acidification / coral reef
new 6/15 see oceans
merri ok
primary 719 on terrify tip pt
see eco-system services
interacts with warming, o2 loss
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ymail ecowatch
Monday, August 12, 2024
“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.” — Margaret Atwood
Warmest Sea Surface Temperatures in 400 Years Present ‘Existential Threat’ to Great Barrier Reef, Study Finds
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — the world’s largest coral reef system — has been under critical pressure in recent years, with warming sea surface temperatures leading to mass coral bleaching that threatens its unique biodiversity, ecology and stunning beauty.
Temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef have reached the hottest in more than 400 years, new research has found, presenting an “existential threat” to the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Read More
Related: 60.5% of World’s Coral Reefs Have Bleached in Past Year, NOAA Says
Rescued Gulf of Mexico coral in a Galveston aquarium could help the species’ survival - Alternet.org
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again sci shocked
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/we-were-shocked-arctic-ocean/
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40% loss but we can save 70% of that?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ocean/
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https://boingboing.net/2023/02/08/australia-chooses-the-great-barrier-reef-over-a-coal-mine.html
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5 22 an
climate change is the result of a deadly calculus: human lives are worth risking and even losing over the profits of global corporations.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) recently dropped a bombshell announcement that should have garnered news headlines in the major global and U.S. media, but did not. New WMO research concludes that “[t]here is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level for at least one of the next five years.”
WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas explained, “The 1.5 degree Celsius figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
In 2015, the likelihood of reaching that threshold within five years was nearly zero. In 2017 it was 10 percent, and today it is 50 percent. As we continue to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in dizzying amounts, that percentage spikes with every passing year and will soon reach 100 percent certainty.
When average global temperatures hit the tipping point of 1.5 degrees Celsius, climate scientists predict that most of the Earth’s coral reefs will die off. At 2 degrees Celsius, all will die off. This is the reason why United Nations members coalesced around staving off an average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius at the last global climate gathering in 2021.
The planet has already heated up by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and the consequences are dire across the globe.
India is experiencing its worst heat wave in 122 years, and neighboring Pakistan has broken a 61-year-old record for high temperatures. Dozens of people have already died as a result of the extreme heat.
In France, farmers “can see the earth cracking every day,” as a record-breaking drought has thrown the country’s agricultural industry into crisis mode.
Here in the United States, across the central and northeastern parts of the country, there is a heat wave so large and so severe that people from Texas to Maine experienced triple-digit temperatures in May.
Even the wealthy enclave of Laguna Niguel in Orange County, Southern California, is on fire, and dozens of homes have been destroyed. Although moneyed elites have far more resources to remain protected from the deadly impacts of climate change compared to the rest of us, occasionally even their homes are in the path of destruction, indicating that nowhere on Earth will be safe on a catastrophically warming planet.
Ironically, as extreme heat waves become more likely with global warming, humans will burn more fossil fuels to power the air conditioning they need to cool off and survive, thereby fueling the very phenomenon that leads to more extreme heat waves.
In such a scenario, it is a massive no-brainer for the world to quickly and without delay transition to renewable energy sources. Instead, President Joe Biden in April announced the sale of new leases for oil and gas companies to drill on public lands, reneging on his campaign platform’s climate pledges.
Biden did so apparently in order to increase domestic fuel supplies and thereby lower gas prices. He also raised the percentage of royalties that companies pay the federal government from 12.5 percent to 18.75 percent. But no amount of dollars saved by consumers or earned in royalties by the federal government can halt the laws of physics and protect the climate.
The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman explained, “The burning of fossil fuels extracted from public land and in federal waters accounts for 25 percent of the greenhouse gases generated by theUnited States, which is the planet’s second biggest polluter, behind China.” Here is one area where the federal executive branch has control, and yet financial considerations have been dictating responses rather than existential ones.
After climate activists vocally denounced the move, Biden did finally cancel the drilling leases for Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. The Interior Department cited a “lack of industry interest” and “conflicting court rulings,” rather than pressure from activists, as the reason for the cancellation. Regardless, it is a small measure of relief for a planet that is on its way to burning to a crisp.
While Biden (and other lawmakers) claim they are driven by rising inflation and the impact of high gas prices on voters’ pocket books, it turns out the public doesn’t actually want a glut of oil and gas to help lower costs.
A new poll by the National Surveys on Energy and the Environment found that there is no longer skepticism among the public that the effects of climate change are real, as 76 percent of respondents—the highest on record since the poll started—“believe there is solid evidence that temperatures on the planet have risen over the last four decades.”
