Tag Archives: coral bleaching

Hawaii’s coral reefs may be safe from sunscreen — but not climate change.

First: Toxic coal ash, which was a problem on the territory well before Maria’s landfall. A coal-fired power plant in the southeastern city of Guayama produces 220 thousand tons of the stuff each year, which studies have linked to an increased risk of cancer, heart, and respiratory ailments.

Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board directed the plant, operated by multinational corporation Applied Energy Systems (AES), to cover its giant pile of coal ash prior to the storm. This weekend, PBS News reported that never happened.

Researchers and community members had worried that the heavy rainfall heightened the risk of coal ash toxins leaching into the soil and contaminating drinking water. Now, AES’ own groundwater monitoring report showed a sharp increase in the levels of arsenic, chromium, and two radioactive isotopes in groundwater near the plant after Hurricane Maria. Federal and local government have historically ignored this region of the island, experts told Grist shortly after the storm.

Second: Statehood! A disaster response nearly as chaotic as the storm itself has highlighted the real risks of the United States’ colonial relationship with the island.

Puerto Rico’s Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González plans to introduce a bill to the House this spring petitioning for Puerto Rico to become a state, the Washington Post reports.

“Ask yourself, if New Jersey or Connecticut had been without power for six months, what would have happened?” she asked, “This is about spotlighting inequities and helping Congress understand why we are treated differently.”

More here – 

Hawaii’s coral reefs may be safe from sunscreen — but not climate change.

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Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

By on May 4, 2016Share

Florida’s coral reefs are disintegrating much faster than expected. And who’s to blame? Oh, you know, just the ENTIRE OCEAN.

Ocean water is growing increasingly acidic as it absorbs the extra CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere, and now that water is eating away at the limestone foundations of coral reefs. A new study found that in the northern section of the Florida Keys’ reef — the third largest barrier reef ecosystem in the world — 6 million tons of limestone have disappeared over the past six years.

This wasn’t unexpected. It’s just that scientists had predicted the reef’s “tipping point,” where coral development is so severely limited by ocean acidification that reefs erode, was a good 40 years off — not today.

Ocean acidification is different from coral bleaching, another threat to reefs, though both have a common cause (climate change) and a common effect (dying corals). We’re looking to our most resilient corals to survive the challenges of living in today’s oceans.

We hope we never have to hold a farewell party for Florida’s coral reef, but ocean acidification is spurring along that unsavory outcome. Here’s to hoping we can usher this uninvited guest out of our coral reefs before it’s too late.

Watch our video on ocean acidification to learn more:

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Coral reefs are straight-up dissolving now

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Climate change made catastrophic coral bleaching 175 times more likely

Climate change made catastrophic coral bleaching 175 times more likely

By on Apr 28, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Warm ocean waters that sucked the color and vigor from sweeping stretches of the world’s greatest expanse of corals last month were driven by climate change, according to a new analysis by scientists, who are warning of worse impacts ahead.

Climate change made it 175 times more likely that the surface waters of the Coral Sea, which off the Queensland coastline is home to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, would reach the record-breaking temperatures last month that bleached reefs, modeling analysis showed.

The scientists found March Coral Sea temperatures are likely to be 1.8 degrees F (1 degrees C) warmer now than before humans polluted the atmosphere. Temperatures recorded by the Australian government last month were slightly higher than that, in part because of a fierce El Niño.

“We’ve had evidence before” that “human-induced climate change is behind the increase in severity and frequency of bleaching events,” said David Kline, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography coral reef scientist who wasn’t involved with the new analysis. “But this is the smoking gun.”

The new findings suggest similar temperatures will become commonplace by the 2030s, potentially destroying the reef and the tourism and fishing industries that rely on it. The reef’s tourism sector employs 64,000 people.

“There may still be corals, but it’ll look like a very sad reef,” Kline said. “There will probably be a few weedy species that can handle these nasty conditions, but we’ll lose a lot of the biodiversity.”

The warm Coral Sea waters have fueled the worst mass coral bleaching ever recorded on the World Heritage-listed reefs, which are withering from warming and acidifying waters, coral-eating pests, and agricultural pollution.

