This is apparently only for one particular kind of fast-growing coral, which means coral diversity is lower and that makes the reef more vulnerable to damage and less supportive of the wider ecosystem:
I wonder if, like forests, corals tend to colonize an area first with fast growing species, which then get slowly replaced by longer lived species (forest succession). I understand that it takes a while for a forest to go from clean-field to a fully matured forest though.
As with the loss of old-growth forests that's happening today, we risk species loss, and hence biodiversity. Re-population is predicated on an extant population, a return to suitable conditions, and for the pioneer species to die off. The problem is that, in sustained adverse conditions, the pioneer species may outlive the surviving population of the threatened species.
The faster growing kind is highly susceptible to the crown of thorns starfish so this causes a cycle of explosive growth in the starfish population, which in turn kills the coral it feeds off.
Yes, the branching corals are the fast-growing early colonisers. The habitat they create is attractive for fish and invertebrates. Together they make up a reef ecosystem. The resilient reef-building massive corals typically appear on the reef later and grow much slower.
Happiness - sure. It's nice to see the reef do well.
Optimism, no. I live in the area. We are going through a record cold snap, as in literally the lowest every temperatures recorded in some areas. And yes, the coral loves the respite. It's been accompanied by record floods, doing a record amount of damage. Which is to be expected - it's the La Nina pattern.
But record low temperatures, in a time when the base temperature is up 1C? That means the "other prediction" of climate change is coming true. The extremes are getting more extreme. And it's not the warming that's hurting us or the coral really, it's the extremes - just a few continuous days in a year when the temperature is +5C. That's what kills the coral - not the 1C average rise.
The reef isn't shrinking because the temperature gets so high it can't survive. That's always happened periodically. Once it gets that high it doesn't matter whether it's 1C over what the coral can tolerate, or 10C, or lasts for a couple of days or a month, the outcome is the same - the coral is dead. But if the high temperature is followed by 5 years or continuous growth, the coral re-colonises the area. What's been happening is we have been hitting extreme temperatures (both low and high) more often, and because the highs are more frequent the coral doesn't get a chance to grow back.
Remember those bush fires Australia has a few years ago - they were the worst we've even seen. Now we are laying down another fuel load. And it looks like the La Nina will persist for 3 years - another rare event, so the size of this fuel load will be another extreme. This cold snap will be followed by another record hot period, and we will move from losing billions to floods to losing billions to fire, again.
We should not lie to ourselves about the real situation just for feelgood purposes. It looks nice, but is empty. We are still missing thousands of species here that can't return until much later.
If we have a oil palm monocultures, "technically" we have a forest. We have an area covered by trees, but this is not the same as having a mature rainforest, that play in a much upper level and a totally different league.
Acropora dominated reefs are the equivalent to really young forests composed mostly with 2m trees. Yes, a poor reef is better than nothing, but we must understand that they sustain a much lower Shannon index than a mature reef and that we should keep protecting it for a long, long time.
I want this too. It's actually ok to be optimistic, if you also prepare mentally for the negative. I'm glad it has increased cover, I look forward to some improvement in overall reef health.
On the 10-20 year window, its a damaged, diminished ecosystem and it will need decades to recover. There is room for hope, it has to be tempered.
Not really sorry. Climate policy in Australia is going through Parliament right now (and while much more progressive than the previous government, the result still have the Greens stating the targets are not aggressive enough and will doom the reef).
Greens have little credibility when it comes to the environment. Instead of comprising and getting an emissions trading system passed they were stubborn and Australia ended up with a decade of inaction. For me that's inexcusable and the damage it caused was immense.
The legislated 43% target is largely symbolic and is a floor not a ceiling. It is not by itself going to change anything. What will change things are concrete steps like our Environment Minister stating that she will stop the Palmer coal mine from going ahead.
The Greens are not your enemy in this fight, the Liberal and Labor parties are - as demonstrated by their decades of long-standing policies which resulted in this mess in the first place.
The Green party certainly have their issues - subjugation and subversion most of all - but to lump the damage on the Greens is an inexcusable farce.
Until Australians realize that their political system is beholden to Big Coal, nothing will change. Australia has a long history, as a nation, of being run by the corporations that provide food to the populace, and Big Coal know this better than most, with their billion-dollar social engineering programs.
