Coral Reefs Are Bleaching More Than Ever Right Now
Last week, the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), a global partnership and forum of 100-plus governments, NGOs, and other entities working toward the preservation of the world's coral reefs and their associated ecosystems, announced that it has recorded the worst coral bleaching event on record, with 84% of the world's reefs showing effects.
Coral bleaching is a broad term conceived back in 1998 after the phenomenon was first widely noticed—or at least seriously and widely recognized—that essentially describes critically stressed corals, which turn white due to inhospitable changes in temperature and pH level, among other things.
The fourth global bleaching event on record since 1998, the current crisis, first announced in 2023, has just seriously outdone the previous event from 2014-2017 and affected about two-thirds of the world's reefs.
This current crisis is blamed on the average of ocean temperatures away from the poles, which has seen back-to-back record highs just at or above the 2.7-degree Fahrenheit (1.5-degree-Celsius) 'warming limit' above 'pre-industrial,' or average global ocean temperatures between 1850 and 1900 A.D., as called for by the 2015 Paris Agreement.The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) averaged figures from six international data sets for a composite temperature rise of nearly 2.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.55 Celsius). This six-piece data set included various government and non-governmental bodies including the NOAA and NASA in the U.S., The E.U.'s Copernicus team, Japan, the U.K., and the privately funded Berkeley Earth, founded by a climate-change skeptic, which calculated the highest of those numbers: 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.6 Celsius).
'We're seeing forecasts that temperatures are going to continue to stay high,' Mark Eakin, corresponding secretary for the International Coral Reef Society and retired chief of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, told the Associated Press. 'We just may never see the heat stress that causes bleaching dropping below the threshold that triggers a global event, so this may be the last one… We're looking at something that's completely changing the face of our planet and the ability of our oceans to sustain lives and livelihoods,' Eakin added.
What's a lowly surf rat left to do in the here and now? Reef-safe sunscreens, alternative surfboard construction, and manual and/or analog paddling of said surfboards may be about the best most of us can offer our great giver, the sea. 'The best way to protect coral reefs,' Eakin puts forth, 'is to address the route cause of climate change, and that means reducing the emissions—the human emissions—that are mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. Everything else is looking like a Band-Aid rather than a solution.'
Here's where that thorny, convoluted little term oft-hawked by libertarians and neoliberals, 'better capitalism,' could come into play. Love or hate the ocean and its temperature-dependent multitude of critters, and reject climate change, chaos, crisis, and/or warming all you like. By all means, fellow ocean-goers, continue to vote with those John Wayne dollars as always, but it's up to the nerds whose direction is at the discretion of the energy geezers and geezettes to sort out both us and our beloved reefs, whose wondrous associated peaks, slabs, peelers, and tubes none of us can deny.
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