Philippine Coral Reefs Affected by Global Warming

[49.35 North]

#2. You're WAY off base. How can you say that the Rainforests don't absorb Co2, but that algae growth/photosynthesis does? They both absorb Co2, in the same manner. Most of the Co2 that is absorbed by the Rainforests, as well as other forests and all plant life, is NOT released, at night, but is trapped within the plant, as it grows.

As you said, it would be nice, if people, including yourself, would read about topics, before posting things, as if they were facts

A plausible argument as far as it goes, but you have to ask what happens when the tree dies or gets eaten. CO2 (and possibly methane) is released when plants decay and CO2 is released by the respiration of the herbivores that eat them. I don't think the science is completely settled on this, and when I last talked to experts (at the Canadian Forestry Service) about this there was some suspicion that the boreal forests might actually be net emitters, but overall forests are close to being carbon neutral.

Planting trees where there aren't any is a different matter, so re-forestation is a carbon sink. Chopping trees down and making them into houses creates a sink too, as long as the forest is re-planted, but there's less house building these days than there used to be.

Oceans are a different matter. Sea shells lock up carbon and get washed into the deep ocean by storms and currents, creating a durable sink. Plankton in the open ocean drifts to the deep sea bed when it dies, again creating a durable sink. This means there's a risk of a nasty feed-back cycle, as global warming and ocean acidification damage the ocean and hurt its ability to sequester carbon, leading to more global warming and more ocean acidification.

There's a good explanation of all of this on the NASA website.

 

[Luiz Rocha]

A plausible argument as far as it goes, but you have to ask what happens when the tree dies or gets eaten. CO2 (and possibly methane) is released when plants decay and CO2 is released by the respiration of the herbivores that eat them. I don't think the science is completely settled on this, and when I last talked to experts (at the Canadian Forestry Service) about this there was some suspicion that the boreal forests might actually be net emitters, but overall forests are close to being carbon neutral.

Planting trees where there aren't any is a different matter, so re-forestation is a carbon sink. Chopping trees down and making them into houses creates a sink too, as long as the forest is re-planted, but there's less house building these days than there used to be.

Oceans are a different matter. Sea shells lock up carbon and get washed into the deep ocean by storms and currents, creating a durable sink. Plankton in the open ocean drifts to the deep sea bed when it dies, again creating a durable sink. This means there's a risk of a nasty feed-back cycle, as global warming and ocean acidification damage the ocean and hurt its ability to sequester carbon, leading to more global warming and more ocean acidification.

There's a good explanation of all of this on the NASA website.

Bingo, someone read about it!

 

[Rossini]

Land use changes have made a massive impact on emmisions and climate change. Large parts of Indonesia peat forests have peat 30 metres deep, these have been clear felled, burnt, and dryed out. Releasing huge amounts of stored carbon.

 

[cortez marine]

Getting paid to watch it die

Getting paid to watch it die

I's say that Philippine reefs have been been set up for the kill by 50 years of Muro Ami, kayakas, dynamite, cyanide food fishing, cyanide aquarium fishing , institutional corruption and ecological malfeasence practiced by a dozen eco-groups feeding off the problems without effective responses.

The eco-groups both local and international got paid salaries [ some directors 100k + ] to focus on this....and granted budgets to do what they said they could do about it.
In their budget proposals they claimed the expertise and the ability effect change. All this played out in public and on the forums the whole time.

I don"t know which is worse.
Poor people killing the coral...or richer people getting paid to watch it burn....and claiming to be the reformers!
Then, when the charges against the trade intensify.....they quietly abandon the scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvtg_GgQewg
Steve

 

[alton]

It is nice to see we can argue but not get belligerent. There are some good post and some great articles. Here is what I think (and I am not a scientist, but I think I have a little bit of common sense)
1. The earth is warming, it has since the ice age although scientist in the early 70’s thought the earth was cooling (look at old newspaper articles)
2. People do play a role on destroying our oceans, from pollution like garbage, trash, raw sewage to treated sewage. If treated sewage was so great, wouldn’t we drink it instead of sending down the river to our oceans?
3. Too many people live in an around the beaches of the world. So what do we do with these people move them? To where?
4. Also there are so many more people in the world today, as compared to 100 years ago. Think about it as a billion or so 98 degree heaters walking around this earth warming it up.
5. So to stop the over crowding of earth do we stop having children for a decade, for a generation? How do we cut the population in half?
6. Building wind generators is a great idea, we have more here in Texas than any other state. But they will never replace fossil fuel generators unless we go back to using electricity like our grand parents one 60 watt light bulb in each room, one radio, one refrigerator. (definitely no computers or big screens/TV’s)
7. Automobiles, once again go back to our grandparents time. Try only putting 1,000 miles on your car a year? I bet you can’t do it?
8. How about Al Gore? I heard his name mentioned earlier, I read somewhere his mansion uses $2,000 worth of electricity a month. Do as I say not as I do!
9. And last but not least what about all those that flew into Copenhagen with there private jets and limousines. Look at our President he needed two jets to get there. I wish someone would of checked the Ozone before the meeting and what is was the day of? It is very hard to listen to those that have the “Do as I say not as I do” mentality.
10. Simple things we can do, turn off all city and street lights from midnight to 5am. Look at the energy savings. And don’t worry about the crooks, they can’t steal what they can’t see. And if they use a flashlight they will stick out like a sore thumb. Change all your lamps to CFL,s but remember the cheap ballast are only 50% efficient, so a 20 watt draws 40 watts not 20, but is still better than incandescent. Only install 100 amp meter loops on homes no matter the square foot of the home. You want a 5,000 sq. ft. home no problem, go green. My wife’s car gets 34 mpg and carries 5 of us. I heard some Corvettes get 28 mpg on the highway so what is wrong with the rest of the market? And please don’t tell me to get a electric car because when you plug it in that coal plant has to run that much harder!
In closing yes the world is warming up today but closing a couple of coal plants is not going to fix the big problem, numbers 2, 3, and 4 are.

So what are we going to do?

The Philippine Reefs are only one of many that will become a test for the future.

 

[Luiz Rocha]

6. Building wind generators is a great idea, we have more here in Texas than any other state. But they will never replace fossil fuel generators unless we go back to using electricity like our grand parents one 60 watt light bulb in each room, one radio, one refrigerator. (definitely no computers or big screens/TV’s)

Nice post, I just want to comment on your statement above. People do very often take alternative sources of energy for granted. This is quoted from a recent published article on wind energy:

"Globally, the long-term technical potential of wind energy is believed to be five times total current global energy production, or 40 times current electricity demand."

With current technology, attaining this potential would of course require large amounts of land to be used for wind turbines, particularly in areas of higher wind resources. However, these calculations are done based only on land turbines; offshore resources experience mean wind speeds ~90% greater than that of land, so offshore resources could contribute substantially more energy.

Excuses for using fossil fuels are many, but when you stop and analyze them you see that they are all "convenience excuses". Yes, fossil fuels are still a lot cheaper, but only because renewable energies are not mainstream yet. How many people could afford a car 70 years ago when only a few were produced and cost much more than they do today? Same goes for solar panels, today only a few thousand are produced and cost a lot, to power a house only on solar you would spend about US $20k, but when millions of solar panels are produced by a fraction of that cost things will change. What we lack is initiative and the decision to switch.

 

[Luiz Rocha]

Another interesting quote about solar energy:

"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules per year. In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."

 

[shandy_say]

Totally agree with you cortez_marine! Corruption is rampant here and no one is actually doing anything about it. Government officials only care about one thing...Money.

 

[cortez marine]

The culture of corruption has continued long after the departure of President Marcos and his long time cohort and lord of Bureau of Fisheries, Felix Gonzales it would seem.
They stole, smuggled, and sold out everything that wasn't nailed down.
Such a shame.
Current BFAR chief, Malcolm Sarmiento could do so much better for fisheries in general [ and the aquarium trade in specific] but was lulled into complacency by foreign organizations bringing in their own money. He thought he was getting a good deal but instead they created their own careers off the Philippines problems and left town a decade later with little positive result.
Small results nullified under the tonnage of coral killed still by cyanide and dynamite.

To be fair, Sarmiento was held back from acting more decisively by his superiors in the Malacanang. [a number of times ]
Steve

 

[Crustman]

Now our Czar Holder does not want us to use Global Warming; it is now Global Climate Disruption. Not enough people were buying Global Warming because of Climate gate and the Michael Mann graph of Hide the decline, hockeystick graph that ignores Medieval warming period and was used by IPCC in reports. There are many theories on climate modification and they are still theories. A Russian physicist has even linked periods of heating and cooling to sun spots and ionized radiation driving the ocean currents and modifying climate. I am not ready to pay some carbon tax for using energy when CO2 is a natural compound that is used in photosynthesis. The climate of the earth needs to be measured in space time and geological epochs. Trilobites are gone but is the Earth worse off for this. If the time of the corals is over, then so be it. Nature is the clockmaker and not us.

 

[billsreef]

Considering the current science does a very good job of using reef cores, ice cores, etc. to back calculate climate trends going back much further than the Medieval warm period, the calculations showing warming at a pace much greater than any previously known seems to hold pretty well. Got to take the popular press out of the equation and actually look at the science. The idea of decline only holds if you cherry pick your data points to start from a large warm spike of one year back in the 1990's.

 

[cortez marine]

Bill,
Good point about the popular press.
They are not really pro-global warming or against it.
They easily swing both ways.
Steve

 

[Crustman]

Why would Govts back, non man made Global warming research? The funding of universities to prove man made global warming is not on par with the funding to disprove the theory. Until this happens; we don't have science but propaganda. The founder of the Weather Channel found this all too political also. All of the research supporting global warming allows for govts to redistribute money from prosperous Nations to poorer ones based on trading in carbon. Chicago Climate Exchange created for this purpose.Third world countries would not pay and China will keep building coal powered plants. NASA is a govt entity so some of their data is suspect. The UN would like to have a world carbon tax if they could. I read about CO2 and ocean acidification but we find in our aquariums that corals are adaptable and tolerate large ranges of pH and temperature. Heat tolerant zooxanthellae will replace those that have narrow ranges. I had a bleaching event in a Long Tentacle Toadstool. Now it is completely healed. Why would this not happen in Nature?

 

[billsreef]

Tom,

Research funding doesn't really work quite that way. Funding is not about what you expect to prove, but what you expect to research. While a scientist might have some expectations of what they think they are going to find, sometimes they find out something totally different. This is how we actually learn new things, as opposed to merely parroting old info.

Yes, there is a lot of political nonsense and propaganda around the issue, but that is not the science. It's one of the reasons to look at the science and ignore the politics and press propaganda that goes with it.

I read about CO2 and ocean acidification but we find in our aquariums that corals are adaptable and tolerate large ranges of pH and temperature.

We also keep adding Ca and other supplements Not to mention, the expected ocean pH sometime over the next 50 -100 hundred years is lower than any truly successful reef tank I've ever seen or heard of with reef building corals. There has been research showing a major increase in mortality with shellfish larvae at CO2 levels expected by the end of this century. While adults, such as what we keep in our tanks, might not die off, reproductive potential can be a major problem. I've also seen some preliminary research that shows similar increase in mortality of some species of larval fish at CO2 levels expected over the next 50 years, and even higher mortality at what's expected in 100 years.

 

[cortez marine]

Evolution does happen.
In middle Baja Calif. Sur, Mexico we have some large coral patches that grew for decades...and then all died out when the cold cycles [ or sub-cycles] came in...but, some of it survived. In fact, there are a few stands of 2 feet high, old pocilipora now that must've weathered the storm [ ie. 59 degree winter water] for decades.

Much of the live rock resource from here is all old, long dead coral.
Now, we see small corals come and go....In some cases, yearly.
However, most of these 2 inchers die in the first winter.
But there are those few that did not....and are 2 feet high now and no doubt more cold water resistant.

If tektonic plates migrate Northward with coral aboard....or global warming heats up sub-tropical zones allowing coral survival......chaos theory says nature will find a way. [ to quote Jeff Goldblume ]
Steve
PS.
Of course, the current reality is all we and our kids have....
I take no comfort in imagining that in 20 million years or so it all evens out.

 

[greenbean36191]

I read about CO2 and ocean acidification but we find in our aquariums that corals are adaptable and tolerate large ranges of pH and temperature.

Like Bill pointed out, our aquariums aren't great analogs for what happens in acidified oceans. For one, we use supplements to maintain alkalinity and high aragonite saturation, which doesn't happen in the ocean (except on geologic timescales). The primary concern for reefs in acidified oceans is NOT reduced pH, but the reduction in carbonate ions and the associated reduction in the aragonite saturation state (omega) of seawater. Growth studies looking at the impact of acidification without holding omega constant or of adding CO2 without maintaining alkalinity, consistently show significant reductions in calcification rates.

Also, in nature, net reef growth is the rate that corals add rock to the reef, minus the rate that storms, dissolution, and bioeroders break that reef down. Even on dead or dying reefs, corals still often grow just fine, but in balance the negative growth wins out (right here in Ft. Lauderdale is a good example). Given that even the fastest growing reefs have net growth measured in mm/yr, it doesn't take much change in either the calcification rate or erosion rate to shift that balance and cause a growing reef to transition to a dying reef. Again, all indications are that acidification dramatically reduces calcification rates, and it may increase erosion rates at the same time. In captivity though we don't have storms pulverizing our corals, we don't have parrot fish turning them to sand, we don't have boring sponges making them crumble to dust, etc. Aside from fragging and the occasional coral death we have pretty much no negative growth, so even under less-than-ideal conditions we should still get positive net growth. That doesn't translate to nature though.

Heat tolerant zooxanthellae will replace those that have narrow ranges. I had a bleaching event in a Long Tentacle Toadstool. Now it is completely healed. Why would this not happen in Nature?

After bleaching events corals often do take up different, more temperature tolerant clades of zoox. However, those clades seem to be less desirable than the more common clades and corals are quick to get rid of them in favor of their old zoox if heat stress doesn't persist. Given the choice between doing without zoox at all or using crappy zoox, corals take the latter but it's hardly a win for them. They seem to get less energy from them and there are indications that having those more heat tolerant clades may make the corals more susceptible to disease than using the more common zoox. Also, there's not a whole lot more room for short-term adaptation via symbiont shuffling. Corals living in areas of frequent heat stress already house the heat tolerant clades, so when they bleach there isn't a more heat tolerant clade of zoox for them to take up in order to be better prepared for the next high-temp anomaly.

 

[Aldridge Corals]

For some reason we all have heard about wild animal parks that use captive animals to breed in order to save the species. We have heard about the acreage of forest and more under protection in order to preserve and restore. How many of you have heard of companies looking to preserve and restore reef life? I have only heard of a few and most are small mom and pop shops with little funding and support. I hope someone out there can tell me that there is some company or organization other then the likes of SeaWorld (looking for the $$$) that are working to preserve cultivate and restore what the last thirty years of our hobby and the last 50 years of our ignorant neglect ("global warming") has caused. Please share!

 

[49.35 North]

I hope someone out there can tell me that there is some company or organization other then the likes of SeaWorld (looking for the $$$) that are working to preserve cultivate and restore what the last thirty years of our hobby and the last 50 years of our ignorant neglect ("global warming") has caused. Please share!

I think research has to be a key part of preserving and restoring coral reefs, and in that context you might want to think about the Coral Reef Research Foundation http://www.coralreefresearchfoundation.org/

It is a registered charity in both the US and Palau. One of the things I like about them is that they maintain a research facility in a developing country (Palau).

I have no association with them, BTW.

 

[Luiz Rocha]

The funding of universities to prove man made global warming is not on par with the funding to disprove the theory.

This is just amazing, exactly what the media passes on to the average voter out there. Funding of universities (or funding of science in general) is not "to prove" or "to disprove" any theory (be it global warming, evolution, or anything else). Funding is for research to study global warming (or climate change, or whatever you want to call it).

The results of the research (proving or disproving it) have nothing to do with the actual funding. If one sets out to study the effects of global warming in corals (or any other organism), these results will get published and added to the data about the question, even if they find that warming doesn't affect corals, just like someone else's results showing that warming does affect certain organisms.

Science, unlike many other fields out there, is driven by the data. The funding is to gather and analyze that data. What the data supports (or not) is a result of the project and not a consequence of the funding.

 

[49.35 North]

I hope someone out there can tell me that there is some company or organization other then the likes of SeaWorld (looking for the $$$) that are working to preserve cultivate and restore what the last thirty years of our hobby and the last 50 years of our ignorant neglect ("global warming") has caused. Please share!

The Indonesian Nature Foundation (LINI - http://www.lini.or.id/) is training collectors and working to restore reefs. Cortez marine has an issue with LINI's founder and he's pretty knowledgeable (and sceptical), but they were able to supply me with quite a bit of detail on what they're actually doing.