[Coral-List] Explosive growth of Sargassum in the Caribbean

Tue Mar 14 03:08:27 UTC 2023

I certainly agree that "the more people, the more disturbance" so long as
each person does about as much.  Population is very much a problem.  But it
is only part of the problem.

Yes, population is a problem, no, there is no chance it will get solved in
time for saving reefs, but it is going to resolve itself without much of
any intervention, and that is already well underway.  Meantime, you don't
mention over-consumption, and few others want to talk about it either.  But
then, very very few people want to reduce their consumption, everyone wants
the economy to grow as much as possible, get richer, spend more, throw more
away.  Economy size and wealth drive some of the environmental damage, like
climate change, plastic trash, and other aspects.  Population and
consumption multiply each other in producing environmental damage
Technology seems about our only semi-realistic hope.

As for population, birth rates are way down in almost all countries.  The
peak birth rate for the world was way back in 1968, it has fallen a lot
since then.  They are way below replacement in China, Japan, S. Korea,
Taiwan, Italy, and several other countries.  Birth rate in the US is
now nearly down to 1.7 children per mother on the average, and replacement
is 2.1 (population in the US continues to grow, but slowly, due to
immigration).  Long been below replacement in most of what was the Soviet
Union, if I remember.  Europe is going to lose population.  Now, as it has
long been stated for Japan, the countries with very low birth rates are
facing mounting problems due to much lower numbers of people of working
age, paying to support more people at retirement age.  In developed
economies, children are expensive, women want to work, and child care is
expensive, so they choose to have fewer children.  It is the "demographic
transition" and it is very widespread.

Check it out:   www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncZW73QMBt8

The Great People Shortage is coming — and it's going to cause global
economic chaos
https://www.businessinsider.com/great-labor-shortage-looming-population-decline-disaster-global-economy-2022-10

"By the end of this century, the global population will have decreased by 1
billion people from its peak, according to a 2020 analysis by researchers
at the Gates Foundation, and in the most extreme scenario, the population
could decline by almost 2 billion from where it is today, to just over 6
billion.  The German working population will have declined
<https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext> by a
third, based on the average scenario from the researchers, and in Italy,
Spain, and Greece it will have declined by more than half. Poland,
Portugal, Romania, Japan, and China will all lose up to two-thirds of their
labor force, according to the projections. The looming population decline
is a wake-up call: Instead of the "population bomb" that some have feared
for decades, we will face a population drop, and it will have enormous
consequences for the world's prosperity."
China will lose half its population by the end of the century — and the
ripple effects will be catastrophic
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-shrinking-population-grim-omen-110400765.html

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3203833/chinas-shrinking-working-age-population-send-ripples-through-global-economy
         "China’s fertility rate decreased from 2.6 in the late 1980s to
just 1.15 last year, well below the 2.1 needed to replace deaths."

There are articles like this popping up all over the web now.

So, in terms of huge population damaging the environment, the future
population decreases look encouraging, though it will take too much time to
get there to help reefs that are forecast to be hit hard within 2-3 decades.

Cheers, Doug

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 7:46 AM Alina Szmant via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