The poll also notably concluded that “Americans continue to favor reducing greenhouse gas emissions as their preferred approach for staving off the worst impacts of climate change,” and that they “remain skeptical of any pivot from mitigation toward climate policy that prioritizes adaptation, use of geoengineering or subterranean carbon storage.”
So, rather than invest in mitigating climate change or adapting to it—which is what market-driven economies favor—people, sensibly, want to stop the planet from warming in the first place.
Still, there is growing concern among climate scientists that it may already be too late for a transition to renewables. In spite of energy sources like solar and wind becoming rapidly cheaper and more accessible, overall energy consumption is increasing about as fast, as per one recent study. Mark Diesendorf, the author of the study, explained, “it is simply impossible for renewable energy to overtake that retreating target. And that’s no fault of renewable energy. It’s the fault of the growth in consumption and the fact that action has been left too late.”
Because corporate profit-based considerations have constantly dictated our energy use and climate policies, we have effectively decided that major sacrifices of lives—most likely poor people of color—will be worth the pain of relying on fossil fuels for energy.
There is an analogy to be found in the COVID-19 pandemic. For months, scientists sounded the alarm over prevention, endorsing lockdowns, masks, and vaccines to stop the spread of the deadly virus, just as climate scientists issued warnings against global warming for decades. Both science-based campaigns faced uphill battles, each with its own challenges in recommending the most rational guidelines to maximize public safety in spite of financial sacrifices (closing down most businesses and restaurants and canceling major sporting and entertainment events, in the case of COVID-19; promoting solar power subsidies, switching to wind energy, and manufacturing hybrid and electric vehicles, in the case of the climate crisis). All the while, corporate interests and right-wing political opportunists successfully pushed their own agenda in the halls of power, insisting that economic growth was the most important consideration.
Today, even as COVID-19 infection rates are skyrocketing, with cases having risen by 58 percent in the last two weeks alone, mask mandates are being dropped all over the country and COVID-19-related restrictions are ending. This is not because the virus is under control—it is clearly not—but because it’s no longer financially viable for corporate America to sacrifice profits for lives. So, it will sacrifice lives for profit—just as is the case with the climate crisis.
It is worth spelling out this equation so that we know where we are headed.
As the climate changes, we begin to see where the bodies are buried—literally. Water levels in Nevada’s Lake Mead have fallen so dramatically that the remains of at least two human bodies were recently discovered. What other disturbing discoveries are in store for us?
Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/great-barrier-reef-bleaching-event/
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Climate Science Denier Patrick Moore Under Attack ... - DeSmog https://www.desmog.com › 2016/04/07 › climate-scienc...
Apr 7, 2016 —British environmentalist and author Mark Lynas, who is also pro-nuclear energy, weighed in too, describing Moore as “just a predictable ...
Climate science denialist Patrick Moore is all about “consensus building.” We know this because it says so on his biography at the think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
And so, fresh from delivering a coal-funded talk in Brussels where he told the audience to “celebrate CO2”, the Canadian has been out doing a bit of that “consensus building” in his own unique way.
In recent days, Moore has accused respected climate scientist Ken Caldeira of “fakery”, called him a “jerk” and then told a fellow nuclear power advocate to “GFY”.
The nuclear advocate in question was Australian energy and climate consultant Ben Heard, who had engaged Moore on social media. He’s written a blog about the exchange.
British environmentalist and author Mark Lynas, who is also pro-nuclear energy, weighed in too, describing Moore as “just a predictable right-wing anti-green contrarian”.
When DeSmog :{UK}: gave Moore the chance to respond to a story showing he had been paid by coal lobbyists to deliver a talk, his response was “bugger off”.
Who is Patrick Moore?
For those that don’t know, Patrick Moore is often described as a former senior member of Greenpeace, even though he left that organisation 30 years ago.
Since then, he has spent his time being an advocate for nuclear power, GM crops, forestry and, apparently, burning as much coal as you can get your hands on.
In a French television interview last year, Moore told a journalist that the pesticide glyphosate was not a carcinogen and was so safe, “you could drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you”.
Moore was then immediately offered the chance to drink a glass by the interviewer, which he declined. “I’m not an idiot,” he said.
Moore is a long-time climate science denialist and claims, against all credible scientific institutions, that there is “no proof” that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere (about 40 per cent more than there was before the industrial revolution) is causing any global warming.
Acidification denial
In April 2015, Moore wrote a column for The Australian newspaper claiming that ocean acidification, caused by adding CO2 to the atmsophere mostly from burning fossil fuels, wouldn’t be a problem for the oceans and the species that live in them.