I think it is important to be realistic and act accordingly, otherwise you could end up in a worse situation due to insufficiently detailed/correct information.
I think those who are naturally pessimistic/optimistic, do think they are being realistic. Unless there is overwhelmingly conclusive data, what is "realistic" is going to be tinted through their life experience and biases.
Nobody can have any optimism, everyone must hold the view that the Great Barrier Reef is in imminent peril. If you don't and are vocal about it, you risk your career.
>Australia's highest court Wednesday dismissed an intellectual freedom claim by a university physicist who was fired in part over his public statements that scientists exaggerated damage to the Great Barrier Reef caused by climate change.
>Beginning in April 2016, James Cook University took a number of disciplinary measures over two years against Ridd, which culminated in Ridd being fired, for refusing to take down confidential information which he had placed publicly online. The university denied that the dismissal was over Ridd's views on climate change.
Looks like it went back in forth in court for a few years, with the university ultimately winning on appeal that he was fired for cause (posting confidential info).
I don't doubt that his views made the decision easier. But people made this a political issue. So it can't be fought with just facts anymore. There's going to be some politicking involved.
No, anything less than fear and self-flagellation is prohibited. I am reminded of that Michael Crichton quote:
“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.”
(And yes, I’m aware that one can tag Crichton with a thought-terminating label such as “climate denier.”)
Gleeful optimism is how Australia got in this mess in the first place. "She'll be right, mate" has excused far too much of the trouble Australia is currently in.
Start being real, Aussies: Our nation is ruled by corporate fascists who want nothing more than to extract its resources, whatever the cost, and build their new world order with it. Those avocadoes don't smash themselves!
A better response to this news, emotionally, is to drop the hubris and self-congratulatory tone and use it as a means of informing the stupidly gleeful in your environment that there is a BIG situation behind this story, and we better start paying more attention to it than whats on telly.
Kinda a side note, but I found it interesting that this approach has been used in NZ for regenerating native plants. Essentially gorse (a pest introduced during European settlement) is used as a shield while the native plants are too young to survive exposure on coastal cliff's
> This is apparently only for one particular kind of fast-growing coral
Plus a bit of evolution for that coral, I'm guessing. Nature will eventually adapt to whatever we throw at it, but I'm not so sure if it will be fast enough for humans to survive.
Are rich countries like US/EU etc. going to just allow tens/hundreds of millions of Africans to immigrate into their country when large parts of their continent become uninhabitable ?
Or are we going to quietly just let them die like is happening now.
Rich countries are also sitting idly by while large numbers of Africans starve to death due to energy shortages. The Africans are going to come out worse whatever happens as long as they look to the US/EU to fix their problems out rather than sorting out their local economy.
If they could manage the sort of wealth generation seen in China or India, they probably could make it through any amount of climate change due to having lots of cheap energy.
Not true in the slightest; evolution is solely driven by differential reproduction rates. You'll see evolutionary dynamics even if every organism you study is immortal and invulnerable.
Dying is just one of many things that affect your ability to reproduce.
I felt this article left some things unexplained, like what is a mass bleaching event? The wikipedia article on Coral
Bleaching is excellent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching
Also, cool note on the economics:
“Experts estimate that coral reef services are worth up to $1.2 million per hectare which translates to an average of $172 billion per year.”
Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD?
> Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD?
About USD 120 billion.
I’m always sceptical of these claims in the media that economists say that something “could be worth up to $X billion/year” or “X costs the economy $Y billion/year”. They are based on assumptions, whose veracity may be unknowable-if not just totally unrealistic; and the error bars on such estimates must be huge, but many journalists will only cite the upper error bar.
That's fair, but I have to assume it's better than the alternative, which is allowing everyone to maintain the implicit assumption that the value is 0.
The point of these claims is to try to get people to understand that climate destruction events have meaning, and if negative economic effects are the most straightforward way to explain that, then so be it.
I fear that, on the contrary, such inaccurate claims may do more harm than good. When people are confronted with claims whose accuracy can easily be doubted, they may conclude that everything else is also exaggerated.
I'd add that the recent recovery has been used by some climate change deniers as justification for ignoring the bigger picture, a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita.
I too dove on the reef in the early 1990s and have seen no reef of that caliber since, anywhere.
> a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita.
While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them.
I wonder. Is it possible to extrapolate emissions based on imports in a meaningful way?
Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions?
Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with.
You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.
From a cursory googling it seems that 'consumption-based accounting' is something that is being heavily researched, and we need to start distinguishing it from the simplistic and flawed 'production-based accounting' in the press, and in political discourse.
Could start with the existing system of international cargo categories and order of magnitude production emissions and packing assumptions based upon standard containers (refrigerated or 40" TEU or whatever). Then add trucking, storage and distribution metrics.
In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had ever asked UNESCO to be removed before). Though they failed, they are dredging all around it as close as possible, and the run-off from all the intensive mono-crop farming on the mainland is not helping either.
Cool video! I'm based in Cairns and work on and around the reef. Definitely appreciate the sentiment of the point you're making here (generally speaking it's true), but the argument is nuanced.
It's nice to see visual evidence that backs up your personal beliefs. That said, it's also problematic to take a video of one tiny, tiny part of the great barrier reef and use it as evidence as to the state of the broader ecosystem (a system so large it would run almost the entire length of the US West Coast, consisting of over 4,000 reefs, some as large as 90km² with widely varying conditions). In fact, there are many groups who deny climate change, the science around it, and the decline of the GBR. In Australia, the IPA are one of these ... who visit pristine reefs (there are many pristine reefs) and take video to further these kind of bogus claims.
On your video. First place was Fitzroy Island, which has a shallow, fringing reef around it. I've been visiting Fitzroy since the 80s and it has certainly changed over the years. That said, in-shore fringing reefs are not a good indication of much, as they are susceptible to pretty much every kind of disturbance. There is an area around the corner from where you were filming on the Island called Shark Fin bay that has 100% coral cover, probably due to slightly better currents (it's just outside of the lee of the island and few people go there). Your dive site was probably Milln or Flynn reef which are both outer reefs, about 40km off the coast. They are both in fairly good shape as far as tourist reefs go, with great visibility and decent coral cover. There's another reef very nearby called Hastings, which has good coral cover (and a lot of life, people often sight Mantas and other bigger stuff there) but the visibility is terrible due to sediment being picked up by currents. On all these reefs the condition would be entirely variable on different aspects of the same reef alone (i.e. north, south, east, west, windward / lee).
Long story short, the science here is about data. Big data. And while highly local, anecdotal evidence can definitely play a part it has to be considered within the correct context.
If you're interested, I built a tool[1] a couple of years ago based on surveys we were doing across the length of the reef. It gives a sense of coral cover, health, and the importance of individual reefs to the broader system.
It's worth remembering that the Great Barrier Reef stretches for 2,300 km, and your video covers a couple of hundred meters of that off one touristy island (Fitzroy) near the busiest town for GBR tourism (Cairns). If we're trading anecdotes, that looks better than my own visit also off Cairns about 20 years ago.
I'm not saying that coral bleaching etc isn't a problem, in fact I don't see how we can avoid massive coral die-off if global warming continues, but we should also avoid generalizing "the reef is dying!" or "the reef is recovering!" based on samples of a single point.
Not to try discount the damage (as someone who grew up in North Queensland it's absolutely heart breaking) but coral often looks worse/dead on camera.
This is because of the colour shift as you you go deeper into water, a red filter (or light sourcee) is needed to capture the colours as you're seeing them.
Yes the chemicals from the cane fields is the biggest issue that constantly ignored due to commercial interests. Really quite sad. The crown of thorns does far less damage.
I suspect I'd wager my life on that (here in winter at least) before some of your African scenarios. My neighbour is just finishing a Simpson crossing this week actually, though four-car convoy so has easy backup.
I turned onto the Oodnadatta Track the other month (going up for Tourism Australia shoots) and got two flat tyres with one spare as the sun set. Same trip, one of my drones got taken by a wedge-tailed eagle. Diesel at $2.70/L. Not a cheap trip. The surrounds were very wet when I went through, but looks like you copped it muddy.
> I suspect I'd wager my life on that (here in winter at least) before some of your African scenarios.
There isn't any "life wagering" going on.
Please don't buy into the hyperbole. With a little planning and prep, Australia is extremely developed and safe. The chances of dying are very slim, unless a person really tries. Sat beacons and phones are cheap and easy to carry, and the family that recently got stuck in the Simpson had to wait all of 4 hours for a chopper to show up when they hit the button after getting hopelessly stuck in the mud.
Africa is also not what you're making it out to be either. Don't take my word for it, talk to people that have spent a lot of time there. Good friends from Cairns drove right around like I did for 2 years, they went to 30+ countries, West Coast, Southern and all of East Coast. They loved it.
In fact, they loved it so much they are right now shipping their Australian-plated vehicle back to Africa for another two year tour. They are perfectly middle class in Australia and live a great life there, but choose to spent another two years touring Africa. That should tell you a lot about what it's really like there.
got two flat tyres with one spare as the sun set
What tyres are you running, at what PSI, at what speed and with what load? Were they just punctures in the tread, or a failure of the sidewall?
No, I just meant that I'd consider a Simpson crossing in winter less of a gamble than parts of Africa. There's minimal risk of dealing with bribes, getting remotely near a conflict zone, encountering guns/weapons, etc. Not saying that's the norm in Africa, but it's certainly nowhere near the norm here.
In three weeks I'm leaving my safe middle class Adelaide existence to re-renovate my 300k km mileage bus and drive it around the USA again with my young children. Not because it's safer, just because it's more fun and adventurous!
Stock tyres at walking pace. Pulled off the road to photograph an old Ghan bridge and there might've been barbed wire underneath the grading gutter that got both tyres on that side.
> Palumbi added: “Coral cover is actually slightly lower than normal levels in the north, central and southern parts of the huge reef. But coral diversity hasn’t recovered - the increase of cover is due to a set of very fast-growing species. Like a forest of fast-growing trees, not the normal oaks.”
> There are many varieties of coral on the reef, with hard coral cover of huge significance to marine scientists.
> Pointing to a study (here), President of the International Coral Reef Society (coralreefs.org/) Andrea Grottoli, says, “Australia is at record low of hard coral cover (see Ch 2, page 8), most of this decline due to declines on the GBR.”
When I was last in Australia, back in 2019, I spent a bit of time out at the reef with local-run dive boat. On the way out, I was chatting with the crew, and they were talking about how exciting it was that some of the conservation efforts were really paying off finally.
They were saying that some of the spots they visit were finally visibly improving over time rather than bleaching over time basically for the first time since they started running trips out on the reef.
Of course, if the water temperature rises enough, or if the ocean acidifies enough, the conservation efforts will stop being enough to make a difference, but for now it's nice to see the recovery underway.
No offense, but whoever you were speaking to was telling whoppers. Conservation efforts on the Great Barrier Reef are extremely limited in both scope and success.
[Edit] Sorry, not meaning to be overly negative. Happy to provide further detail of the efforts in place if you let me know where you were!
Nowhere in this article or discussion is any mention of the extremely relevant farm runoff pollution. Particularly from cotton farms. Any progress there? I don't have the answer.
There are many aspects to reef conservation. Looking at one aspect in total isolation and claiming anything at all about it with respect the health of the reef is just idiotic.
There would have been very, very little reef tourism over the past two years. Any effect from that?
There will be others as well.
And right there is the risk of using "The reef is nearly dead because global warming" scare campaign lies to try and motivate people to do the right thing. It backfires and ends up encouraging people not to care because they've heard this chicken little stuff before.
Lying for the greater good and those who do it just need to be treated with something beyond contempt.
Context: I'm pretty worried about global warming and have been hearing the reef is nearly dead because global warming for decades now. I've become totally cynical about the reef being used as evidence of global warming for good reason - and it may well be under very deep threat because of global warming. Just stop with the damn lies.
The reefs off the American Florida Keys have apparently been deteriorating for some years now. A study was done by researchers at a Florida university on why, with the expectation that the primary cause would be global warming. It was not. The main cause was apparently nutrient-rich runoff from south Florida agriculture and fertilized lawns. (Nutrients lead to increased growth of algae and other non-coral things, things which are not good in large quantities for coral.) And the good news is that this kind of runoff is easier to fix than global warming.
My fear is that when everything can so easily (and semi-plausibly) be blamed on global warming, no one will look for other causes. ICO coral reefs, those might include runoff, but also over-fishing, over-touristing, dumping or leakage of sewage and trash and oil off boats, and even reportedly sun screen worn by those tourists. And studies like the one above will not get done, because everyone "knows" what the problem is, so the environment--the reefs, in this example--will get worse when they could get better.
