"...coral reefs throughout the Florida Keys have turned ghost white and perished in recent weeks amid a record-breaking, relentless marine heat wave..."
— There’s A Crisis Unfolding In Florida's Waters. DeSantis Hasn’t Said A Word. The GOP governor and presidential candidate has touted his environmental and economic credentials. He’s ignoring an environmental and economic disaster at home. Chris D'Angelo, HuffPost, Aug 4, 2023
DeSantis is now saying (September 20, 2023) that humanity is "safer than ever" from climate change, a phenomenon he does not outright deny but mainly discusses in terms of "resilience."
"...scientists are increasingly focusing on an emergency plan: collecting coral specimens and safeguarding them onshore."
One way to save coral reefs? Deep freeze them for the future, NPR, September 6, 2023
"For nearly two decades, ever since the levees in New Orleans broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, my research, writing, filmmaking, organizing, and public speaking had focused almost exclusively on aspects of the deepening climate crisis. And most of it followed a very particular narrative arc, one to which I had grown quite attached. The story went like this: Things are bad. They are about to get a lot worse. But we can avert that “a lot worse” if we embrace a Marshall Plan/New Deal/World War II–scale mobilization that will transform our entire economy so that it is largely powered by the wind and the sun, while giving us a historic opportunity to battle pretty much every form of inequality under that sun.
The catch was that we had to do it fast. “Decade Zero” was what they were calling it when I first went to a United Nations climate conference in 2009. By 2014, when This Changes Everything came out, we were already nearly halfway through it. Then Decade Zero came and went. In 2020, based on the best available science, we said that, while it was too late to stop dangerous warming, there was still time to avert catastrophic climate change, but, once again, we would need to cut global pollution in half in a decade. The good news was that, by then, there was a surging, intergenerational climate movement, along with a rapidly expanding understanding that system-scale change was the only credible path forward."
* * *
"That’s when I made the odd decision to follow my doppelganger down her various rabbit holes. More than anything, I think it was to distract myself from having to write about what I could no longer deny: that we appeared to be blowing our last best chance to change. I couldn’t face writing that, not me. And so I found something else.
Yet, the further along I have gone on this journey into a world of doubles, the more it led me back to where I began. The more I looked at doppelgangers and the messages they carry, both personally and politically, the more relevant that knowledge seemed to our prospects of becoming the kinds of people capable of getting off our treacherous path."
— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
"Charlie Veron, a legendary coral scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the Great Barrier Reef, now in its death throes, describes the journey of his life as one of de-centering himself so that he has the headspace to truly see other life-forms, human and nonhuman alike. It was a hard-won lesson, which began with losing his young daughter Fiona, or Noni, to drowning, a tragedy that made him realize that her life was more important to him than his own. Leveled by personal and ecological grief, he aspires to dissolve into the reef he studies, to 'feel like a coral or a fish.' ...the climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere; it can also be understood as a surplus of self — a result of all the literal and figurative energy it takes to perform and perfect the selves fortunate enough to live outside the Shadow Lands.
* * *
We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human. Some are coral. Some are whales. And they are there to connect with, if we can get out of our own way for long enough."
— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
See also: The Philippines accuses China’s shadowy maritime militia of destroying coral reefs in South China Sea, Kathleen Magramo, CNN, September 22, 2023
Extreme heat might have been the ‘nail in the coffin’ for these critical Florida coral, by CNN Meteorologist Derek Van Dam and Eric Zerkel, CNN, October 8, 2023
Coral reef scientists return species following deadly heat wave, Axios, October 31, 2023
"The coral reef declared a major event to protest the warming waters, and expelled the algae living in their tissues. They could no longer sustain an endosymbiotic relationship due to the rising temperature in the water. It is a phenomenon called coral bleaching and it shut down ocean cities into underwater ghost towns. The reef went from lush green algae to frozen skeleton bones, and 89% of the new coral has collapsed in the Great Barrier Reef. This is a stress signal that can be seen from space. The corals reached beyond our human animal intelligence to call out to their lunar in betweener friends in space. One of my favorite teachers, Bahati, says that you can't ask the power system permission to protest. The coral bypassed the anthropocentric humans who explode fireworks into the atmosphere, because our systems of racial capitalism and earth exploiting are the source of the problem. Instead they reached out to those who can remember. It is a hopeful thing, how we humans, even in designing our wildest visions for travelling to other worlds and communicating through explosions, combustions, nuclear disruptions, that we believe we are the brave ones making the bridge, calling out in the darkness. We build aeronauting hero centered mythologies of Man starring as the brave molecule propelled into space migration. I am writing today to confirm that the Other Side Deep Space in the Darkness are laughing at us."
— "Proxima Centauri," Banah el Ghadbanah, La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc, 2022. p. 127.
"When I first got to know Kim [Cobb], she was studying past climate conditions, using coral to track changes in sea surface temperature over time. However, she was overcome with grief after witnessing firsthand the wholesale loss of the coral reefs on Kiritimati Island in the Republic of Kiribati, during a 2016 marine heat wave linked to the largest El Niño event on record. This grief propelled her towards shifting both her life and her career to focus on climate solutions."
— "Climate impacts and action with Dr. Kim Cobb." by Katharine Hayhoe, LinkedIn, November 28, 2023
See also: 3D-printed 'Cajun coral' project aims to boost Louisiana's fish and oyster habitat: Artificial reefs take shape on a sunken island near Port Fourchon. Tristan Baurick, The Advocate, December 2023
A new paper in Frontiers in Marine Science (December 8, 2023) reports that the water around Bermuda has changed from the 1980s to the 2020s: it's warmer, saltier, more acidic. Prof. Nicholas Bates, an ocean researcher at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, explained that "the surface ocean in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean has warmed by around 1°C over the past 40 years. Furthermore, the salinity of the ocean has increased, and it has lost oxygen. In addition, ocean acidity has increased from the 1980s to the 2020s." (WION)
A Record-Sized Deep Sea Coral Reef Was Mapped in The Atlantic, And It's Breathtaking sciencealert.com
In the Pacific too
Titouan Bernicot grew up "on his family’s pearl farm on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe." Then: "At just 18 years old, Bernicot set up Coral Gardeners, an organization focused on restoring local reefs, and in the seven years since he has gathered a team to restore and plant more than 100,000 resilient corals at atolls across the Pacific Ocean." (CNN, December 22, 2023)
See also
Climate change effects hit marine ecosystems in multiple waves, according to marine ecologists: A Brown professor and two Brown-trained scientists co-authored a research review proposing a ‘more realistic’ conceptual model for understanding current and future changes to marine ecosystems in the wake of climate change. Brown University, November 15, 2023
"The new most extreme category, Bleaching Alert Level 5, signals near-complete coral mortality, when at least 80 percent of corals in an area are experiencing mortality due to prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures." — "Coral bleaching is now so extreme, scientists had to expand their scale for it." Amudalat Ajasa, Washington Post, February 14, 2024
Corals are bleaching in every corner of the ocean, threatening its web of life: It’s possible the overall percentage of reefs experiencing heat stress may soon pass a record, Amudalat Ajasa, Washington Post, April 15, 2024
Report confirms Great Barrier Reef has suffered worst summer on record, CNN, April 20, 2024
Underwater Atlanta railcars create new coral reef off Georgia coast, Sara Gregory, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aug 8, 2024
Read on Medium
My article: "Climate change is expensive, but that's not the point". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.
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