In typical conspiratorial style, Moore even claimed the science of ocean acidification had been “invented” around the year 2005.
Moore has no academic publishing record at all on ocean acidification (or much else in the last 20 years), so it was no surprise that he got things badly wrong.
Several of the world’s leading scientists on ocean acidification, including one who had apparently begun studying the issue a whole five years before it had even been “invented”, tore Moore’s claims to pieces.
Moore’s column was “ill informed and highly misleading”, “very wrong”, “BS” and “nonsense”, the scientists told me for The Guardian, who explained in painstaking detail why his analysis was flawed.
But this didn’t stop Moore making the same claims in a subsequent research paper ”Ocean ‘Acidification’ Alarmism in Perspective” for the Canada-based Frontier Center for Public Policy (FCPP), where he is chair of the think tank’s “Energy, Ecology and Prosperity Program”.
Oddly, the paper carried a disclaimer that the views expressed “do not reflect the opinions” of the center, “its Board of Directors, staff and/or donors” despite it being written by one of its own.
According to FCPP, its papers are “rigorously researched by the most credible experts in their field”. They also claim to run their own “peer review” system for their reports.
This is just as well, because Moore thinks that actual peer reviewed scientific journals are ruled by a “warmist ideology”.
This appears to be a pattern for Moore. When challenged, respond with a mixture of abuse, name-calling and conspiracy theories.
So when a group of students walked out of a speech he gave at a US college last year, he compared them to the “taliban”.
There’s Moore’s “consensus building” skills on display again.
Image: Patrick Moore gives evidence to the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, February 2014
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an 1120
climate crisis is the primary cause of 98% of dead Florida coral reef: NOAA research
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/new-methane-leak-found-in-antarctica-raises-alarm-as-planet-edges-closer-to-climate-tipping-points/
Scientists have for the first time identified an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica, increasing the possibility that the planet is close to one of the “tipping points” that would put the impacts of global heating out of humans’ control.
According to The Guardian,GUK researchers led by Andrew Thurber at Oregon State University foundguk the methane leak in a region known as Cinder Cones in McMurdo Sound, within the Ross Sea. The site is 30 feet below the surface of the ocean.
In addition to finding methane dissolved in the water there, the scientists found that microbes which usually consume the gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only formed in small numbers five years after they first began to study the site.
Thurber called the findings “incredibly concerning.”
“It is not good news. It took more than five years for the microbes to begin to show up and even then there was still methane rapidly escaping from the sea floor,” he told The Guardian. “The methane cycle is absolutely something that we as a society need to be concerned about.”
Scientists have warned for years that the climate crisis could lead to the “tipping point” of methane leaks in the sea floor and the thawing of permafrost regions.
“At some point in a warming world, greenhouse gas emissions from nature will go way beyond anything we can control,” tweeted Australian immunologist Peter Doherty.[twt guk]
the Ross Sea has not yet warmed significantly from the climate crisis, so the research did not directly link the methane leak to global heating.
But climate models have not yet accounted for significant delays in the development of microbes, which help to keep methane from leaking into the atmosphere.
“The big question is: how large is the lag [in microbe development] compared with the speed at which new leaks of methane might potentially form in the wake of retreating ice?” Prof. Jemma Wadham of the University of Bristol in the UK, who reviewed the study, told The Guardian.
Thurber called the discovery of the methane leak and the delayed microbe growth “a significant discovery that can help fill a large hole in our understanding of the methane cycle.”
“Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere and the Antarctic has vast reservoirs that are likely to open up as ice sheets retreat due to climate change,” he said in astatement.
Other tipping points identified by climate scientists include the disintegration of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, “dieback” in the Amazon which would transform the rainforest into a dry ecosystem, and the dying off of the coral reefs.
Scientists raised alarm earlier this year aboutunusually warm water beneath a massive glacier in West Antarctica, and researcherswarned in February that the third major bleaching event in five years at the Great Barrier Reef would put the reef “on a knife edge.”
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https://www.ecowatch.com/corals-mass-extinction-2645381071.html
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On a knife edge’: Experts warn of new signs the Great Barrier Reef is at severe risk
Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams
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https://ecowatch.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=214ab5fbb3f6015d74ffab4ec&id=6c225ee769&e=c2e8fdabfa
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kpfa 12/18/19 pacific acid 2x as fast?!
