The Climate Change thread - news about the changing climate and the effects on reef ecosystems.

[Eric R.]

 

[MnFish1]

Off topic but in the mid 2000s I was in Africa with a government program designed to get villages solar ovens to curb deforestation. Upon revisit we found all the ovens turned on their side with the doors off being used as fire pits. Turns out the indigenous people did not like the lack of flavour. What’s worse is they were cooking an endangered primate with it. At the end of the day though who are we to judge a dude living in a mud brick hut with malaria, 15 other family members, and war raging around him.

Many of the arguments being made - are 'first world problems' - to 'third world people' - whether right or wrong - they are trying to survive. We are trying to make them do what we want to save coral

 

[skyrne_isk]

So - this planet:

Was once mostly molten

Then mostly ice.

All of the land was once one giant super continent.

The magnetic poles have changed countless times.

Massive swaths of Life have been wiped out and renewed several times due to not so massive impactors.

Impactors and volcanoes have regularly plunged the world into dusty cold darkness that alters weather for hundreds, if not thousand year spans.

There are fish fossils high upon mountain peeks

There are plant and animal fossils MANY thousands of feet deep in coal and shale beds, often UNDER mountains comprised of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock.

There are inland lakes nearly 1000 feet deep gouged out by glaciers that receded millions of years ago.

Plates collide and push mountains from below sea level to 20,000 or more feet into the air, buckling the earths crust like it were tinfoil being crumpled.

Our moon has been moving away from us since it was formed after a collision with us sometime in the ancient past... all the while its gravitational effects on our tides and our tidal bulge in our crust lessening with each passing moment.

Our sun cyclically and sometimes randomly bombards us with massive amounts of solar radiation, sometimes in extended spurts that wreak havoc with our "stable" climate patterns.

One day in actual relative short time compared to the planets age, that sun will grow just a little bit larger before it grows massively larger... but even that little bit will cook everything on the planet, billions of years before it actually gets large enough to consume us.

In all of that, our ocean depths, currents, topography, locations, temperatures and chemistry have drastically and constantly changed.

The oldest known reef fossils are around 500 million years old (yep in the mountains and coal beds, thousands of feet up and down with the oldest I think being in Vermont).

However, as far as I know the oldest known "living" coral beds are around 4000 years old. The rest of them are long gone....due to the ever changing planet.

So yes - the Atlantic current will go away at some point and be replaced by some other current. The effects will be grand on "our" minuscule timescale. But are they really grand on the timescale of even 5,000 years or 10,000 years let alone a million or two, which is minuscule in relation to the planets age and life? Is "our" time the ideal time, or was that some other age past or future? Who knows. I am sure the dinosaurs and various hominid and pre-hominid life forms thought things were grand too...

Don't look toward the sky too much, for that next impactor or pulsar may be coming straight at us and get you before parts of yellowstone are ejected to the moon....

Thank goodness someone said it. I also appreciate the pejorative “conspiracy theory” being applied by the OP to all who don’t believe “man made” climate change is an existential threat that should be used as the justification of the upending of the entire economic order.

100 years ago, scientists were convinced a global ice age was coming: https://www.nytimes.com/1895/02/24/...al-period-geologists-think-the-world-may.html

And if the warming persists? There’s lots of appropriate depth coastlines at higher latitudes…. so the gulf coast will get reefs.

But sure carry on, the global warming will kill us if the cooling doesn’t.

 

[Lebowski_]

Here's a pretty neat little diagram discussing the recovery of the GBR, some good news that was mentioned earlier:




It's neat to me that Acros are this delicate flower in our hobby, but they are described more like a weed in a lot of accounts I read of this recovery - I guess just due to their ability to spread and grow so quickly.

 

[MnFish1]

Hey MN, Paradox and the rest of the team - you guys are right. Maybe you guys could start a thread to take your victory slap and give each other high fives while posting Greta memes, and those of us who want to discuss the thread topic could do so?

The team of what? This is such an insulting comment. I never posted a greta meme. But - You can do ahead if you want - and discuss - like governments have done for at least a decade - the way to solve this. Certainly - we're not on a team. I already agreed with your original premise. There is climate change. Do you have a different agenda?

 

[BeanAnimal]

I'm old enough to remember when we dodged an ice age. Then as it is now the answer was turn your liberties into the government so we can fix the climate...

They can't even balance a budget.
Thanks for this warning Spock.


Spock was a paid government shill.

The US govt was 100% convinced that we would all be ice-cubes by the end of the decade...

They started dumping coal dust and black paint on massive icebergs in an effort to melt them, with sites set on larger scale melting of glacial ice as it advanced south...

I think you will find a related article in an archived Popular Science magazine fwiw.

 

[Lebowski_]

Great video for those interested:

 

[MnFish1]

Great video for those interested:

Thanks

 

[Reefering1]

Just look at the government's attempts to "help" with greenhouse gases from refrigerants. Excuse my rough, estimated from memory numbers. They ban r12(citing ozone hole) moving to r134. Supposedly decreasing from 3 thousand something pounds, of co2 I'm atmosphere, to closer to 2k. (This is from 1kg of respective refrigerants released). Now it's on to 1234yf, which is closer to 1200lb. Sounds good right? But we went from 60$/30lb to 600$/10lb. All the while we've had r290(propane] 1$/1lb. What are they really accomplishing? Idk, but somebody making money

Edit- r290(propane) results in 3lb of co2 in atmosphere. Yet we don't use it

 

[Lebowski_]

I don't know why but I find the whole concept of a Manta Tow to be hilarious and I want to try it:



If we haven't scared off the legitimate scientists on this forum by this page, please speak up if you've ever done one of these! It looks fun

 

[Lebowski_]

One more post from AIMS - check out this page for a lot of really interesting initiatives being done to help the reefs deal with climate change:

https://www.aims.gov.au/research-topics/environmental-issues/climate-change

This one specifically makes me hopeful that I won't have to buy an inkbird for my next tank

 

[Reefering1]

Just keep it civil guys.

I think everybody's doing pretty good!

 

[jabberwock]

How dare you

That's what my wife says when she knows I have her dead to rights.

 

[Tangs-A-Lot]

Sorry, no Greta . . . is Al Gore ok ??

 

[Lebowski_]

That's what my wife says when she knows I have her dead to rights.

There's no better feeling in the world.

 

[MoshJosh]

Sorry, no Greta . . . is Al Gore ok ??

I like the "source's" facebook handle haha!

 

[jabberwock]

Off topic but in the mid 2000s I was in Africa with a government program designed to get villages solar ovens to curb deforestation. Upon revisit we found all the ovens turned on their side with the doors off being used as fire pits. Turns out the indigenous people did not like the lack of flavour. What’s worse is they were cooking an endangered primate with it. At the end of the day though who are we to judge a dude living in a mud brick hut with malaria, 15 other family members, and war raging around him.

This is not off topic and is HUGELY relevant.

 

[revhtree]

While we appreciate the vigor, care and concern that you all have for this topic, we’re going to close this thread. We have had many, many reports and the responses towards one another is not something that we want to be representative of the R2R community and is in violation of our TOS. Thank you.