I guess the coral is getting stressed by a-current events.

But seriously it isn't great.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Totally out of the realm of my experience, what being a flatlander of a Canadian, but the efforts to preserve it need to be stepped up.

 

[pookie101]

unfortunately the reefs are at 95% levels of being bleached at the current temperature levels and at best they are looking at limiting temperature rises to double what we currently have. so in other words reefs world wide are going to go extinct in the wild and its only a matter of time.

that said anything that delays them dying off for as long as possible is worth it

 

[Thaluikhain]

Eh, if Rhinehart waited a little she could rip the thing up for her coal port and nobody would care anymore.

 

[Zhukov]

...but the efforts to preserve it need to be stepped up.

I'm not sure how they're supposed to do that.

It's caused by the warming of the sea. Even with the resources of a national government, how does one go about cooling down an ocean?

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

While bleaching is a concern, it should be noted the organisations such as Greenpeace, that champion saving the reefs, have been known to "have fun" with the proof. i.e Making it seem much much worse than it really is.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

...but the efforts to preserve it need to be stepped up.

I'm not sure how they're supposed to do that.

It's caused by the warming of the sea. Even with the resources of a national government, how does one go about cooling down an ocean?

Nuclear Winters and Large-Scale Volcanic Eruptions, duh! Start a petition to get the government to launch their nukes into Volcanoes! (/s)

OT: Loosing reefs would be tragic, especially the Great Barrier Reef. Sadly, beyond pulling out as many reefs as we can and preserving them in controlled waters (like at a Zoo or Aquarium), it seems like their fate is sealed.

 

[Politrukk]

I think people have to understand that nature can't always be preserved and that if we believe in evolution we might naturally have to accept that some things go extinct.

The planet is not just warming because of us, global warming is a recurring phenomena, perhaps the forming of reefs will be that too.

 

[Disco Biscuit]

You're alarmed about 15-25 years too late.

I think people have to understand that nature can't always be preserved and that if we believe in evolution we might naturally have to accept that some things go extinct.

-Excerpt from a Hypersquid documentary on the extinction of the ancient human species by its own hand.

 

[Frission]

I think people have to understand that nature can't always be preserved and that if we believe in evolution we might naturally have to accept that some things go extinct.

The planet is not just warming because of us, global warming is a recurring phenomena, perhaps the forming of reefs will be that too.

It doesn't really have anything to do with evolution, maybe more with ecosystem change. Coral reefs are a pretty big indicator of ecosystem health, so mass bleaching is not a natural phenomena, so I still think it's cause for alarm.

While climate change is a natural phenomena, most estimates is that current change is anthropogenic.

You're alarmed about 15-25 years too late.

Would his majesty prefer I go back in time to post this thread?
It's always years too late for the environment and I was well aware of this for a while, but hopefully more awareness will translate to more political pressure.

 

[Disco Biscuit]

I think people have to understand that nature can't always be preserved and that if we believe in evolution we might naturally have to accept that some things go extinct.

The planet is not just warming because of us, global warming is a recurring phenomena, perhaps the forming of reefs will be that too.

It doesn't really have anything to do with evolution, maybe more with ecosystem change. Coral reefs are a pretty big indicator of ecosystem health, so mass bleaching is not a natural phenomena, so I still think it's cause for alarm.

While climate change is a natural phenomena, most estimates is that current change is anthropogenic.

You're alarmed about 15-25 years too late.

Would his majesty prefer I go back in time to post this thread?
It's always years too late for the environment and I was well aware of this for a while, but hopefully more awareness will translate to more political pressure.

Unless you think that you might have been the lynchpin to change events at that time, I don't think the time machine is warranted, no. Not that I was accusing you of personally failing to foresee, forestall or otherwise avert ecological catastrophe, because I wasn't. It was a global sigh of misery, not pointing at you and saying "Ha ha asshole!"

You know what I think about all of this? I think we're joining the club.

The Great Filter

With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. Hanson's list, while incomplete, describes the following nine steps in an "evolutionary path" that results in the colonization of the observable universe:

The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
Reproductive molecules (e.g., RNA)
Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life
Sexual reproduction
Multi-cell life
Tool-using animals with big brains
Where we are now
Colonization explosion.

According to the Great Filter hypothesis at least one of these steps ? if the list were complete ? must be improbable. If it's not an early step (i.e., in our past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in our future and our prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human species. However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only thing that appears likely to keep us from step 9 is some sort of catastrophe or the resource exhaustion leading to impossibility to make the step due to consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources).[6] So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2?6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.[4]

Although steps 1?8 have occurred on Earth, any one of these may be unlikely. If the first seven steps are necessary preconditions to calculating the likelihood (using the local environment) then an anthropically biased observer can infer nothing about the general probabilities from its (pre-determined) surroundings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Just because we've survived so far, and just barely, doesn't mean that we always will. Now we don't have to wait for a Toba disaster, or the next Chicxulub event, we're always on the brink from our own means. I think that a lot of people think in terms of how things can't possibly happen, or that there must always be SOME kind of covert safeguards against the worst, but there just aren't. We've singularly failed to manage the WMD's we've invented so far, and it will only ever get easier to build them as new and more deadly ones replace them.

So many ways to die, but so few ways through it all. Maybe that's why it's so quiet out there.

 

[madwarper]

how does one go about cooling down an ocean?

Giant ice cubes, obviously.

Spoiler: Solving the problem once and for all.