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Study confirms fear that intense ocean acidification portends ecological catastrophe: ‘We have been warned’Julia Conley / Common Dream
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-blob-a-marine-heatwave-larger-than-alaska-is-wreaking-havoc-on-marine-life-and-the-worst-may-be-yet-to-come/
no lnx
The Blob: A marine heatwave larger than Alaska is wreaking Written by Nicole Karlis / Salon September 27, 2019
In the fall of 2013, scientists in Washington noticed a strange physical phenomenon surfacing in the Pacific Ocean — a vast patch of unusually warm water moving through the Pacific. For a year, from 2014 to 2015, this odd mass of water — known colloquially as “The Blob” — had horrible repercussions for marine life: thousands of sea lion pups were beached and starved, and The Blob created the first ever mass bleaching event for Hawaii’s coral reefs. Now, scientists are on high alert as they observe the second largest blob on record, one that, at its current growth rate, could exceed the original blob.
While “The Blob’s” name is reminiscent of the 1958 science-fiction horror movie about a fictitious blob that eats everything in its path, the real-life marine heatwave blob should inspire just as much horror. When the 2014 blob was first discovered, it was 500 miles wide and 300 feet deep; at its peak, it expanded to be 1,000 miles long, 1,000 miles wide and 300 feet deep. The 2014 blob wreaked havoc with the West Coast marine ecosystem — slowing down salmon returns, and likely fueling for strange weather patterns across the country.
The new blob, officially called the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019, is, like the original, situated in a vast swath of ocean off the west coast of the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Andrew Leising, a research scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center and developer of a marine heatwave tracker, told Salon its size is currently around 8 million square kilometers.
...
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Australia Cuts Outlook for Great Barrier Reef to ‘Very Poor’ for First Time icn 919
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/completely-terrifying-study-warns-carbon-saturated-oceans-are-headed-toward-tipping-point-and-could-unleash-mass-extinction-event
no lnx
‘Completely terrifying’: Study warns carbon-saturated oceans are headed toward tipping point — and could unleash mass extinction event
written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams July 10, 2019
The continuous accumulation of carbon dioxide in the planet’s oceans—which shows no sign of stopping due to humanity’s relentless consumption of fossil fuels—is likely to trigger a chemical reaction in Earth’s carbon cycle similar to those which happened just before mass extinction events, according to a new study.
MIT geophysics professor Daniel Rothman released new data on Monday showing that carbon levels today could be fast approaching a tipping point threshold that could trigger extreme ocean acidification similar to the kind that contributed to the Permian–Triassic mass extinction that occurred about 250 million years ago.
Rothman’s new research comes two years after he predicted that a mass extinction event could take place at the end of this century. Since 2017, he has been working to understand how life on Earth might be wiped out due to increased carbon in the oceans.
Rothman created a model in which he simulated adding carbon dioxide to oceans, finding that when the gas was added to an already-stable marine environment, only temporary acidification occurred.
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When he continuously pumped carbon into the oceans, however, as humans have been doing at greater and greater levels since the late 18th century, the ocean model eventually reached a threshold which triggered what MIT called “a cascade of chemical feedbacks,” or “excitation,” causing extreme acidification and worsening the warming effects of the originally-added carbon.
Over the past 540 million years, these chemical feedbacks have occurred at various times, Rothman noted.
But the most significant occurances took place around the time of four out of the five mass extinction events—and today’s oceans are absorbing carbon far more quickly than they did before the Permian–Triassic extinction, in which 90 percent of life on Earth died out.
The planet may now be “at the precipice of excitation,” Rothman told MIT News.
On social media, one critic called the study’s implications about life on Earth “completely terrifying.”
if the carbon cycle is nearing a natural positive feedback point – well – completely terrifying https://t.co/gXVnoITpo0
— steve crandall (@tingilinde) July 9, 2019
“Today’s oceans are absorbing carbon about an order of magnitude faster than the worst case in the geologic record — the end-Permian extinction.” In that event, at least 90 percent of all life on earth died. https://t.co/16CCtyQeWG
— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) July 9, 2019
The study, which was completed with support from NASA and the National Science Foundation, also notes that even though humans have only been pumping carbon into the oceans for hundreds of years rather than the thousands of years it took for volcanic eruptions and other events to bring about other extinctions, the result will likely be the same.
“Once we’re over the threshold, how we got there may not matter,” Rothman told MIT News. “Once you get over it, you’re dealing with how the Earth works, and it goes on its own ride.”
Other scientists said the study, which will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents a clear call for immediate action to drastically reduce the amount of carbon that is being pumped into the world’s oceans. Climate action groups and grassroots movements have long called on governments to impose a moratorium on fossil fuel drilling, which pumps about a billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.
