Dahr Jamail is perhaps the world’s premier reporter on climate change (he uses the more vivid and accurate term, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, ACD), and his latest book, The End of Ice, may be his most dire. I haven’t yet finished reading it, but the chapter on coral reefs, “Farewell Coral,” is so alarming that I felt compelled to write about it now.
Let me begin with the ice story, though. Jamail is a long-time mountain climber and he has spent a good deal of time climbing and enjoying Alaska’s mountains and glaciers. He notes that Alaska has 100,000 glaciers that cover “approximately 79,000 square kilometers,” the largest glaciation area outside of Greenland and the Antarctic. Interviewing Louis Sass, a USGS glaciologist in Alaska, he quotes Sass as saying that “On average, we’re probably losing 50 glaciers each year now” (28). Does this incredible loss of ice matter? It does for two reasons. First, mountain ecosystems are sensitive indicators of climate disruption, so their melting should be taken as a warning that the heating of the planet is truly dangerous and getting moreso every year. Second, these mountain systems “provide up to 85 percent of all the water humans need…Globally, glaciers contain 69 percent of all the fresh water on the planet” (45). So on a planet where humans in the U.S, China and India are rapidly depleting the underground aquifers that we need for farming and drinking, to be losing simultaneously the immense water supply that comes from mountains and glaciers is alarming indeed. And warming, and the consequent glacial melting, is only increasing, with each of the last four years being hotter than the last. Humans are in trouble, water-wise.
Then comes the coral reef story, a story about what is happening to the oceans. Aside from the pollution that we’ve dumped into the oceans—literally “the lungs and food source of our existence” (95)—the warming from excess CO2 in the atmosphere is also being dumped primarily into the oceans. Here is how Jamail makes this vivid:
If you took all of the heat humans generated between the years 1955 and 2010 and placed it in the atmosphere instead of the oceans, global temperatures would have risen by a staggering 97° F (94).
In other words, by absorbing this massive amount of the heat from the warming we humans have created, the oceans have saved us from thermal disaster so far. And what is our response? to treat them like a garbage dump. But that’s not all. All this warming of the oceans is having a catastrophic effect on coral reefs. Briefly, warming waters cause what oceanographers call ‘bleaching.’ That’s where corals turn ghostly white because they expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues; they also cease being able to reproduce. This bleaching has been accelerating in recent years. Jamail has figures for this and they’re sobering to say the least. He writes:
Sixteen percent of global corals perished during the first ever global bleaching event which happened in 1998. According to the Associated Press, the largest bleaching event ever recorded occurred in 2015 to 2016 “amid an extended El Nino that warmed Pacific waters near the equator.” Twenty-two percent of the Great Barrier Reef was killed and 73 percent of coral surveyed in the Maldives…suffered bleaching, with other areas in the central Pacific experiencing a 90 percent loss of their coral reefs (77).
These are big numbers. But, one might say, so what. Do corals really matter? They do indeed, and not just so scuba divers can admire the colorful fish that hang out there. Though coral reefs only cover around 2 percent of the ocean bottom, they provide a home for a full one-fourth (1/4) of all marine species, says Jamail. And he again gives us statistics:
A report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN shows that coral reefs are responsible for producing fish that contribute significantly to what is 17 percent of all globally consumed animal protein. That rises to more than 70 percent in island and coastal communities like Micronesia (79).
So if those reefs go, as in the Caribbean up to 80 percent of reefs have gone, disappeared, much of the fish that humans rely on for food goes with them.
The largest coral reef assemblage lies off the coast of Australia. It’s known as the Great Barrier Reef, and Jamail recounts his conversations with some of the oceanographers monitoring what’s happening there. Dr. Dean Miller, director of science and research for Great Barrier Reef Legacy is quoted as follows:
“Corals need many years to adjust to the warmer ocean waters, and we don’t have that kind of time anymore. The warming we are seeing now is happening far too fast for evolution…So what we’re seeing now is death. That’s what bleaching is” (92, emphasis mine).
This comes close to saying that one of the oldest ecosystems on the planet, some as old as 20 million years, are nearing extinction. In fact, Miller does say that “we might see ecosystem collapse as we know it. We’ll lose the reef fish from the bleaching, then all the fish that depend on them, then all the way up the food chain to the biggest fish. Everything is affected” (92).
Nor are the coral reefs alone in their plight. Jamail cites another 2015 study showing that plankton, “the basis of the entire oceanic food chain” is threatened by acidification—itself also caused by uptake of excess CO2 from the atmosphere. If the plankton die out, that will constitute a very BIG problem, according to the report’s authors “given that phytoplankton photosynthesis produces half the total oxygen supply for the planet” (94). Yes, you read that right. Not only are plankton the base of the entire marine food chain, but they supply half the oxygen we humans need to breathe and survive.
So we are in serious trouble due to the CO2-caused warming of the planet, and specifically of the oceans where most of the warming is occurring. The problem is, most humans are oblivious to what’s happening. As Dr. Miller puts it, “oceans are more vulnerable to apathy because they are easy to ignore since they are an unseen world” (95). But we all depend ultimately on the oceans and those rapidly-bleaching reefs. Again, Dr. Miller puts it baldly: “Right now, the largest ecosystem on Earth is undergoing its death throes and no one is there to watch it” (96). Except, of course, for Dahr Jamail, whose book is clanging the alarm bells in the night. The question is, will anyone pay attention, and more than that, finally take action that is meaningful? The governments attending the COP25 climate summit that just ended did not. Like the Australian government, which had a plan to save the Great Barrier Reef but which it has now declared to be “no longer achievable,” the governments of the world, led by the United States, are burying their collective heads in the sand and still striving hardest to amp up their fossil-fuel-driven economies. And with them, climate disruption.
Will they ever learn, and will it be in time? We all better hope so.
Lawrence DiStasi
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