Coral reefs display much of the diversity of life

From “Living on Earth” for Week of April 2, 2021

NOTE: The Ocean Panel is a group of 14 countries looking to protect 100% of their ocean areas by 2025. Pictured: a coral reef in the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.

The oceans are facing serious and growing threats, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution and more. But a group of 14 world leaders called the Ocean Panel is committing to transform the ocean from victim to solution, by sustainably managing 100% of their ocean areas by 2025. Jane Lubchenco is the Deputy Director for Climate and Environment for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as a co-chair of the Ocean Panel Expert Group that helped ground this vision in research. She joins Host Aynsley O’Neill for more about the Ocean Panel and its vision.

O’NEILL: Putting the oceans to work by catching some of the wind offshore is part of the Biden Administration’s plan to blunt climate disruption and reduce dangerous pollution. And the oceans are also getting a champion in the White House. Jane Lubchenco is the former Administrator of NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She recently co-chaired a panel of experts advising 14 world leaders on how to transform the ocean from victim to a solution, with 100% sustainable management by 2025. She is now a senior member of the climate and ecology brain trust that President Biden has assembled at the White House, serving as Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before she took her White House job she spoke with us about the vision and work of the Ocean Panel. Jane, welcome back to Living on Earth!

LUBCHENCO: Thanks, Aynsley, it’s a delight to be here.

O’NEILL: Now, when we look at how we currently manage the oceans, why does the world need this total transformation in management?

LUBCHENCO: The ocean is incredibly important to all of life on Earth. It’s important to livelihoods, it’s important to help mitigate climate change. And yet the ocean is under serious threat from a wide range of activities: climate change, pollution, overfishing, just to name a few. The current trajectory that we are on is really not good. And the question is, how can we address these underlying challenges? And part of the answer is that we need to do so more holistically than we have done in the past. We’ve treated a lot of these problems, issue by issue. And part of the message that the Ocean Panel leaders heard is the need for integrated solutions that consider the whole suite of human activities. The other major thing that I think they heard was that a smart future is not just doing more of the same. It’s actually doing things differently, being much smarter about how we fish, much smarter about how we produce energy, much smarter about how we transport goods around the world. And so much of what is in their new, exciting Ocean Action agenda is doing things smarter, more effectively, more efficiently, and also doing things more holistically.

O’NEILL: Now, Jane, what are some of the most important ways that a sustainable ocean economy connects with climate change?

LUBCHENCO: That’s a great question. In September of 2019, we had a new report that came out from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There was a special report on the ocean and the cryosphere, and it painted in very depressing detail, all of the ways that the ocean has been massively affected by climate change and ocean acidification. And it was clear from that report that the ocean is indeed a victim of climate change. It’s not just the changes in the weather patterns, and the extreme heat, and the droughts, and the megastorms that we’re seeing on land. But the impacts of climate change to the ocean have been very, very significant. But the same week, the Ocean Panel unveiled a report that it commissioned that asked the question, what is the potential for the ocean to provide solutions to help mitigate climate change. And before that report, when people thought about climate change in the ocean, they either thought about the impacts that I just referred to, or they thought about the ocean being important for adaptation. But very rarely has the international policy community focused on climate mitigation thought about the ocean. The report that the Ocean Panel commissioned, looked at a variety of ocean based activities and asked simply, what is the potential for mitigating climate change, and they found enough data at the global scale to analyze five categories of activities. And when they added up how much they could get from each of those five, they came to the astounding conclusion that it might be as much as 1/5 of what we need, by way of carbon emission reductions to achieve the 1.5 degree centigrade target of the Paris Agreement by 2050. So that’s huge. You know, a lot of those activities weren’t even on the table. And here, we find that they actually could play a very significant role in helping to turn things around in terms of climate change.

O’NEILL: So Jane, you mentioned five ocean based activities to help mitigate climate change. Could you go through those for us, please?

LUBCHENCO: So the first one was (1) increasing renewable energy from the ocean, and that’s a big one. Most of that is going to likely be wave energy, but it might also be tidal, it might be current, it might be thermal, depending on what part of the world you are in. The second category was (2) making shipping less polluting. So 90% of the goods that are traded globally travel by ocean and currently, that’s pretty polluting. It’s dirty fuels, they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But it is technologically possible to decarbonize shipping, and that could have a huge benefit. Number three is (3) focusing on what we call blue carbon ecosystems. So these are coastal and ocean ecosystems, such as mangroves, salt marshes, or seagrass beds, that are little carbon engines that are just sucking carbon out of the atmosphere like crazy. Those habitats; mangroves, sea grasses, salt, marsh beds, can not only remove but then sequester as much as 10 times as much carbon as an equivalent area of forest, for example. And we’ve currently lost about half of them globally. So here is an opportunity to actually protect the remaining ones, but also to restore those that have already been degraded. The fourth area for ocean based activities to mitigate climate change comes from (4) focusing on a little bit greater efficiency with aquaculture, mariculture operations, a little bit greater efficiency, with fisheries. But the big one in this category is really shifting diets globally, away from animal protein on the land, and including animal protein from the sea, instead of that animal protein from the land. And then the fifth category was (5) simply sequestering carbon on the seabed. And the panel who looked at these five categories, said that the first four, they felt completely comfortable recommending that they be pursued aggressively. Smartly, yes, but aggressively.

