Back on July 27, journalist Guy Kelly’s “The biologist in a race against time to save the Great Barrier Reef” came out in the Telegraph Magazine, and I noticed it today (edited a bit) in the Good Weekend magazine of my paper back home, The Age. British (but now in Sydney) biologist Emma Camp and one of the world’s foremost climate change/coral reef experts spoke to, of all things, an explorers’ conference:
Climate change is compromising not just the Great Barrier Reef, but reefs globally. Warmer, more acidic, low-oxygen seawater is fundamentally affecting the biology of the corals, and this is compromising whether they’ll be able to exist in the future. In just three years, over a third of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost.
Camp turns out to be both pessimistic and optimistic. She is exploring the idea of grafting on coral evolved to exist in more acidic water, which sounded to me, as I read it, intriguing but most speculative. As Guy Kelly explores her scientific world, she ends up summing up:
The best case scenario in 50 years is that we have coral reefs that are still biodiverse, serving their function, and we have an even healthier marine environment than we do now, respecting biodiversity not just for its value to us as humans. The worst case scenario is that we’ve lost coral reefs as we know them. I don’t want to tell my future grandchildren that this was a privilege I had, but they won’t, and it was all because we didn’t do enough.
I reflected that my ongoing task is to clearly identify the truth about the world’s coral reefs (Guy’s article has a graphic showing the world’s eight major coral reefs, our Great Barrier Reef being the largest). I suspect the truth is more or less suppressed simply because of tourism impact. I think I’ll turn to the IPCC next.