Phillip Dustan via Coral-List
4:59 PM May 27, 2021
to Steve, coral-list@coral.aoml.noaa.gov
Ecological Infrastructure is at the heart of this issue.
Translating that to scientists is hard, to politicians more so, and nearly
impossible to the average westerner.
Native people understand it intuitively.
Reefs are sensitive because they are biological entities at the edge of
their evolutionary success.
By this I mean they are superbly adapted to their environmental limits, but
not to conditions they have not experienced the wrath of Natural Selection.
Now humans are increasing the “evolutionary goalposts” faster than
evolution allows for adaptation – or maybe not.
But it is clear we are witnessing (monitoring) a global selection
experiment with humans providing the selection pressures.
I see it much like the evolution of drug resistance bacteria; which
species/ecosystems/etc will survive humanity?
If only Humanity would embrace a Lovelockian perspective and realize we
can’t make it without the rest of the Biosphere as a support mechanism.
I would start by teaching that life is a process, not a thing.
Ecosystems represent the emergent properties of processes and are not
things to plunder.
They cannot be “restored” unless the selection pressures that “guide” these
processes are restored first, not as an afterthought.
You cannot build a bridge without a foundation. The same goes for a house,
road, financial system, an army, or a nation.
The foundations of ecosystems are physical and biological, just like the
foundations for a nation are physical and social.
Humans will (maybe and hopefully) accept these ideas and integrate into
nature.
Biogeochemistry and the evolved conservative properties of natural systems
are what I would want people to appreciate.
Westerners might be able to understand this in terms of garbage picking:
Someone puts their old microwave on the curb for the trashman because they
got a new one for their birthday.
THe next bloke that comes along sees the old one and thinks. “Oh, a
microwave! I always wanted one but…”
He takes it home where it lasts for many years.
The moral is that someone’s junk is another’s treasure.
It happened with oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and the list goes on and on
throughout the food web driving the biological arms race.
Reefs evolved in the sea where there was lots of energy and almost no
nutrients, so selection favored the efficient capture and retention of
nutrients.
A few hundred million years of evolution in a benign, stable, and
predictable place and it is no wonder that nitrogen from sewage and runoff
is like crack cocaine to zooxanthellae……….
And all those fish we catch for food are equivalent to airplane mechanics
that keep our fancy jet planes flying.
It’s no mystery why fishing them off the reef leads to an ecological
crash…….
The list goes on as long as we care to make it.
So how do we become more aware?
Maybe try doing one thing each day to help the Biosphere heal.
Maybe vote with your dollars.
Remember, the ocean begins at your front door….
WASHINGTON
— When pollsters informed President Trump that he faces political
exposure in the 2020 election with swing voters on environment policy,
he decided to respond with a White House address claiming stewardship of
clean water, air and oceans.
But as some Trump aides were drafting that speech, others were casting doubt on the significance of a climate threat to a key battleground state: the degradation of coral reefs in Florida.
Weeks
before, a senior intelligence analyst at the State Department had
submitted a draft of planned testimony to Congress detailing the
national security implications of climate change for White House review.
Among
the edits that the analyst, Rod Schoonover, received back from the
White House was a novel argument. National Security Council officials
issued a challenge to the scientific consensus that warming oceans pose
an intensifying mortal threat to coral reef systems, home to a quarter
of all marine life and a vital resource in the global food market.
In
the past decade, 90-95% of coral on the Florida Reef have died or
incurred severe damage, according to scientists with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which estimates the reef
sustains roughly 70,000 jobs in South Florida and generates over $4.4
billion in annual sales.
“There
is no evidence that coral bleaching is intensifying now or will in the
future,” reads the comment, attributed to the NSC. Two sources said it
was written by William Happer, a prominent skeptic of climate change.
“Coral reefs have bleached and usually recovered throughout their
evolutionary history.”
That
position has spooked government experts who have worked in marine
biology for decades, and who in recent years sounded alarm bells over
the consequences of mass die-offs along U.S. shorelines and beyond.
Scientists
say bleaching occurs when coral expel algae in response to an increase
in sea temperatures. The algae give coral their color, and without it,
they are left bone white. But algae also provide coral with their
primary source of food and sustenance.
The
more frequently bleaching events occur, the less time damaged coral
have to recover from the last event and the more likely they are to die
from starvation or disease.
Corals
in Florida were hit by severe bleaching in both 2014 and 2015 the
warmest years on record and in 2015, Hawaii saw the worst bleaching and
coral mortality ever recorded. Guam and American Samoa have also
experienced repeat bleaching events over the past six years, according
to Mark Eakin, coordinator of the NOAA Coral Reef Watch.
Eakin questioned the scientific basis of the NSC commentary.”Clearly this is someone who either is not aware of the scientific literature that overwhelmingly shows that coral bleaching has increased and most certainly will continue to increase as the climate warms or they’re ignoring that literature,” Eakin said. “Normally, documents of this sort require vetting by experts within the administration, and those experts usually include people who are knowledgeable in the subject. We don’t know what was done in this case.”[
Schoonover’s
leaked testimony, Eakin continued, “appears accurate and consistent
with a large amount of public literature, including the last four
reports from an intergovernmental panel on climate change. And it is
consistent with what we have analyzed at NOAA and with what we have
published on coral bleaching multiple times.”
The
wide scope of climate-related threats facing Florida has convinced some
of its leading Republican lawmakers to acknowledge humanity’s role in
the crisis. The state’s two GOP senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott,
joined Hawaii’s Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono last week
in sponsoring the Restoring Resilient Reefs Act of 2019, a bill that
would restore federal assistance for coral protection and emphasizes
their economic and ecological significance.
That
bill attributes the challenges facing coral reefs to “human-accelerated
changes, including increasing ocean temperatures, ocean acidification,
coral bleaching, coral diseases, and invasive species.”
White
House officials would not confirm the authenticity of the Schoonover
document, first obtained by the Washington Post. Schoonover who resigned
from the State Department over the NSC edits later ruffled feathers in
the administration by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times accusing
the White House of politicizing climate science.
“We
don’t comment on deliberative matters, where this appears to be a clear
example someone in the U.S. bureaucracy believing their way is the only
way, and trying to undermine the president by leaking internal
deliberative information,” a senior administration official told
McClatchy.
But the degradation of coral reefs “is a problem,” the official continued. “We’re serious about it.”
“We
understand that coral reefs and their ecosystems offer benefits to
humankind, as sources of food, livelihood, recreation and shoreline
protection,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the
record. “Reefs are facing multiple threats including pollution,
unsustainable destructive fishing practices, coastal development, and
global threats such as ocean acidification and coral bleaching.”
The
official pointed to language in the International Coral Reef
Initiative’s “call to action” in 1995, which claims that “reasons for
the decline in reef health are varied, complex, and often difficult to
accurately determine.”
Since the mid-1990s, reef systems around the globe have faced increasingly frequent mass bleaching events.
While the Florida and Caribbean reefs have been especially damaged, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef the most publicly recognizable system in the world has suffered from mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, leaving over a third of its coral stark white.[
“There’s
denialism, and then there’s really fringe,” said one climate expert who
has worked on interagency government review efforts.
“Coral
bleaching has not typically fallen within denialist rhetoric,” the
expert continued. “Most people would not see this as a climate issue,
and wouldn’t feel the need to deny it you could believe in warmer oceans
without believing in climate change. But this goes well beyond that.
This says all marine biology is off.”