This fifth one, carbon storage in the seabed has a lot of questions still about technical and environmental impacts. And so they recommended further study for those. But that’s another deep dive, if you will, into the potential of the ocean, to not just be thought of as a victim of climate change, but as a solution to climate change by providing as much as 1/5 of the carbon emission reductions that are needed to get us to the 1.5 degree target by 2050.

O’NEILL: To what extent is it important to frame this vision as an opportunity, as opposed to a sacrifice for the countries involved?

LUBCHENCO: You’ve really hit the nail on the head, Aynsley. This is really the secret sauce here. There has been a lot of focus on the ocean as doom and gloom. And there are a lot of problems. There’s no sugarcoating that. There are a range of very serious challenges underway to the ocean right now. However, we also see looking around the world, some amazing solutions that have come to light, that have developed in this community, or that country, or this industry. And those solutions are bright lights. Collectively, they aren’t at the scale that’s needed. They aren’t at the pace that’s needed. But we have the benefit of a huge range of potential solutions that if they were adopted and implemented, could actually transform how we think about and how we use and how we benefit from the ocean in ways that are truly opportunities. So this is not really sacrifice. It’s being smarter about doing things. I think people are familiar with the concept of greater efficiency when we think about energy. You know, much of the focus for mitigating climate change has been focusing on how do we use energy more efficiently. And there have been tremendous advances in energy efficiency of our appliances, of our automobiles, of our transportation systems. That same concept of being more efficient, is what underlies a lot of the transformative actions that are in the ocean action agenda. So yes, this is an incredible opportunity. And it’s my belief that these 14 nations that have embarked on this journey of discovery and now journey of action will have such success with what they are proposing that others will say, oh my gosh, I want some of that too. I want to join forces because what they are doing is exactly what the world needs.

O’NEILL: Jane Lubchenco is a co-chair of the Ocean Panel expert group. Jane, thank you so much for taking the time with me today.

Links in Article: More on the Ocean Panel, National Geographic | “In Rare Show of Solidarity, 14 Key Nations Commit To Protect Oceans”, More on Jane Lubchenco

Corals are integral (essential) in ocean life

From an Article by Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch.com, February. 20, 2020

Researchers have released a sobering study showing that all of the world’s coral reefs may be lost to the climate crisis by 2100. The bleak outlook means that restoration efforts will face Herculean challenges, according to the research presented by researchers at this week’s Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020 in San Diego, California.

Rising sea temperatures, acidic water and pollution are proving too much for the reefs to handle. About 70 to 90 percent of the world’s existing coral reefs are predicted to disappear in the next two decades, according to scientists from the University of Hawaii Manoa.

“By 2100, it’s looking quite grim,” said Renee Setter, a biogeographer at the University of Hawaii Manoa in a statement.

While pollution poses a large threat to many ocean creatures, corals seem most at risk from emissions, according to the researchers. “Trying to clean up the beaches is great and trying to combat pollution is fantastic. We need to continue those efforts,” Setter said in a statement. “But at the end of the day, fighting climate change is really what we need to be advocating for in order to protect corals and avoid compounded stressors.”

To make their predictions, the scientists simulated future ocean conditions like sea surface temperature, wave energy, acidity, pollution and overfishing in areas where corals are today. Looking at those models, the scientists found that most parts of the ocean will not sustain habitats for corals by 2045, and almost no suitable habitats will exist by 2100.

“Honestly, most sites are out,” said Setter in the statement.

Coral reefs nurture about 25 percent of marine life and support local economies worldwide. The new research is disheartening for efforts to restore corals by growing them in labs and then putting them back into the ocean. While those efforts have had a 60 percent success rate, the research suggests that lab-grown corals will not stand up to warming oceans and increased acidification.

Corals are extremely sensitive to ocean temperatures. When the temperature rises just a couple of degrees, corals experience mass bleaching, where coral turns white as it sheds the algae it relies on not only for survival, but also for its magnificent colors. Bleaching does not kill the coral, but it does weaken them, making them vulnerable to disease.

Scientists are predicting a mass bleaching within the next couple of weeks in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The reef, which is nearly the length of Italy, is undergoing heat stress right now, with patches starting to bleach. While a major widespread bleaching has not occurred yet, scientists have warned that it is likely if high ocean temperatures around the reef do not drop in the next two weeks.

Already, temperatures across two-thirds of the reef are about two to three degrees Celsius above normal, with typical peak temperatures still one month away.

“We are down to the wire,” said professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has placed the Great Barrier Reef on Alert Level 1 for the next week, meaning significant bleaching is likely, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company.

“Unfortunately we are a whisker away from bleaching disaster yet again because of global warming-driven marine heatwaves,” said Shani Tager from the Australian Marine Conservation Society to the Australian Broadcasting Company.

“As underwater heatwaves threaten once again to cook our corals, our politicians must move beyond half-baked plans to tackle global warming.”

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See also: Stony Corals Seem to Be Preparing for a Mass Extinction, Scientists Report – EcoWatch, Jordan Davidson, March 4, 2020

We are not ready for these climate impacts ...

From an Article by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, November 23, 2018

In a move environmentalists and journalists denounced as a blatant effort to bury facts that conflict with the president’s denialism and pro-fossil fuel agenda, the Trump administration used the Friday after Thanksgiving to quietly release Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), which warned “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization” and concluded that “greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account” for planet-threatening warming.

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels.”
……………. —Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

“The decision to release this damning report when families are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a brazen attempt to bury the truth from the public that we must act now to move off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

“Releasing this report when no one is looking, tweeting his annual nonsense about global warming and cold weather, and announcing that he’ll use the upcoming U.N. climate meetings as a fossil fuel tradeshow, Trump is doubling down on his climate denial for the holidays—as many families are still reeling from unnatural climate disasters across the country,” Hauter continued. “The science is way past in on climate change… We must prepare for our climate future in spite of Trump.”

From deadly wildfires to catastrophic hurricanes and other extreme weather events, the “impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future,” notes the congressionally mandated report—the first of its kind released since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Authored by officials from over a dozen federal agencies, the report warns that in the absence of aggressive action to quickly slash carbon emissions, the climate crisis will continue to have increasingly devastating effects on the environment, wildlife, and human health.

“It is very likely that some impacts, such as the effects of ice sheet disintegration on sea level rise and coastal development, will be irreversible for many thousands of years, and others, such as species extinction, will be permanent,” the report warns.

Using the hashtag #ClimateFriday, environmentalists worked to overcome the Trump administration’s attempt to hide the NCA4 amid the chaos of the holidays by highlighting the report’s findings and stressing its dire implications if ambitious and global climate action is not taken.

“This report makes it clear that climate change is not some problem in the distant future,” Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a statement. “It’s happening right now in every part of the country.”

The Washington Post summarized the report’s key findings with regard to major regions of the U.S.:

Already, western mountain ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year, threatening water supplies below them. Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida, and the U.S.’s Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires are devouring ever larger areas during longer fire seasons. And the country’s sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has utterly upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly thawing permafrost tundras.

The federal report comes as climate activists and progressives like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing for the Democratic Party to combat the Trump administration’s fossil fuel agenda with ambitious climate action centered around a Green New Deal.

“It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, and why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent clean renewable energy,” concluded Hauter of Food & Water Watch. “This transition is not only possible, but necessary for the health and prosperity of people and the planet.”

Coral Reefs important to ocean life

Coral Reefs’ Only Hope Is Halting Global Warming

From an Article by Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News, March 15, 2017

PHOTO: The Great Barrier Reef has experienced a series of damaging bleaching events since 2014.

>>> Bleaching events have stressed coral worldwide, particularly the Great Barrier Reef, and research says their survival depends on quickly slowing climate change. <<<

Two doses of bad news for the world’s coral reefs came in the last week. First, Australia’s government confirmed that the Great Barrier Reef is in the midst of a second consecutive year of mass bleaching. It’s the first time the reef has experienced back-to-back events, and it seems to be weakening many of the corals.

Then on Wednesday, leading scientists published a new study about last year’s bleaching—the worst to date—suggesting that when the seas are hot enough for long enough, nothing can protect coral reefs. Their only hope is that we rapidly slow climate change.

The research, published in the journal Nature, looked at data from three bleaching events along the 1,400 mile-long Australian reef system dating back to 1998. By looking at factors including water temperature, water quality and fishing protections, the authors determined that last year’s bleaching was linked almost exclusively to ocean warming.

Conservationists have long hoped that protecting corals from other threats, such as pollution and overfishing, might help shield at least some of them from bleaching, too. While the new paper doesn’t entirely deflate that hope—such protections likely help reefs recover—it shows that such work provides little if any relief from severe bleaching.

“At the level of heat stress that was seen during this event, it just didn’t matter,” said C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Coral Reef Watch program at NOAA and a co-author of the paper.

