Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and how much is due to global environmental changes?
Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and how much is due to global environmental changes?
Regional activties is a huge factor, much bigger than global imo.
For example, South China Sea coastlines from Vietnam and China side are basically completely dead. There zero ocean environmental awareness in both countries and it's all about just devouring all ocean creatures with no self awareness.
This is especially apparent if you take a look at the other side of the same sea. Philipines coasts are absolutely beautiful, full of life (well as much as you can get these days). Huge conservation efforts and really strong indigenous culture that respects the ocean made much more difference than global warming ever could.
Completely different views from two vastly different regional activities.
Yeah this is always my worry about the global warming debate. It's a crisis for sure but there are so many local initiatives that can be taken around ecosystem protection that are cheap and don't require national decision-making to be effective. They won't stop global warming but they will increase local resilience (and beauty).
So, something has been bugging me. Coral is one of the oldest animals.
They've been around for over half a billion years.
They survived the Great Dying, which killed 80-95% of marine species.
And now the ocean gets 0.9 C warmer and it's game over for coral?
Nobody's claiming that all coral is going to go extinct.. the reef environment that has existed for the past few thousand years is at great risk though. Water temperatures that we know have been relatively stable for several hundred years are suddenly rapidly warming. Bleaching events due to high temps which infrequently occurred in the past are happening nearly every year now, which gives the reef no time to rejuvenate between them. The evolutionary process which protects species in their niches takes hundreds or thousands of generations to adapt to new selection pressures and the changes are happening over dozens of generations instead, which may be too fast for most species to respond.
Coral and coral reefs will surely exist for the next few hundred million years but e.g. the Great Barrier Reef as an example of a vibrant reef ecosystem might not. We don't know exactly where the tipping point for these extremely complex systems lies, but we know that it's some point in the direction we're heading and we're starting to see examples of the outcomes that scientists predict to see near those tipping points.
My guess is as a species it will relocate to somewhere with the right temperature zone but because coral takes so long to grow from the perspective of those of us alive the existing “old growth” coral will die.
0.9 C warmer on average vs location specific volatility + acidification
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Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2 emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional and global inputs.
Request the source? I researched and calculated the cumulative percentage of global carbon emissions from major economies since the industrial revolution: - United States: 24% - China: 15% - Russia: 6.7% - Germany: 5.2% - United Kingdom: 4.4% - Japan: 3.8% - India: 3.5% - France: 2.2% - Canada: 1.9% - Ukraine: 1.7%
source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?
I added up the 2023 numbers from here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...
You must have made a mistake in doing that. If you add “world” to the selection, Our World in Data adds them up for you, and you only have to divide 27253/181000. That gives you 0.1506, very close to 15%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...
Oops. You're very right. Math error on my part :( thank you for the correction.
Isn't this 75% less responsibility than total responsibility in case it's only due to regional activities?
Sure, but 25% of responsibility for something like this is well into "consequences of your actions" territory.
If the world had 25% less GHG emissions to date, warming may well still be sub 1C, and the reefs might be fine.