I'm so glad we have space rockets, flying cars and drone warfare...but I'd trade it all in for the reef to come back.
It's really just climate change. (Ocean warming is what causes bleaching.) Luckily, since the 80s we've had the technology to generate energy without releasing greenhouse gases. I wish more people knew about the harms caused by climate change because maybe if they were they'd be more interested in preventing them.
The power is yours.
If only we were just debating why/who! Thanks to Social Media, filter bubbles, and “alternative facts,” we are back to debating whether it is actually even happening or not.
https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...
This doesn't mean everything is fine, but it is doing way better than 2017.
Was in central GBR this year, can't say I'm super impressed but not sure how I should set my expectation
Typically the biggest change in diversity is due to cyclones which kill of the delicate and fast-growing corals like staghorns, which are also the fastest to grow back.
Bleaching is not death of the coral, it is the expulsion of algae (typically in high temperatures). The coral can find a different species of algae, or the algae can return once temperatures drop.
There are corals living in regions of the ocean with different temperatures, so it is not that high temperature alone would kill all coral, but populations adapted to a given region (like north vs south GBR) are being affected by the speed of the changes.
Because it’s nice to say these things in Sentiment, until you see past the naïveté to see human lives are what cause the wear and extraction on the environment. Humans live, eat, shit in, consume their environment for their lives.
How many humans are worth restoring the reef for you? And would you sacrifice your own friends and family?
You don’t need to sacrifice humans, you need humans to behave different. Do you know the energy requirements that go into war? The chemical, carbon and physical changes to the ocean from all we do?
We don’t need to kill more humans, we just need to stop being fucking idiots for a few hundred years.