[Coral-List] Call to Action Re: New paper on coral bleaching in Science

William Precht william.precht at gmail.com
Thu Jan 11 08:46:44 EST 2018


 Coral-list,

Please see attached opinion piece written by John Bruno that was published
in the Washington Post - it discusses all the issues in this thread.  Enjoy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/
01/09/coral-reefs/?tid=ss_tw-bottom&utm_term=.54a30c66e2c9

On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Dennis Hubbard <dennis.hubbard at oberlin.edu
> wrote:

> Sarah:
>
> Thanks for your engagement on this. I've thought a lot about carbon issues
> over the years and have come to a couple of conclusions on both of the
> fronts that you address, so here are my two cents worth on the first half
> of your question.
>
> On carbon, there are two levels where we can address this. One is at the
> large, political scale. While I think that we need to keep slogging on this
> front, I'm not holding out a lot of hope (some of this is magnified by
> recent political events at home, but I was already getting skeptical
> beforehand). At the other end of he scale, there is personal engagement,
> which I particularly like because it makes politics irrelevant. We recently
> installed 3 kw of solar panels. The interesting thing i that this was the
> smallest system they could install and is 50% above our electrical needs.
> Going back to my time on  St. Croix, we had neither heat not air
> conditioning - we faced into the Trade Winds. We have to do something about
> heat in northern Ohio and fortunately we can use an abandoned gas well to
> supplement natural gas from the local supplier. Gas is not perfect, but
> ironically it turns out that it's carbon footprint is  on the order of
> 60-70% of most distributed electricity, regardless of how green the source
> is - included distributed solar. The only thing that beats it here is the
> fact that Oberlin burns landfill gas to generate 50% of the city's
> electricity; this is all "free" carbon-wise as it is being flared off
> already with no payback in "work". I won't get into the environmental
> justice issues tied to this - a saga for another day.
>
> To help offset some of the carbon from the well, we also installed a heat
> pump to use up some of that excess power we can't use from the panels. And,
> we should be taking delivery on a plug-in hybrid within the next 30 days
> (we have a 10-year olf gen-!! Prius that is slowly dieing). With the
> back-and-forth to work (less than 2 miles - passive choices like living
> withing within walking distance of work are often overlooked), the mileage
> approaches 100 mpg - and whatever isn't coming from the gas tank is coming
> off the panels. We also, just packed the walls of a ca. 1850 house with
> cellulose to cut down on heat loss. I'm a big advocate of retrofitting old
> buildings over building new uber-efficient replacements. We have two of the
> most efficient buildings on the planet on the Oberlin campus. One is the
> Lewis Center, brain-child of David Orr. It is the most efficient building
> on campus. Ironically, the least efficient building on campus is the new
> science center, even with all of it's fancy bells and whistles. I really
> enjoy he irony of the fact that the second-most-efficient building on
> campus with respect to heat is the geology building - built ca 1850... it's
> hard to beat 2 ft of sandstone (plus new efficiency measures) when it comes
> to keeping heat in. We use efficient heat-recovery systems for our fume
> hoods, unlike the science center that just vents heat out in the winter and
> cool air in the summer. (they are working on that as a retrofit, but it
> should have been part of the original plan). And, it was built from
> sandstone that was sledded down from the local quarry when the streets were
> frozen - a low carbon answer based on a stone age solution to a space-age
> problem - embedded carbon.
>
> So, I guess my bottom line here is personal accountability. While it does
> little to affect political change, I do think a lot more about my personal
> footprint. I do feel that we too often leapfrog over our personal
> responsibility while we admonish "the system" for not coming up with the
> answers we want to see. I wish the "system" did more to reduce our carbon
> footprint. In the meantime, however small my personal part of this bigger
> problem might be, I feel that starting in my own back yard gives me the
> right to point fingers. At the College, we have spent a lot of time
> thinking about offsets and have come to the conclusion that we'd prefer to
> not use them to reach carbon neutrality as an institution. However, because
> "you can't get there from here" without offsets, we've spent a lot of time
> thinking about ways to make them more palatable.  Te main problem is that
> you really don't understand where the few dollars you pay to an airline
> actually go; there are similar problems throughout the offset system. At
> Oberlin, we have set up something called the "Green Edge Fund", paid for by
> student fees. The fund covers the costs of small-scale start-ups (we could
> have even used it for some of our solar start-up at home). The goal is to
> have home-grown projects in place that we understand from a carbon
> perspective. Hopefully, when we have to start thinking about offsets to get
> that last little bit of carbon to achieve neutrality by 2025, there will be
> local entities in place that we understand from a carbon perspective. So,
> rather than investing in  a rain-forest tree that might no actually get
> planted, we can invest in things like locally sourced food (a program that
> serves as a middle man between sustainable farmers and restaurants so that