“We already know that our CO2-emitting actions will have consequences for many millennia,” says Timothy Lenton, a professor of climate change and earth systems science at the University of Exeter. “This study suggests those consequences could be much more dramatic than previously expected.”
“If we push the Earth system too far,” Lenton added, “then it takes over and determines its own response—past that point there will be little we can do about it.”
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Biodiversity helps coral reefs thrive – and could be part of strategies to save them
Cody Clements, Georgia Institute of Technology
In a study that cultivated coral 'gardens' with varying numbers of species, plots with more species were healthier. This finding could inform strategies to help coral reefs survive climate change.
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Sea creatures store carbon in the ocean – could protecting them help slow climate change?
Heidi Pearson, University of Alaska Southeast
Protecting forests and wetlands, which absorb and store carbon, is one way to slow climate change. Scientists are proposing similar treatment for marine animals that help store carbon in the oceans.
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Coral reefs provide flood protection worth $1.8 billion every year – it’s time to protect them
Michael Beck, University of California, Santa Cruz
A new report shows that coral reefs reduce damage from floods across the United States and its trust territories by more than $1.8 billion every year – and pinpoints that value state by state.
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Warning for Seafood Lovers: Climate Change Could Crash These Important Fisheries
:{BY: BOB BERWYN
Atlantic and polar cod face a double whammy as the planet warms: rising ocean temperatures and acidification could cut reproduction by nearly two-thirds, new research shows.}:
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Australia's $379M Plan to Save Great Barrier Reef Raises Skepticism
The Australian government announced Sunday its largest investment in the Great Barrier Reef to date. More than $500 million Australian dollars (US $379 million) will go towards helping the highly vulnerable site that's under threat from climate change.
However, some have criticized the move as a "band-aid plan" as the fossil fuel-friendly government promotes the building of new coal mines, which fuels global warming that harms the reef.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/marine-extinction-warming-2494757460.html
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https://www.ecowatch.com/coral-bleaching-pacific-2475832718.html
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/04/13/breitbart-james-delingpole-pushing-denial-great-barrier-reef-bleaching-again
The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing mass coral bleaching for the second consecutive year, ushering in another global round of headlines above images of ghostly white corals and dying habitats.
About a quarter of all the corals on the reef died from the 2016 event, mostly in the pristine north.
What were once dazzling multi-colored homes for myriad marine species are now graveyards of algae-swamped coral.
Now the reef is bleaching again, with corals in the reef's central area, popular with tourists, suffering the most. It’s too early to say how many of the corals will die from the bleaching.
But fear not. Breitbart’s resident climate science denier James Delingpole is on the case.
With his trademark cavalcade of insults and lack of understanding, the British writer has been working hard to rid the reef of all this death and destruction by typing angry sentences into a computer.
“The Great Barrier Reef isn’t in the remotest danger,” writes Delingpole in his latest Breitbart story. Under the headline, “Only Gullible Fools Believe that the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying,” Delingpole writes that those who accept the evidence are “pillocks,” “idiots,” and “eco loons.”
Delingpole’s piece is mainly an attack on a recent paper published in Nature and its author, Professor Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Queensland.
Hughes’ paper examined the 2016 bleaching and also previous episodes in 2002 and 1998.
Delingpole tries to convince his readers Hughes is “the main man behind the scare” and accuses him of being “more interested in generating headlines than pursuing the scientific method.”
Delingpole ignores how Hughes had more than 40 co-authors on the study, with scientists from the Great Barrier Marine Park Authority, the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and several leading universities. The science linking human-caused global warming to mass coral bleaching is well established.
Delingpole doesn’t really have any of his own arguments for his latest piece, but instead relies on a retired college tutor and migratory bird expert from California, Jim Steele.
Delingpole quotes heavily from an article on Steele’s website, which claims the Hughes study is based on “aerial surveys” that “cannot discriminate between the various causes of bleaching.”
The problem with this is that Steele is flat out wrong. As the Nature study clearly states, the analysis was based on “aerial and underwater surveys” combined with satellite data.
As Hughes told DeSmog by email:
“Steele needs to actually read our Nature paper. We reported the extent of bleaching, measured both from the air and underwater — the latter on 150 reefs.
Mass bleaching due to thermal stress is the only mechanism that can turn more than 1000km of a reef system white in the course of a few weeks.
In the Nature paper, we show the relationship between thermal stress experienced on each reef and the amount of bleaching recorded underwater by divers. We also ground-truthed the accuracy of the aerial scores, and found them to be highly reliable.
