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Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

hawkesburygazette.com.au

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Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#71

Post by prawn »

grecy wrote: post #69
prawn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect I'd wager my life on that (here in winter at least) before some of your African scenarios. My neighbour is just finishing a Simpson crossing this week actually, though four-car convoy so has easy backup. I turned onto the Oodnadatta Track the other month (going up for Tourism Australia shoots) and got two flat tyres with one spare as the sun set. Same trip, one of my drones got taken by a wedge-tailed eagle…

> I suspect I'd wager my life on that (here in winter at least) before some of your African scenarios. There isn't any "life wagering" going on. Please don't buy into the hyperbole. With a little planning and prep, Australia is extremely developed and safe. The chances of dying are very slim, unless a person really tries. Sat beacons and phones are cheap and easy to carry, and the family that recently got stuck in th…

No, I just meant that I'd consider a Simpson crossing in winter less of a gamble than parts of Africa. There's minimal risk of dealing with bribes, getting remotely near a conflict zone, encountering guns/weapons, etc. Not saying that's the norm in Africa, but it's certainly nowhere near the norm here.

In three weeks I'm leaving my safe middle class Adelaide existence to re-renovate my 300k km mileage bus and drive it around the USA again with my young children. Not because it's safer, just because it's more fun and adventurous!

Stock tyres at walking pace. Pulled off the road to photograph an old Ghan bridge and there might've been barbed wire underneath the grading gutter that got both tyres on that side.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#72

Post by boffinAudio »

threeseed wrote: post #66
stubish wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really sorry. Climate policy in Australia is going through Parliament right now (and while much more progressive than the previous government, the result still have the Greens stating the targets are not aggressive enough and will doom the reef).

Greens have little credibility when it comes to the environment. Instead of comprising and getting an emissions trading system passed they were stubborn and Australia ended up with a decade of inaction. For me that's inexcusable and the damage it caused was immense. The legislated 43% target is largely symbolic and is a floor not a ceiling. It is not by itself going to change anything. What will change things are con…

The Greens are not your enemy in this fight, the Liberal and Labor parties are - as demonstrated by their decades of long-standing policies which resulted in this mess in the first place.

The Green party certainly have their issues - subjugation and subversion most of all - but to lump the damage on the Greens is an inexcusable farce.

Until Australians realize that their political system is beholden to Big Coal, nothing will change. Australia has a long history, as a nation, of being run by the corporations that provide food to the populace, and Big Coal know this better than most, with their billion-dollar social engineering programs.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#73

Post by boffinAudio »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #31
pabs3 wrote: post #16

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...

Can we just have a moment of happiness? Of optimism?

Gleeful optimism is how Australia got in this mess in the first place. "She'll be right, mate" has excused far too much of the trouble Australia is currently in.

Start being real, Aussies: Our nation is ruled by corporate fascists who want nothing more than to extract its resources, whatever the cost, and build their new world order with it. Those avocadoes don't smash themselves!

A better response to this news, emotionally, is to drop the hubris and self-congratulatory tone and use it as a means of informing the stupidly gleeful in your environment that there is a BIG situation behind this story, and we better start paying more attention to it than whats on telly.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#74

Post by boffinAudio »

somishere wrote: post #65
harry8 wrote: post #36

Nowhere in this article or discussion is any mention of the extremely relevant farm runoff pollution. Particularly from cotton farms. Any progress there? I don't have the answer. There are many aspects to reef conservation. Looking at one aspect in total isolation and claiming anything at all about it with respect the health of the reef is just idiotic. There would have been very, very little reef tourism over the pa…

AFAIK not a lot of cotton farming going on in reef catchment areas. There is lots of sugar cane and bananas however. Also lots of deforestation for grazing. Plus major resource export ports (LNG, coal). Regardless, runoff remains a major topic and there is some progress being made in the space [1]. Regards the article. If you look to the report itself[2] you'll see that this isn't a "she'll be right" triumph of scien…

The cotton industry in Australia has diverted and depleted waterways which normally replenish the surrounding regions, resulting in a dust-bowl effect which generates storms that regularly dump immense loads of nitrate-bearing dust into the oceans - materials that would normally be caught in a more lush/green/temperate environment where it was useful, were the water available...

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#75

Post by boffinAudio »

hackernewds wrote: post #45
contingencies wrote: post #3

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.

Are the reefs back to 1990s quality? this makes it seem like they are

They are not, and won't be for another 1000 years .. after we are gone.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#76

Post by somishere »

boffinAudio wrote: post #74
somishere wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK not a lot of cotton farming going on in reef catchment areas. There is lots of sugar cane and bananas however. Also lots of deforestation for grazing. Plus major resource export ports (LNG, coal). Regardless, runoff remains a major topic and there is some progress being made in the space [1]. Regards the article. If you look to the report itself[2] you'll see that this isn't a "she'll be right" triumph of scien…

The cotton industry in Australia has diverted and depleted waterways which normally replenish the surrounding regions, resulting in a dust-bowl effect which generates storms that regularly dump immense loads of nitrate-bearing dust into the oceans - materials that would normally be caught in a more lush/green/temperate environment where it was useful, were the water available...