Ilsa B. Kuffner, a marine biologist with the United States Geological Survey who was not involved in the research, said the new paper supports a solid body of evidence suggesting that disease and bleaching are driving coral mortality, while other factors play a more important role in the recovery from those threats. “It’s a distinction that, while it’s subtle, is also very important when you talk about what’s actually causing coral reef decline,” she said.

The paper also found that a reef’s history made little difference. Some studies have suggested that previous bleaching may make reefs more resilient if they are given time to recover, perhaps by killing off weaker corals or driving some adaptive response.

Warmer-than-average temperatures can cause coral to expel the symbiotic algae that live on its surface, turning the reef white. Such bleaching stresses coral and can make it more susceptible to disease and death.

The world’s reefs are in the midst of what scientists consider to be a single, mass bleaching event dating back to 2014. Climate models project that most of the world’s reefs could experience annual bleaching by 2050 without rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

While coral can survive even extreme bleaching, surveys conducted this month along the Great Barrier Reef are showing evidence that successive hits take a toll. Eakin said the level of heat stress—a measurement of how hot the waters are for how long—is lower than last year, and yet the bleaching appears to be just as widespread.

“They haven’t bounced back yet, so when you hit them with another event a year later, you can see more bleaching at a lower level of heat stress,” he said. “A lot of the corals that have survived last year really are not ready for another event.”

The bleaching has also spread to areas of the reef that escaped last year’s event, according to the recent surveys.

Successive bleaching also appears to be reshaping the makeup of the reef system. Reefs are composed of a rich diversity of coral species, with some particularly sensitive to bleaching and some that recover much more quickly than others. With consecutive years of bleaching, and after four events over 20 years, the new paper said the composition of the reef is changing in areas that have seen recurrent bleaching, perhaps irreversibly.

“The good news is you’ve got some tough corals that are surviving,” Eakin said. “The bad news is, one of the most important things about coral reefs is their diversity, and you’re cutting out some of that diversity.”

The paper’s authors believe that protecting reefs from pollution and overfishing will help them recover from bleaching. But the most important action, they said, lies elsewhere.

“Securing a future for coral reefs, including intensively managed ones such as the Great Barrier Reef,” they wrote, “ultimately requires urgent and rapid action to reduce global warming.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Very Large Ice Crack (upclose)

A Really Big Crack In An Antarctic Ice Shelf Just Got Bigger

From a News Report of WAMU,  Rae Ellen Bichell, National Public Radio, January 6, 2017

Right now, a big chunk of Antarctic ice is hanging on by a frozen thread. British researchers monitoring the crack in the Larsen C ice shelf say that only about 12 miles now connect the chunk of ice to the rest of the continent.

“After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km [11 miles] during the second half of December 2016,” wrote Adrian Luckman in a statement Thursday by the MIDAS Project, which is monitoring changes in the area.

The crack in question has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When the fissure reaches the far side of the shelf, an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off, leaving the Larsen C 10 percent smaller.

A NASA scientist  (John Sonntag) with project IceBridge took this photo of the crack in November.

“This event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” Luckman wrote. Ice shelves are important because they provide a buffer between the sea and the ice that sits on land, in this case on the Antarctic Peninsula. Without a healthy ice shelf, water from melting glaciers can flow straight to the sea, raising the sea level.

It’s normal for the front of an ice shelf to crack and break off, known as calving. But it’s unusual for that to happen faster than the ice shelf can refreeze.

Some scientists worry that the missing piece will destabilize the whole ice shelf. A smaller ice shelf, Larsen B, completely splintered in a little over a month in 2002, a process that started with a similar crack. Another ice shelf, Larsen A, had disintegrated a few years before.

“Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbour Larsen B,” wrote Luckman. Larsen C is Antarctica’s fourth-largest ice shelf.

Crack at Larsen C Ice Sheet

“If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed,” he told BBC News.

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Nearly all coral reefs will be ruined by climate change

From an Article by Katie Herzog, The Grist, January 6, 2017

According to a study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, 99 percent of the world’s reefs will be affected by coral bleaching by the end of this century if climate change continues apace.

When water is above ideal temperatures, coral expels the symbiotic algae that reside in its tissue and provide it with nutrients. This turns the reefs a ghostly white, and while the coral is not exactly dead at that point, it is more susceptible to disease — and death. A bleaching event on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last year, for instance, left 67 percent of its shallow-water coral dead.

This isn’t just bad for the reefs themselves; it’s bad for the vast, biodiverse ecosystems that depend on them. That includes the humans who fish these reefs and who cater to reef-loving tourists. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that the commercial value of fisheries near coral reefs is over $100 million in the U.S. alone, and reef-related tourism generates billions of dollars a year.

Even if aggressive actions are taken to combat climate change, such as those pledged during the Paris climate talks, it could be too late to prevent mass bleaching events at many reefs, according to the study. Divers, you might want to book those trips sooner rather than later.