We also showed that satellite measurements of heat exposure matched the aerial bleaching scores as well as the underwater scores. The south didn’t bleach in 2016 because it was cool, the north was the most severely bleached because it was hottest.”
Coral bleaching is a stress reaction and at a local level can have multiple causes, including poor water quality.
But multiple studies in scientific journals have found the kind of widespread mass bleaching of corals witnessed since the late 1990s is caused by increasing ocean temperatures.
Delingpole claims that bleaching is “normal” during El Nino years when global temperatures tend to be higher. He doesn’t mention that the current bleaching unfolding across the reef is not happening in an El Nino year and that in any case, before the late 90s reefs around the world routinely experienced El Nino years without mass bleaching.
Delingpole reports Steele’s claim that rather than heat stress, the bleaching could be caused by falling sea levels. Steele points to a study of corals in Indonesia.
Hughes says:
“The Indonesian study shows that coral branches on inter-tidal reef flats that stick 15cm out of the water on an unusually low tide can get their tips burned off. That has nothing to do with why corals bleached four times along the Great Barrier Reef, in the four hottest years on record. Two of the mass bleaching events, 2002 and 2017, were not during El Nino conditions.”
[vid]
Delingpole’s misrepresentations don’t stop there. He writes: “And no, bleaching isn’t the same as dying. Not in the slightest,” clarifying something that coral scientists also like to clarify.
For example, as Hughes’ James Cook University colleague marine biologist James Kerry said in a press release: “Bleached corals are not necessarily dead corals, but in the severe central region we anticipate high levels of coral loss.”
Hughes adds: “We have always distinguished between bleaching and mortality. The latter takes longer to unfold.”
Just two days ago in The Conversation, Hughes wrote:
“Last year (2016), following the peak temperatures in March, on average 67% of the corals died in a 700 km-long northern section of the Reef; the single greatest loss of corals recorded to date on the Great Barrier Reef. Further offshore and further south, most of the bleached corals regained their colour after the 2016 bleaching, and survived. The patchiness of the bleaching means that there are still sections of the Great Barrier Reef that remain in good condition.”
Like Delingpole, Steele also happens to deny the evidence that humans are causing dangerous climate change. He's written a book on it.
So far a couple of thousand people have shared Delingpole’s story on Facebook.
Gullible, much?
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Think you’ve had it rough this past year? You should hear what the Great Barrier Reef is dealing with.
According to the cover article in today’s issue of the journal Nature, the iconic reef off the coast of Australia suffered unprecedented coral die-off after last year’s record-breaking bleaching event. Now, as the Southern Hemisphere hits late summer temperatures, central and southern sections of the reef — areas which avoided the worst of last year’s bleaching — are in trouble.
“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” coral researcher Terry Hughes told the New York Times. Hughes led the team that conducted aerial surveys to document the bleaching last year, as well as subsequent surveys to assess just how much of that bleaching turned into dying.
Bleached corals don’t always turn into dead corals — some are able to recover when temperatures drop. Er, if temperatures drop. If water temperatures stay high and corals stay bleached, they will eventually starve to death. Without coral building reefs, whole ecosystems may disappear, along with the food, tourism, and jobs they support.
Hughes and his coauthors found that even corals in pristine, protected water were likely to be suffering from heat stress, meaning the only thing left to do to protect corals is, you know, address climate change.
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The following is written by Ben Richardson, based on his new book Sugar [2] (Polity, 2015):
Class, gender, nationality and race structure sugar's unequal production, exchange and consumption across the world. This can be seen most vividly in the corporeal effects of sugar: the new type of chronic kidney disease [3] striking down sugarcane field workers in Central America, the high rate of prostitution and HIV in sugar towns in Zambia, and the disproportionate level of tooth decay [4] among poor and Hispanic children in Colorado, US. The circulation of sugar is also embodied in the landscape with unequal effects on wildlife. Fertilizer run-off from sugar farming has contributed to the :{degradation of the}::{ Great Barrier Reef}: [5] in Queensland and the destruction of fisheries [6] in the Indus delta (by contrast, the sugarcane plantations have provided welcoming habitats for rats and snakes). Yet these environmental changes are also social. In the case of water pollution, those worst affected have tended to be indigenous people and artisanal fisherfolk traditionally dependent on communal resources for drinking and fishing.
So to really get at the global politics of sugar, the essential question for me was “why does it harm some more than others?”
