Take a COOL Guess – the Fun Quiz on Clean Energy. Today’s Topic: The Health of Our Coral Reefs
Question: What percentage of our planet’s coral reefs have died over the last 30 years due to the warming of the oceans? What percentage of ocean species live on these reefs?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
Relevance: According to New Scientist: These reefs create a microcosm story: they are a metaphor for where the world is going, and one of the strongest signs of an impact of climate change on ecosystems.
Technically, this isn’t correct.
The reefs are being threatened by ocean acidification (as well as disruptive harvesting for aquarium hobbiest, overfishing, and plastic/diesel water contamination, but mostly this is acidification) – not global warming. Ocean acidification is a problem that is caused by increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, but it is an entirely different problem that is only tenuously related to global warming because increased atmospheric CO2 is a primary cause for both…
Kind of like erosion and drowning are both negative things caused by water… but you wouldn’t say that a person who died from immersion in water had died from erosion.
😉
It’s nit-picky, and I’d be perfectly happy with you deleting this as unnecessarily anal bit of nit-picking.. but still…
Technically 0% of the coral reefs have been destroyed over the last 30 years due to global warming. That’s the correct answer.
🙂
I need to stop procrastinating and get back to work on my own blog now… A good friend has offered me a very big favor as soon as I get a couple of things worked out, but blogging is more fun than making a blog, so this is a brief respite.
🙂
So you’re saying that the scientists at “New Scientist” are 100% incorrect here and that there is zero causality between warmer water and coral death? I find that hard to swallow. (I understand the causation of ocean acidification, btw; I’ve written about that elsewhere.)
Craig,
I don’t think that there’s much correlation. the water temperature hasn’t risen very much – certainly not more than a few feet deep.
I know that with our own tiny reef tank, a fluctuation of a single degree will not kill the organisms, but the shift of PH by less than 0.1 can kill off virtually everything in the tank.
I won’t say that they are 100% wrong, but weather patterns can cause surface temperatures of regions of the oceans to vary slightly for seasons or even years. Corral cannot be so vulnerable to temperature shock that it cannot survive a very slight change, else it never could have evolved beyond an abnormally active hurricane season.
I’m sure that the teams in question have looked into it carefully, and I do not claim expertise in this area… but I’ve noticed a tendency in all media – including here – to conflate global warming with ocean acidification. So that might be a part of the problem… and of course the prolonged period of higher temperatures might have resulted in some warming of deeper waters – where perhaps some of the corral might be less tolerant of temperature shocks… So perhaps 0% might not be exactly correct, but I can assure you that 40% is far further off.
😉