Yep totally agree with your statement. My point was that there isn't a lot of cotton being grown in GBR catchments, so it wouldn't be one of the main industries directly effecting water quality on the reef.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#77

Post by rstuart4133 »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #31
pabs3 wrote: post #16

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...

Can we just have a moment of happiness? Of optimism?

Happiness - sure. It's nice to see the reef do well.

Optimism, no. I live in the area. We are going through a record cold snap, as in literally the lowest every temperatures recorded in some areas. And yes, the coral loves the respite. It's been accompanied by record floods, doing a record amount of damage. Which is to be expected - it's the La Nina pattern.

But record low temperatures, in a time when the base temperature is up 1C? That means the "other prediction" of climate change is coming true. The extremes are getting more extreme. And it's not the warming that's hurting us or the coral really, it's the extremes - just a few continuous days in a year when the temperature is +5C. That's what kills the coral - not the 1C average rise.

The reef isn't shrinking because the temperature gets so high it can't survive. That's always happened periodically. Once it gets that high it doesn't matter whether it's 1C over what the coral can tolerate, or 10C, or lasts for a couple of days or a month, the outcome is the same - the coral is dead. But if the high temperature is followed by 5 years or continuous growth, the coral re-colonises the area. What's been happening is we have been hitting extreme temperatures (both low and high) more often, and because the highs are more frequent the coral doesn't get a chance to grow back.

Remember those bush fires Australia has a few years ago - they were the worst we've even seen. Now we are laying down another fuel load. And it looks like the La Nina will persist for 3 years - another rare event, so the size of this fuel load will be another extreme. This cold snap will be followed by another record hot period, and we will move from losing billions to floods to losing billions to fire, again.

I'm not optimistic. I'm fearful.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#78

Post by boffinAudio »

somishere wrote: post #76
boffinAudio wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cotton industry in Australia has diverted and depleted waterways which normally replenish the surrounding regions, resulting in a dust-bowl effect which generates storms that regularly dump immense loads of nitrate-bearing dust into the oceans - materials that would normally be caught in a more lush/green/temperate environment where it was useful, were the water available...

Yep totally agree with your statement. My point was that there isn't a lot of cotton being grown in GBR catchments, so it wouldn't be one of the main industries directly effecting water quality on the reef.

But do you not see how the water issues are actually related? The catchments that do abut the GBR are not kept clean by regular water flow - meaning that when there is a major flood or storm, materials that would normally be absorbed by a green environment, are instead dumped - en masse during a flooding event - directly into our oceans. We've had a few major flooding events-worth of nutrient dumping in the last 20 years.

The cotton industry is buffering the problem - its not a direct cause - but it definitely contributes to the lack of local nutrient capture, which, when dumped, drastically effects our ocean water quality.

I think its important not to minimize the effect that altering Victoria/NSW's water table has on the waterway ecosystems.

This picture, straight from the horses mouth, shows you just how interdependent the waterways - and thus, the GBR - are:

https://cottonaustralia.com.au/assets/general/Landscapes-ima...

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#79

Post by roenxi »

threeseed wrote: post #67
_AzMoo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you think humans will adapt as well?

Because humans are inherently selfish. Are rich countries like US/EU etc. going to just allow tens/hundreds of millions of Africans to immigrate into their country when large parts of their continent become uninhabitable ? Or are we going to quietly just let them die like is happening now.

Rich countries are also sitting idly by while large numbers of Africans starve to death due to energy shortages. The Africans are going to come out worse whatever happens as long as they look to the US/EU to fix their problems out rather than sorting out their local economy.

If they could manage the sort of wealth generation seen in China or India, they probably could make it through any amount of climate change due to having lots of cheap energy.

Re: Coral makes comeback on Great Barrier Reef

#80

Post by somishere »

boffinAudio wrote: post #78
somishere wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep totally agree with your statement. My point was that there isn't a lot of cotton being grown in GBR catchments, so it wouldn't be one of the main industries directly effecting water quality on the reef.

But do you not see how the water issues are actually related? The catchments that do abut the GBR are not kept clean by regular water flow - meaning that when there is a major flood or storm, materials that would normally be absorbed by a green environment, are instead dumped - en masse during a flooding event - directly into our oceans. We've had a few major flooding events-worth of nutrient dumping in the last 20 y…

I'm sorry but I'm not sure I follow. Are you suggesting that the nutrients that get washed out via catchments in NSW end up on the GBR? I didn't realise this. Certainly water quality is a massive issue, and the current mess going on in the Murray-Darling is highly concerning in a general way. Also regards the nutrients, yes we have exactly the same issue with e.g. sugar, bananas, graziers up here.
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