U Of BC Climatologist - It May Already Be Too Late For Most Of Planet's Coral Reefs - Guardian

[hatrack]

A climatologist who is trying to explain why even the most immediate and drastic steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions may not save the coral reefs, has embarked on a metaphor for climate change. "The climate is like this big ship, right? We are all on this big ship and the problem is once you hit the brakes it takes a long time for the ship to actually slow down and stop," says Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia. "In our case the ship is the Titanic and we are going to hit the iceberg. It is going to be almost impossible for us not to hit the iceberg at this point. What we need to do is everything we can to put the brakes on, to slow the ship down and – to hope for the corals to help us – move the iceberg a little bit. The time for emission reductions isn't so much now, it was 20 years ago."

EDIT

"There is a little bit of a caveat: this is happening in restricted pools where the water gets hotter than the open ocean. It is not happening on the open ocean reefs. But it is happening, and it is a window into the future. And it is not a particularly good view that I see. There are corals – not all, but some of them – that every summer are very close to death. There is essentially no step between where they are at, and dying. In one section of the pool, they spend almost the entire year bleaching. There is a very short period when they recover, just before the next summer's bleaching," he says. "A very slight increase in temperature, and death will start overwhelming the growth."

One of the other great messages of the conference was that as carbon dioxide levels rose, the seas would become increasingly acidic, and under such circumstances, corals would find it harder and harder to make the skeletons that become, quite literally, the backbone of all reefs. All marine biologists can do is warn everybody, and try to persuade governments to protect reefs from other human exploitation, to give them a better chance of survival. Reefs are the habitat for around one quarter of all marine species. One third of all reef building corals could be at some risk of extinction already. Five studies had already reported a slowing in the growth rate of massive corals, said Joan Kleypas of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research. She faces a prospect that Cousteau and Hans Hass could never have imagined: a day when the corals have died, and the fish that depend on them have gone.

She calls it a "there-goes-the-neighbourhood situation," and "osteoporosis of the reef". She is addressing her fellow scientists, but they understand the peculiar irony of this kind of research, that you can discover something astounding, fashioned over millions of years only a few metres below the enigmatic surface of the ocean, and discover at the same time that in a few decades it could all be gone; that Cousteau's silent world may indeed soon become silent forever. It's a moment for straight talking, in terse, uncompromising language, to as many people as possible.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jul/24/biosciences.climatechange

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Most likely true.....Oceans are already too acidic.

That is also the death knell for all the life that lives off the coral, and those that feed on those that live off the coral..and on and on and on.

[kgrandia]

2. Just had lunch in Vancouver

With Simon the other day. What a small world! He's great and is very dedicated to his work. He runs a great blog as well: http://simondonner.blogspot.com/