By starting with social relations, I diverged from two standard approaches. The first of these has addressed the poverty-inducing effects of sugar and framed it as an issue of international trade. This stems from the curious situation whereby exactly the same product, refined sugar, can be made from two entirely different crops. These are the grass crop sugarcane which is grown in tropical climates, and the root crop sugar beet which is grown in temperate climates. The near universal ability to grow these crops has allowed governments across the world to build up a domestic sugar industry by protecting markets from imports and supporting producers with favourable prices.
There are now an estimated 1.1 million jobs in sugar manufacturing [7] and tens of millions more in sugar farming scattered over 120 countries in the world. Moreover, sugar is considered by the World Bank to be the second most protected agricultural commodity in the world behind rice. In 2008 the level of import tariffs and domestic subsidies on sugar accounted for almost one fifth of all agricultural support [8] – that amounts to a lot of redistributive tax!
The injustice that both free traders and development campaigners have pointed out is that protectionist policies seem largely to benefit sugar producers in developed countries. They argue that by keeping out exports from developing countries, trade barriers have denied poor people the chance to trade their way out of poverty and thus confined them to a life of hunger. Or as the Wall Street Journal once pithily put it: “Addiction to sugar subsidies chokes poor nations’ exports [9].”
While trade protection remains important in shaping who benefits from sugar production, the idea that the industry is controlled by wealthy farmers in the European Union (EU) and the US is increasingly untenable. First, significant steps towards liberalisation have happened over the last two decades, turning the EU into a net sugar importer for the first time since the 1970s and opening up the US to unlimited imports from Mexico (whilst sending increased amounts of processed food and High Fructose Corn Syrup the other way). In fact, the US is consistently one of the world’s biggest importers of sugar.
Second, demand for sugar has grown most rapidly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, leading to a steady shift to sugarcane planting in the Global South over the last six decades. Brazil, India, China and Thailand are now the production powerhouses of the global sugar economy.
The third problem with the trade protectionism argument is that they treat countries as homogenous units rather than hierarchical societies. Since there is significant inequality within countries as well as between them focusing on which country sugar is produced in only gives us part of the picture.
There are many examples of men (and they are usually men) in developing countries who have become fantastically wealthy through sugar while their fellow citizens languish in poverty. Two of the richest people the world in fact built their business empires on the back of sugar trading enterprises: the Nigerian Aliko Dangote now worth an estimated $25 billion and the Malaysian Robert Kuok worth $12 billion. Others have found their fortunes as sugar industrialists. The Brazilian Rubens Ometto Silveria Mello, worth $2 billion, made his money at the helm of a sugarcane milling company and was dubbed “the world’s first ethanol billionaire [10]”.
Beyond those agri-businesses selling sugar as an ingredient, there are those re-selling it in the form of manufactured foods and drinks. These include Western-based multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. Together these companies made over $50 billion profit in 2013; a handsome return for their managers and shareholders. (Did you know that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, despite its stated goal to improve global health, holds stock in Coca-Cola, Mars, Wal-Mart and Kraft-Heinz [11] worth over a billion dollars?!). These examples of wealth accumulation all belie the idea that we can determine who benefits from sugar simply by looking at national levels of output and export.
The second approach to sugar politics has addressed its adverse health effects. If the injustices of sugar production have been framed as a problem of trade protectionism then those relating to consumption have been framed, quite separately, as a problem of corporate manipulation. These companies are charged with purposefully misleading the public into dangerous eating habits. On the one hand, they manufacture and market foods high in sugar, salt and fat, and on the other hand, lobby governments to water down dietary guidelines and labelling regulations.
Like the literature on trade protectionism though, while it contains some important insights, as a political critique this approach also has its limitations. First, it tends to ignore the countervailing appeal of diets and detoxes popular in the media. Among these are Atkins, Dukan, Glycaemic Index, paleo and No Sugar, all of which have changed the consumption of sugar either by discriminating against sucrose or shifting eating habits away from sweetened foods altogether. Studies which focus only on the dominance of corporations thus miss these forms of (typically feminised) agency and marginalise the response of companies to it. Product reformulation using artificial sweeteners and the takeover of health conscious brands have been particularly common strategies, although by no means a solution to the spread of diet-related disease.
Second, these studies are divorced from issues of production. One of the biggest developments in recent years has been the growth of the ethanol biofuel market. By 2013 fully 15 per cent of global sugarcane production was turned into ethanol; a proportion which is expected to almost double over the next decade. Meanwhile, the masses of corn grown in the US that have been diverted into biofuel production has put inflationary pressure on the price of High Fructose Corn Syrup, making it less competitive compared to sugar [12] in the North American sweetener market. Ignoring these dynamics blinkers us to which agricultural crops end up in our food, in what form, and why.
