First in a series
The planet is grappling with a “new reality” as it reaches the first in a series of catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate tipping points: the widespread death of coral reefs, according to a landmark report produced by 160 scientists across the world.
As humans burn fossil fuels and ratchet up temperatures, it’s already driving more severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires. But there are even bigger impacts on the horizon. Climate change may also be pushing Earth’s crucial systems — from the Amazon rainforest to polar ice sheets — so far out of balance they collapse, sending catastrophic ripples across the planet.
…
Since 2023, the world’s reefs have been enduring the worst mass bleaching event on record as oceans reach record high temperatures, with more than 80% affected. What was an underwater riot of color and life is being replaced with a bleached, seaweed-dominated landscape.
“We have now pushed (coral reefs) beyond what they can cope with,” said Mike Barrett, chief scientific advisor at the World Wildlife Fund UK and co-author of the report. Unless global warming is reversed “extensive reefs as we know them will be lost,” the authors wrote.
And global warming is obviously not going to be reversed. We’re doing nothing to reverse it. Cars zoom, planes fly, cruise ships cruise.
See Jim Massa’s videos on “ocean stratification. Prepare for your hair to stand on end.
It’s hard not to feel pessimism, if not outright despair, at our climate catastrophe and the fact that so little is being done to combat it.
At least one person of my acquaintance has said that he and his wife decided not to have children years ago, and now feel that the worsening ecological situation has vindicated their decision.
As an environmental scientist, I have felt that for so long, I’m not sure I could recognize hope if it looked back at me in the mirror. I’ve been saying for a long time that when we passed a tipping point, we probably wouldn’t know it immediately, because it would just be another data point. It might take a year, or a decade, before we looked down and realized we had just gone over the cliff, and that holding up a Help! sign wouldn’t do us any good. (If you don’t get the reference, just look up roadrunner and coyote; they were my go to for explaining the way we need to approach environmental issues…they were the ‘don’t do it this way’ model).
Iknklast, I am old enough to remember reading books as a teenager in the mid-90s about what was imagined to be the ecological sustainable future society, that many people believed humanity was likely heading towards.
One of them had, ISTR, an introduction by the late James Lovelock. The book had a drawing of what was imagined to be the “sustainable city” of the twenty-first century. The inhabitants lived in enormous geodesic domes, and the metropolis had city farms, solar panels everywhere, and all transport by monorails and bicycles. It looked like an enormous version of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. I remember thinking “This might not be a bad world for future people to live in.”
Today, that 1990s green future looks as hopelessly dated as the “Buck Rogers” meets “The Jetsons” future many US Baby Boomers imagined would come soon.