AFAIK not a lot of cotton farming going on in reef catchment areas. There is lots of sugar cane and bananas however. Also lots of deforestation for grazing. Plus major resource export ports (LNG, coal). Regardless, runoff remains a major topic and there is some progress being made in the space [1].
Regards the article. If you look to the report itself[2] you'll see that this isn't a "she'll be right" triumph of science over scare campaigns. Climate change sits at the top of a growing list of concerns. The summary specifically mentions increased frequency of both marine heatwaves (that lead to bleaching) and major destructive weather events like cyclones. The other serious concern is crown-of-thorns starfish (a sea star that eats coral) ... and while the jury may still be out on the cause of their outbreaks (overfishing of predators? excess nutrients? changing environment?), the effect of this single species on the broader ecosystem is beyond frightening to witness.
It's extremely difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the threats to the reef without getting into the weeds. The "scare" campaigns may be light on detail, glossing over (or ignoring) much of the important nuance, but (for the most part) they aren't wrong.
The cotton industry in Australia has diverted and depleted waterways which normally replenish the surrounding regions, resulting in a dust-bowl effect which generates storms that regularly dump immense loads of nitrate-bearing dust into the oceans - materials that would normally be caught in a more lush/green/temperate environment where it was useful, were the water available...
Yep totally agree with your statement. My point was that there isn't a lot of cotton being grown in GBR catchments, so it wouldn't be one of the main industries directly effecting water quality on the reef.
But do you not see how the water issues are actually related? The catchments that do abut the GBR are not kept clean by regular water flow - meaning that when there is a major flood or storm, materials that would normally be absorbed by a green environment, are instead dumped - en masse during a flooding event - directly into our oceans. We've had a few major flooding events-worth of nutrient dumping in the last 20 years.
The cotton industry is buffering the problem - its not a direct cause - but it definitely contributes to the lack of local nutrient capture, which, when dumped, drastically effects our ocean water quality.
I think its important not to minimize the effect that altering Victoria/NSW's water table has on the waterway ecosystems.
This picture, straight from the horses mouth, shows you just how interdependent the waterways - and thus, the GBR - are:
I'm sorry but I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that the nutrients that get washed out via catchments in NSW end up on the GBR? I didn't realise this. Certainly water quality is a massive issue, and the current mess going on in the Murray-Darling is highly concerning in a general way. Also regards the nutrients, yes we have exactly the same issue with e.g. sugar, bananas, graziers up here.
The issue is that we've screwed with the water systems in the region so much, that when there is a flood event in areas that have had their natural water flows completely altered, nutrients that have built up in the system that would normally 'trickle-release' slowly are instead dumped en mass into our ocean. Don't forget that for 9 months of the year, the ocean water currents draw waters from the southern coast towards the north... reversing during summer (drought), but when the rainy season hits, and washes the stored nutrients out, the currents pull that artificially nutrient-rich waters directly onto the reef.
Its a mess of epic proportions, but unfortunately the cotton profits are too damned high.
Isn't Adani coal mine meant to start commercial-scale coal mining soon? It's right next to the Great Barrier Reef.
"From there, container ships will weave their way through the Great Barrier Reef and out to India and other customers, where the coal will be burned in power stations."
Isn't that comeback proof enough that all this environmentalism is hoax and we can do whatever we want to this planet and it will be fine? Also you sure don't want people to freeze and earn a living..
(Sorry, was just missing such a comment here yet.)
I've seen this reported a lot with lots of climate change deniers triumphing. I'm not really sure what is going on. The AJ article has more detail including:
“While the coral cover is similar to what it was in the 1980s, people should not believe in any way that that means conditions on the reef are the same as they were in the 1980s,”
We have had an unusually cold summer and winter here in Queensland this year, I expect due to the La Niña weather pattern. Unfortunately, once that breaks, we’ll probably be back to the more and more frequent bleaching events again.
I’m surprised the deniers haven’t started trumpeting “global cooling” again like last time we had a couple of unusually cool outlier years…
I don't know what there is to fact-check. Two decades of increased coral cover doesn't mean it's a comeback, the National Bureau of Coral Research hasn't certified an official comeback yet.
After all that noise that vocal minority made, they were simply wrong. Didn’t check their facts, predicted incorrectly, wasted everyones time and desecrated our freedoms with do good save the children socialist laws. pfft
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...