Brave new world watch: a world without coral
Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife
When I was a kid, one of my favorite authors was the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, whose depictions of interplanetary colonization captured my imagination: What would it be like to live in an environment different from the Earth’s?
Well, we’ve yet to leave a footprint on another planet, but we’re about to find out anyway. In Copenhagen last week, I saw a group of scientists tell a gathering of legislators from the world’s 16 largest economies that if we don’t limit carbon dioxide concentrations at less than 350 parts per million we’re going to lose all our coral reefs.
If CO 2 levels are allowed to reach 450 ppm (due to occur by 2030–2040 at the current rates), reefs will be in rapid and terminal decline world-wide from multiple synergies arising from mass bleaching, ocean acidification, and other environmental impacts. Damage to shallow reef communities will become extensive with consequent reduction of biodiversity followed by extinctions. Reefs will cease to be large-scale nursery grounds for fish and will cease to have most of their current value to humanity.
Today, carbon dioxide concentrations are at 387 ppm and rising. Next month, negotiators will meet in Copenhagen to try to carve out deal that will limit concentrations to 450 ppm. The earth is going to be a different planet: one in which coral won’t be found in the oceans.
[The] scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen.
That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.
There were about 100 legislators in the room. As much as anybody, they have a feel for the world’s political pulse. When the presentation was finished, Barry Gardiner, a British member of parliament, asked his fellow lawmakers to raise their hands if they thought it was politically possible to limit carbon dioxide at level that would allow the reefs to survive.
At first nobody moved. Then two men, one from South Korea, one from Russia, slowly raised their hands.
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This is sad and frightening. Do you think it’s corals’ invisibility that makes this a (more) difficult sell? We can all see and smell air pollution and dirty water, and are watching temperatures rise — but unless you’ve actually seen the astonishing beauty of coral (snorkel, scuba or an aquarium) as part of the undersea ecology, and understand its importance there, it remains some weird abstraction.
I don’t envy any politician fighting the good fight against climate change. It seems amorphous and distant, even if it’s not.
I think you’ve put your finger on it: “amorphous and distant.”
If we were faced with the immediate loss of coral, etc., we would do something about it. But since it’s in the future, and there’s little a single person can do on his own, and it’s all so confusing anyway, well, then we kind of let it slip through our fingers.
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