> farmers just have to farm and restaurants just have to turn out sustainable
> meals at a profit) or a sustainable dairy, or some other project for which
> we know the pros and cons because we helped provide the funds to get it
> started.
>
> I've gone on way too long about just the first part of your question. So,
> I'll save the list-serve from my ranting on the second half and put that
> off for another day. The short preview is that I have no fundamental
> problem with the motivation to "fix what we've broken." My major concern is
> less about under-performance than it is with unintended consequences.
> But... stay tuned for part II.
>
> Best,
>
> Dennis
>
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 11:08 AM, Sarah Frias-Torres <
> sfrias_torres at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy, and he is us"
> >
> >
> > The recent Science paper (Hughes et al 2018;
> > http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6371/80) shows a bleak global
> > picture for coral reefs. We must stop burning fossil fuels if we want a
> > future for coral reefs as we know them.
> >
> >
> > At this crossroads, we can either give up or keep fighting.
> >
> >
> > I choose to fight.
> >
> >
> > This is a Call to Action to those who still want to fight, against all
> > odds, so coral reefs will have a future.
> >
> >
> > We have many strategies on the table. It's uncertain which strategy is
> > going to work.
> >
> >
> > From the angle of coral reef restoration, I call on the restoration
> > community to work together, to share failures and successes and move
> > towards large-scale restoration.
> >
> >
> > To the critics of coral reef restoration, I ask you to work with us.
> Don't
> > just say: "this won't work". Give us constructive criticism, share your
> > concerns with us. Is it a failure of the scientific process (validity of
> > hypothesis testing) or is it an engineering concern (bringing the process
> > to scale)?. The solution is very different in each case.
> >
> >
> > For everyone on this list, let's find ways to work together, from science
> > to implementation, to communication, to everything in between.
> >
> >
> > It's all hands on deck now.
> >
> >
> > Sarah Frias-Torres, PhD
> >
> > Twitter: @GrouperDoc
> > Science Blog: https://grouperluna.com/
> > Art Blog: https://oceanbestiary.com/
> > https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah_Frias-Torres
> > ________________________________
> > From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <coral-list-bounces at coral.
> > aoml..noaa.gov> on behalf of Mark Eakin - NOAA Federal <
> > mark.eakin at noaa.gov>
> > Sent: Friday, January 5, 2018 12:07 PM
> > To: Coral Listserver
> > Subject: [Coral-List] New paper on coral bleaching in Science
> >
> > For the first time, an international team of researchers has measured the
> > escalating rate of coral bleaching at locations throughout the tropics
> over
> > the past four decades. The study documents a dramatic shortening of the
> gap
> > between pairs of bleaching events, threatening the future existence of
> > these iconic ecosystems and the livelihoods of many millions of people.
> >
> > "The time between bleaching events at each location has diminished
> > five-fold in the past 3-4 decades, from once every 25-30 years in the
> early
> > 1980s to an average of just once every six years since 2010," says lead
> > author
> > Prof Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral
> Reef
> > Studies (Coral CoE).
> >
> > “Reefs have entered a distinctive human-dominated era – the
> Anthropocene,”
> > said co-author, Dr C. Mark Eakin of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric
> > Administration, USA. "The climate has warmed rapidly in the past 50
> years,
> > first making El NinÞos dangerous for corals, and now we're seeing the
> > emergence of bleaching in every hot summer."
> > For more, see the full paper at:
> > https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fscience
> .
> > sciencemag.org%2Fcontent%2F359%2F6371%2F80&data=02%7C01%7C%
> > 7C28c288a0e1314412a06d08d554606f2c%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaa
> > aaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636507695516397420&sdata=%2FOiYD4VTlVb%
> > 2BnUWgRfXbfPnwRT6ZA80OXJ48dtqH0Aw%3D&reserved=0
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Mark
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > C. Mark Eakin, Ph.D.
> > Coordinator, NOAA Coral Reef Watch
> > National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
> > Center for Satellite Applications and Research
> > Satellite Oceanography & Climate Division
> > e-mail: mark.eakin at noaa.gov
> > url: coralreefwatch.noaa.gov
> > Twitter: @CoralReefWatch FB: Coral Reef Watch
> >
> > NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP)
> > 5830 University Research Ct., E/RA32
> > College Park, MD 20740
> > Office: (301) 683-3320     Fax: (301) 683-3301
> > Mobile: (301) 502-8608    SOCD Office: (301) 683-3300
> >
> > “You would have to reject the “greenhouse effect” outright to conclude
> that
> > human activities pumping millions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse
> > gases into the atmosphere every year are having little or no impact on
> the
> > earth’s climate. That is simply not a tenable position."
> > William K. Reilly, EPA Administrator under President George H.W. Bush,
> > June 18 2014
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
>
> --
> Dennis Hubbard
> Chair, Dept of Geology-Oberlin College Oberlin OH 44074
> (440) 775-8346
>
> * "When you get on the wrong train.... every stop is the wrong stop"*
>  Benjamin Stein: "*Ludes, A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream*"
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