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Haha, this is a hilarious political issue, as evidenced by the existence of fact-checks on it. For example: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans... People have their politics entwined with whether or not it recovers.
Could it be adapting? Standard wisdom has always seemed to be it's a sensitive niche of incredible biological complexity. Couldn't such a system be smarter than we think and evolve to meet climate change?
> Palumbi added: “Coral cover is actually slightly lower than normal levels in the north, central and southern parts of the huge reef. But coral diversity hasn’t recovered - the increase of cover is due to a set of very fast-growing species. Like a forest of fast-growing trees, not the normal oaks.”
> There are many varieties of coral on the reef, with hard coral cover of huge significance to marine scientists.
> Pointing to a study (here), President of the International Coral Reef Society (coralreefs.org/) Andrea Grottoli, says, “Australia is at record low of hard coral cover (see Ch 2, page 8), most of this decline due to declines on the GBR.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-environment-oceans...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.google.com/search?q=172aud+in+usd I'd add that the recent recovery has been used by some climate change deniers as justification for ignoring the bigger picture, a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. I too dove on the reef in the early 1990s and have seen no reef of that caliber since, anywhere.
> a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Coincidentally I went diving on the GBR last week, and from personal observation, it's in way, way, way worse condition that it was 20 years ago. There are massive sections of bleached coral, huge dead patches and way less fish life. Here's how it looked last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had…
This is apparently only for one particular kind of fast-growing coral, which means coral diversity is lower and that makes the reef more vulnerable to damage and less supportive of the wider ecosystem: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/great-barrier-reef-re...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
> While I understand per capita for fairness It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Coincidentally I went diving on the GBR last week, and from personal observation, it's in way, way, way worse condition that it was 20 years ago. There are massive sections of bleached coral, huge dead patches and way less fish life. Here's how it looked last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had…
Coincidentally I went diving on the GBR last week, and from personal observation, it's in way, way, way worse condition that it was 20 years ago. There are massive sections of bleached coral, huge dead patches and way less fish life. Here's how it looked last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0h0j0PSqaY In 2015 the Aussie government tried to have it de-listed as a UNESCO site so they could dredge it (Nobody had…
It's nice to see visual evidence that backs up your personal beliefs. That said, it's also problematic to take a video of one tiny, tiny part of the great barrier reef and use it as evidence as to the state of the broader ecosystem (a system so large it would run almost the entire length of the US West Coast, consisting of over 4,000 reefs, some as large as 90km² with widely varying conditions). In fact, there are many groups who deny climate change, the science around it, and the decline of the GBR. In Australia, the IPA are one of these ... who visit pristine reefs (there are many pristine reefs) and take video to further these kind of bogus claims.
On your video. First place was Fitzroy Island, which has a shallow, fringing reef around it. I've been visiting Fitzroy since the 80s and it has certainly changed over the years. That said, in-shore fringing reefs are not a good indication of much, as they are susceptible to pretty much every kind of disturbance. There is an area around the corner from where you were filming on the Island called Shark Fin bay that has 100% coral cover, probably due to slightly better currents (it's just outside of the lee of the island and few people go there). Your dive site was probably Milln or Flynn reef which are both outer reefs, about 40km off the coast. They are both in fairly good shape as far as tourist reefs go, with great visibility and decent coral cover. There's another reef very nearby called Hastings, which has good coral cover (and a lot of life, people often sight Mantas and other bigger stuff there) but the visibility is terrible due to sediment being picked up by currents. On all these reefs the condition would be entirely variable on different aspects of the same reef alone (i.e. north, south, east, west, windward / lee).
Long story short, the science here is about data. Big data. And while highly local, anecdotal evidence can definitely play a part it has to be considered within the correct context.
If you're interested, I built a tool[1] a couple of years ago based on surveys we were doing across the length of the reef. It gives a sense of coral cover, health, and the importance of individual reefs to the broader system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita. While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
> While I understand per capita for fairness It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions?
Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with.
You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.