Coral reefs are a lot like the old growth forests of the sea. They offer a robust biological infrastructure for all manner of creatures to inhabit. Coral bleaching caused by climate change is like a forest fire to those trees. A forest can survive a fire, even a bad one. Root systems and seeds of all kinds, safe in the ground or carried in from elsewhere, will sprout and, over time, rebuild the forest. But if that same forest were swept by fire year after year, eventually it would never recover on time scales human can wrap our primate brains around. And a similar fate may consume the world’s greatest reefs if climate change is not halted:
Scientists with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world’s largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km. The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef’s southern third unscathed.
Where last year’s bleaching was concentrated in the reef’s northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef. This year’s mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event.
- Astronomers have directly imaged the Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black-hole using radio waves for the first time. Not to be outdone, exotic cosmologists and physicists are doing the same for dark matter.
- On an Easter Sunday many moons ago we discussed the lovable, adorable, bunny rabbit. Tomorrow on Sunday Kos, we’ll be looking at the incredible, edible, Easter egg.
- Looks like the Times has hired Bret Stephens to help finish off the great reefs and undercut anyone who objects: Here’s a taste of what we can look forward to from him:
For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem.