This seems like a low priority in terms of worldly problems...
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Which really shouldn't be surprising. The emergence of human technology in that period has caused a massive shift in the environment in which humanity's selection occurs. Not even speaking of our effect on the natural environment, just that human civilization is a vastly different environment than living as small hunter-gatherer tribes with crude stone tools.
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Healthcare changes how selection occurs. It has a direct impact, that it's technological rather than "natural" is completely irrelevant. "Natural selection" describes the natural evolution process, it does not define all evolutionary processes. For instance, domesticated animals have become, in many cases, their own species; dogs aren't more-polite wolves. That may have occurred because of human influence, which may not be "natural", but it's still evolution.
Have they looked at other sources for the cause of the reef's destruction? Seems very localized just to claim CO2 destruction and it states the reef in question is used heavily by the fishing industry. Extracting almost $8 billion in product a year from a stretch of just 124 miles sounds like nightmare for anything living there. People do all sorts of really crappy stuff to our oceans including things like cyanide fishing and removal of corals and live rock by the ton for the hobby industry.
These analyses do take all that into account. We're talking about acidification of the oceans, and that's straight-up simple chemistry; if the PH changes too much, corals can't survive, they take a fairly narrow range of conditions to prosper. This is why live coral aquaria can be so challenging to maintain; they're harder to keep in the proper balance than most freshwater tanks are, and if it slips too far, everything dies.
r.i.p. alleria. 1997-2017. blizzard ruined alleria forever. blizz assassinated alleria's character and appearance.
i will never forgive you for this blizzard.
It does? All I see in the article is that an area that is heavily fished (which means lots boats and pollutants) is dying while pointing the finger at atmospheric and ocean surface CO2 levels. Most corals can adapt quite readily to a small shift in pH levels especially if they are given time. Pollutants in the water can also cause massive die offs which in turn can ammonia toxicity which has a more localized and immediate changes to pH levels.
http://www.teachoceanscience.net/tea...t_coral_reefs/
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/W...idification%3F
http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/managing-th...-acidification
Just a few sources from around the world.
Its just a few weeks ago that a report determined that half of Australia's 2000 km long Great Barrier Reef is dead and 90% of it is bleached - which usually means terminally ill. The biggest problem is by far the combo of warmer water and acidification.
It was expected to happen in around ~ 50 years, but the fear mongering scientists have unfortunately been quite frugal with their scare campaign - many of their predictions have been surpassed by reality.
Researchers have succeeded in artificial insemination and repopulation of corals with stronger skeletons, which is positive.
But the scale of things. It takes 4 years to grow corals the size of a football. The Great Barrier Reef could be 600 thousand years old - with the top layer alone being 20 thousand years old.
A pH shift of 0.1 units over hundreds of years shouldn't be enough to kill corals. Even Acropora sp. and other sensitive corals can easily adjust to minor changes in pH and normal respiration of corals can cause localized pH changes larger than a tenth of a unit. I think direct pollution and poisoning from petroleum based products and agricultural runoff of pesticides (especially those containing copper) are far bigger culprits.
We don't need to engage in theoreticals. We're talking about actual, observed, real-world coral extinctions. Something like 90% of the Great Barrier Reef has become bleached, which means it's dying.
And no; we've identified the culprit, and while those other products don't help, they're not what's causing the bleaching.
Err what?
Its not been over hundreds of years its been more or less the last 100 only that this change has occurred over, and the change is not small. pH is a logarithmic scale meaning that altogether the ocean is ~1/3 more acidic than it used to be. Lastly corals cannot easily adjust to pH changes, that's the whole point of why scientists are worrying about them.
Oh and are you are denier? You sound like one.
r.i.p. alleria. 1997-2017. blizzard ruined alleria forever. blizz assassinated alleria's character and appearance.
i will never forgive you for this blizzard.
Protip: Bleaching in corals has many, many different causes and what will cause bleaching in one reef will not always have the same cause as bleaching in another reef. Claiming only one variable is responsible while ignoring the other possibilities is intellectually dishonest.
Are you dumb? You sound dumb especially when I never denied there was a serious problem. "DENIER! Either accept our version of things exactly how it's presented to you laymen or BURN IN HELL!" Every time you poise the "Are you a denier?" question to someone on these forums it makes you look like a religious nut job.
Going from a pH of 8.2 to 8.1 (the claimed 0.1 units) isn't enough to bleach out corals unless there are other, more serious contributing factors. Salinity, nutrient levels, poisonous metals, etc, etc, etc can all have more immediate affects on the density of zooxanthellae in skeleton forming photosynthetic corals.