> Thanks Gene for once again weaving the data into a cohesive scenario that
> starts with:  too many people doing what people do best.... disturbing the
> natural environment to grow food and other human life necessities. The more
> people the more disturbance. And this has been going on for millenia.
> After all, humanity started in Africa. Most of what you describe has been
> happening long before the industrial revolution and the rapid increase in
> greenhouse gas concentrations responsible for recent global warming.
> Anthropogenic climate and environmental change and degradation has been
> occurring for much longer than the rise of global temperature since the
> boom in use of fossil fuels. And coral reefs are not the only ecosystems
> affected by human activity.  If you could ask the Sargassum how they feel
> about all this, they would tell us they love it! To paraphrase a great line
> from Encanto ("We don't talk about Bruno"): humanity doesn't want to talk
> about human overpopulation and the cumulative impact of now 8 billion
> people going about their daily business. There were only 2 billion people
> on Earth 100 years ago. Not wonder everything is falling apart! Only 4 % of
> mammal biomass is made up of mammal wildlife. What happened to all the
> wildlife? They have been killed off as food or decimated by loss of
> habitat. Their biomass has been replaced by humans and our food animals
> (plus a few % of pets).
>
> Can't save coral reefs if we have a bigger structural problem to deal
> with. And yes, social inequality and inequity is a contributing factor but
> not the main one.
>
>
>
> Dr. Alina M. Szmant,  CEO
> CISME Instruments LLC
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Eugene Shinn via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Date: 3/13/23 1:19 PM (GMT-05:00)
> To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> Subject: [Coral-List] Explosive growth of Sargassum in the Caribbean
>
>     As a geologist/biologist diving the Fla Keys and much of the
> Caribbean long before the coral-list, Brian LaPointe, and Marine
> Sanctuaries existed, I have watched corals diseases develop and other
> crises come and go. HoweverI do not recall a time when Sargassum growth
> exploded such as it has in the past 2 decades. Of course there were no
> satellites for observing the explosive growth back then, nevertheless we
> would have experienced abundant floating seaweed accumulating on beaches
> such as it has in the past 2 decades.During these recent decades  the
> explosive growth has been building year after year. Now the newest area
> of weed forms a belt stretching from West Africa to the Caribbean and
> beyond and it keeps enlarging. The Amazon and other rivers have often
> been blamed in the past even though it seems difficult for those waters
> to reach West Africa. Let’s see, can we blame ballast water and/or
> cruise ships? Climate Change? Upwelling? Cosmic Rays? There must be
> something out there that affects that region on a yearly basis. Whatever
> it is satellite images indicate it is coming from Africa, especially
> during our summer months. I once read some technical papers that stated
> the Amazon Rain Forrest receives its essential nutrients mainly during
> our winter months. It seems there is a this red/brown powder that
> accumulates on limbs and leaves high up in Amazon forest trees. Because
> of it some limbs even sprout rThat powder has been shown to contain
> essential nutrients. What is it? During our summer months that belt of
> powder moves northward and forms a thin soil over the prevailing
> limestone of Caribbean Islands. Some even reach the Florida Keys and
> Bermuda. It forms a thin hard laminated red/brown crust in the Florida
> Keys that has been forming for several thousand years. That crust
> contains clay minerals not native to the Keys, or Bermuda. We even have
> an agricultural area west of Miami called the Red-lands. I wonder what
> it is and how did it get there?
>
> Of course long-time readers of the list know exactly what I am writing
> about. Just suppose that stuff gets sprinkled on the water forming a
> belt that spans the Atlantic Ocean. I wonder if it might stimulate the
> growth of a floating plant held afloat by small gas filled floats?
>
> Why had it not affected the seaweed, and the corals, or caused red tides
> in the past?  Dr. Joe Prospero, now retired from the U. of Miami Marine
> Lab  monitored
> African dust flux at Barbados starting in 1965. That  monitoring is
> on-going. There was little dust in the past when there was far less
> people/agriculture in the Schell desert of North Africa and less
> pesticides used to control Locusts outbreaks and mosquitoes. There was
> also a hundred-mile-wide lake Chad  there in 1960 that has evaporated
> down to only a few miles wide. It’s exposed lake bed, and whatever had
> accumulated in it, is now blowing across the Atlantic. Need I say more?
>
> After all these years I keep wondering why some organization has not
> studied the situation? We at the USGS monitored and cultured live
> bacteria in the dust and noted the presence of numerous viruses in the
> late 1990s. While the military followed our work, because of bioterror
> implications, there was little interest within our organization. Only
> the US Academy of Environmental medicine appreciated the work because of
> the clear evidence of medical effects on humans, especially on Caribbean
> Islands. Trying to understand why there was so little interest in the
> projectI keep coming back to the fact that no one is  going to make
> money determining if that dust is the cause of coral, and medical
> effects. Who benefits if you can’t stop it? Of course the many thousands
> with respiratory diseases in the Caribbean and Eastern Bahamas might
> benefit but does that put any money in anyone's pocket? And what can be
> done to stop it?  Oh Well, I will continue to watch and wait. I thank
> Doug Fenner for pointing out this latest explosion of Sargassium and
> will wait for his short  reply. Gene
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