Climate Central

Bleaching occurs when warm waters cause the colorful algae that provide food for corals to release chemicals that are toxic to their hosts, and they are spat out. Corals, which are rigid animals that shelter rich ecosystems, can recover from bleaching. But persistent high temperatures, overfishing, and other environmental stresses make it more likely they will starve and die.

“As the seas warm because of our effect on the climate, bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef and other areas within the Coral Sea are likely to become more frequent and more devastating,” the team of Australian university scientists wrote Thursday in The Conversation, announcing the results of the analysis.

Following global average temperature records set in 2014, 2015, January, February, and March, coral reefs from Florida to India have been devastated by the third mass global bleaching event recorded. The first occurred in the late 1990s, leaving one out of six of the world’s corals dead.

Recent surveys showed 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef afflicted by bleaching, with the impacts worst in the reef’s more pristine northern reaches.

Although the surface temperatures in March were unprecedented, they could become normal within 20 years, the scientists discovered.

The researchers ran Earth model simulations in which greenhouse gases were kept at natural levels. They compared those simulated Coral Sea temperatures with those in modeling runs where climate-changing pollution increased at current rapid rates.

“The human effect on the region through climate change is clear and it is strengthening,” the scientists wrote. “Surface temperatures like those in March 2016 would be extremely unlikely to occur in a world without humans.”

The analysis was produced using established modeling techniques but it wasn’t peer-reviewed before the results were announced Thursday on The Conversation, which is a nonprofit news site founded in Australia that frequently publishes articles written by scientists.

“Because this is happening now, we wanted to do this quickly and get it in the public sphere,” said Andrew King, one of two University of Melbourne researchers who worked on the analysis. University of Queensland and University of New South Wales researchers also contributed. “We will write up a paper after this.”

By the 2030s, the modeling showed this year’s coral bleaching temperatures could become average and after that they may start to seem cool.

“These kinds of temperatures in the future will become normal,” King said. “They’re high for the current period, but by the 2030s it’s going to be about average.”

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Climate change made catastrophic coral bleaching 175 times more likely

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Climate change made catastrophic coral bleaching 175 times more likely

These reefs actually stand a chance of surviving climate change

survivor: polyp edition

These reefs actually stand a chance of surviving climate change

By on 16 Jan 2015 6:22 amcommentsShare

Coral reefs, along with polar bears, are basically the sad, rained-on mascots of climate change doom-and-gloom: Every bit of news from them seems worse and worse.

But here’s some good news! Some reefs in some parts of the world actually stand a pretty good chance of rebounding from the bleaching events that are expected to become more and more common with global warming, according to a study out in Nature this Wednesday.

By looking the results of a massive bleaching event that wiped out corals in the Seychelles in 1998, scientists were able to determine what factors may have contributed to the subsequent recovery of 12 out of 21 sites surveyed. From that, they can make pretty good predictions about which reefs will be able to muscle through some of the worst of our climate-ravaged future. From the Guardian:

Looking at just two of 11 factors — water depth and the physical complexity of the coral — the team were able to use modeling to 98% of the time correctly predict whether a reef would recover or not. Deeper water and a more complex structure made a recovery more likely.

This means that northern and offshore parts of the Great Barrier Reef, where the coral is still relatively pristine and protected from human activity, actually seem pretty robust. If conservationists can focus their efforts on those survivor reefs — protecting them from further damage from boat anchors, fishing gear, or sediment dumping — they may be able to stave off some of the worst damage from warming water, as the study’s lead author James Graham told the Guardian:

“If emissions continue as they are, the longer term future is likely to still be bleak, even for those recovering at the moment [from bleaching], because the projections are coral bleaching will become more and more frequent. In a way it’s [the study’s findings] buying us time to keep as many reefs in good shape as we can, while we tackle some of these global, bigger issues.”

Right now, parts of the Pacific are in the grips of a mass coral bleaching that could be the worst seen in 20 years. So let’s do us all a favor and not make things worse than they already are. 

Source:
Scientists reveal which coral reefs can survive global warming

, Guardian.

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These reefs actually stand a chance of surviving climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These reefs actually stand a chance of surviving climate change