Third, this account has little to say about the prospects for conscious political change. For example, in his otherwise excellent book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, the journalist Michael Moss concludes by putting his faith in enlightened shopping to save the day. In his closing paragraph, he argues that:
They [the major food corporations] may have salt, sugar and fat on their side, but, we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.
Not only is this is perverse conclusion to reach after spending the previous 346 pages detailing the myriad ways that American consumers have virtually no meaningful choice over what they eat, it also rules out other sources of change and ways of acting. By reducing politics to individual choice at the checkout and starving it of its collective character and varied institutional expression, accounts like the one given by Moss may do more harm than good.
So how should the global politics of sugar be approached instead? My book proceeds from two foundations. The first is that the circulation of sugar is deeply structured by capitalism. Since the 1990s this has been entrenched on a global scale. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the formation of the World Trade Organisation have undermined national farm policy, while the industrialisation of China and marketization of food provisioning across the Global South has underpinned a seismic ‘nutrition transition’. Through these changes and more, the reach and use of sugar has been transformed. As such, a critical analysis of capitalism is necessary not for advocating Communist revolution of the food system (“Eaters of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your fast-food chains!”) but to appreciate why this system has led to social inequality and political crisis.
Inequality is reproduced in many ways; from under-paying easily exploitable farm workers like migrants and women, to disproportionately marketing processed sweetened foods to racial minorities and children. Likewise, the over-production of sugar has led to systematic contradictions including periodic market crashes [13] and exacerbating a global diabetes epidemic [14]. These in turn have produced crises (a farm crisis, a health crisis) which state authorities have been called upon to manage. And contrary to the common assertion that equates capitalism with free markets, it is often capitalists themselves have called for state intervention, either to make a market function in their interests or else protect them from the vagaries of it.
At the same time as taking global capitalism seriously, it is also important not to ascribe it with uniform and omnipresent characteristics. Capitalism need not be a single fate. This refers both to the different ways in which capitalist economies can be organised and the limits to which capitalist principles of private property, commodification and endless accumulation extend. Think of the bake-a-cake sales that raise millions for charity. These are just as much part of the economy as a factory making chocolate bars or a futures exchange trading sugar contracts. What this second foundation does then is to create some room for human agency, without which every eventuality would be boiled down to the inner workings of capital – no better than other deterministic accounts of sugar [15] which ascribe everything to its irresistible sweetness or the characteristics of the cane plant.
Progressive political change is not about changing people’s relationship to sugar per se but changing our relationships to one another. Reducing sugar consumption may lower some people’s risk of diabetes, but if those same people remain reliant on poor quality food then it is likely that they will suffer from other forms of diet-related ill-health instead. Similarly, increasing crop productivity through high-yielding seeds may help farmers make a decent living, but only insofar as they are not then subject to price cuts by other businesses in the supply-chain.
I argue that this change comes about through site-specific struggles to value life differently. They are site-specific because they take different forms in different places – a campaign against child advertising here, a protest against water pollution there. But what they have in common is a desire to govern by a different metric, one that recognises values beyond ‘the bottom line’; be it the sanctity of childhood or the preservation of the environment. These contestations might cohere into broader systemic change that would make sugar provisioning more ecologically sound and socially just. This is a move that, I believe, must ultimately challenge the profit-driven organisation of food and farming itself.
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WRITTEN TESTIMONY OF SCOTT C. DONEY, Ph.D. WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION1 HEARING ON Climate Change: It’s Happening Now BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT & PUBLIC WORKS UNITED STATES SENATE JULY 18, 2013
Introduction Good morning Chairman Boxer, Ranking Member Vitter and members of the Committee.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today on climate change, the ocean carbon cycle and ocean acidification.
My name is Scott Doney, and I am a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole MA. My research focuses on interactions among climate, the ocean and global carbon cycles, and marine ecosystems, and I have published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and book chapters on these and related subjects. I have served on the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program Scientific Steering Group and the U.S. Community Climate System Model Scientific Steering Committee. I was the inaugural chair of the U.S. Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program and am currently on the steering committees for the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Program and the U.S. CLIVAR/CO2 Repeat Hydrography Program. I am also a convening lead author for the Oceans and Marine Resources chapter of the U.S. 2013 National Climate Assessment.
curry writes of idso rebuttal http://sppiblog.org/news/idsos-rebuttal-to-scott-doneys-senate-testimony-on-ocean-acidification
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