Chasing coral

Best Fish-Jake · Jul 23, 2017

neuwave said:
I had to separate your statement into two parts. Above you give an answer/solution on how to make viable energy without mass killing and reducing our way of modern living using nuclear power as a energy source.

Then below you say it's inevitable that mass killings have to happen and quality of life must be taken away.

So which is it? Cause you have a solution and then said there's now way to solve the problem when you gave a solution above.

On a side note: As for Sweden one of their biggest exports is renewable energy. So if you consider them wealthy, I'd say why could we not out compete them at renewable( they export hydro power) and make it one of our best sources of income, lead the way?

Cars, trucks, trains, planes, etc. Nine nuclear power plants would provide the entire country with electricity. Not fuel.

Regarding Sweden; after a quick google search I found that renewable energy is nowhere near as big of an export as you exclaimed. In fact, it's 4th largest export is Mineral fuels (generating $8.4B annually). Keep in mind that refined petroleum makes up $7.2B of that. I've found no figures on the exports of renewable energy. In fact I actually found out that the supply and consumption of energy in Sweden was about equal. (You can't export used energy)

Sweden had invested more than $1 billion US dollars by 2013 to renewable energy for their 10 million civilians. They have and are going to spent billions more to reach their goal of having 49% of gross final consumption of energy (electrical, heating/cooling, and transportation) being supplied by renewable energies in 2020.
I'm know I am missing quite a few 100s of millions of dollars expenditures but the total amount spent by 2020 from my calculations is $2.5B.
2.5 billion dollars for 49% of the energy consumption of 10 million people.

Imagine we do this in the US.

I am not going into extreme detail here so the final figures I give are going to be extremely generous to your case.

So we take the US population of 320 million. We spend 2.5 billion dollars per 10 million by 2020. That gives us a total spent of $80 billion by 2020 (try not to forget about the billions we've already spent on renewable).
But wait.. this is assuming that Swedes and Americans use the same amount of energy. Per capita, Americans use about 7.7x the amount of energy that swedes do. This brings us to the figure of $616 Billion.

This of course doesn't mention any sorts of regulations, civilian and government blowback, or cultural differences between Sweden and the US.

neuwave · Jul 23, 2017

Best Fish-Jake said:
Cars, trucks, trains, planes, etc. Nine nuclear power plants would provide the entire country with electricity. Not fuel.

Regarding Sweden; after a quick google search I found that renewable energy is nowhere near as big of an export as you exclaimed. In fact, it's 4th largest export is Mineral fuels (generating $8.4B annually). Keep in mind that refined petroleum makes up $7.2B of that. I've found no figures on the exports of renewable energy. In fact I actually found out that the supply and consumption of energy in Sweden was about equal. (You can't export used energy)

Sweden had invested more than $1 billion US dollars by 2013 to renewable energy for their 10 million civilians. They have and are going to spent billions more to reach their goal of having 49% of gross final consumption of energy (electrical, heating/cooling, and transportation) being supplied by renewable energies in 2020.
I'm know I am missing quite a few 100s of millions of dollars expenditures but the total amount spent by 2020 from my calculations is $2.5B.
2.5 billion dollars for 49% of the energy consumption of 10 million people.

Imagine we do this in the US.

I am not going into extreme detail here so the final figures I give are going to be extremely generous to your case.

So we take the US population of 320 million. We spend 2.5 billion dollars per 10 million by 2020. That gives us a total spent of $80 billion by 2020 (try not to forget about the billions we've already spent on renewable).
But wait.. this is assuming that Swedes and Americans use the same amount of energy. Per capita, Americans use about 7.7x the amount of energy that swedes do. This brings us to the figure of $616 Billion.

This of course doesn't mention any sorts of regulations, civilian and government blowback, or cultural differences between Sweden and the US.

Wrong choice of words when I said they export energy, I assumed you knew that the energy itself wasn't being exported but renewable technology itself. Which is why I didn't go into detail, my apologies.

I understands that we have a higher population than Sweden and need to generate more power. Instead I looked at the total consumption of the countries as whole where US consumes 3,913,000,000,000 kw h per year and Sweden only consumes 127,000,000,000 kw-h per year in total energy consumption. But these figures are from each countries as a whole. Now lets break that down. So yes as a whole the US devours more energy but Sweden consumes 12583 kw-h per capita per year and the per capita only consume 12053 kw-h per capita per year. So per capita the Swedes love their power more than we do. lol
So how does that equal 7.7x higher amount of energy consumed per capita?
I didn't check the math on the dollar amount since your per capita was so far off for energy consumption.

Regardless it still doesn't account for the mass deaths your are speaking of or returning to the 1800s. Nor does it explain why we can't change over to more renewable technology or why we in the US don't have the ability to overcome your concerns, even fuel.

Cory · Jul 24, 2017

Im pretty sure the cause of coral reef decline is in some way connected to humans. Billions of cars in the world producing co2 every minute. Its a lot.

The problem is humans pretend we are not part of the ecosystem called Earth, but we are and we are messing it up. But we dont act as part of the ecosystem, we manipulate it to our advantage. And thats creating problems. Imo the only way planet earth will be save is with green energy.

Nobodys going to stop oil because it makes a lot of people a living either directly or indirectly. We need to invent the mandatory "carbon capturing muffler" to make a difference in carbon emmisons. Or for every gallon of gas consumed, plant three trees.

Dylan Grech · Jul 24, 2017

I've watched the documentary and one thing just kept coming to mind. "What is being done?" I understand that global warming is potentially the cause of the bleaching and no one can deny that CO2 levels have been on the rise for the past 100yrs unlike any other time recorded in history. The thing is though there is no way for the governments of the world to just stop the CO2 emissions at a stand still in any reasonable time frame and even if they manage to do so it will still take a few hundred years for climate to settle down again.

So I just kept asking myself what would happen if all the reefs had to die? Is there a way to revive them once the climate problem has been tackled? I do believe that us hobbyists play a crucial role in this revival process, I can foresee a time where hobbyist would place frags in oceans to re-start the colonies but let's be a bit more realistic now. It's highly unlikely that anyone of us would be alive when that happens and our tiny frags would take hundreds if not thousands of years to re-grow the huge colonies we have today so what do we do?

I personally think that governments around the world especially the Australian and US governments should start a preservation plan before it's too late. They should have gigantic man made reefs to house the endangered corals so at least when the time comes we could revive the lost species.

I understand that this sounds like a long shot but at this point I don't see any other way to preserve the more delicate species and after all this has already been done with other wild animals so why not corals?

Bronx19 · Jul 24, 2017

There is no stopping climate change, the only countries that are in a position to do anything have gone through development to reach their 1st world status. China, India ect. dont give a hoot, they have 100s of millions of people to drag out of poverty.

The biggest question I have is, can the sea food chain continue without the reefs?

Dylan Grech · Jul 24, 2017

Bronx19 said:
There is no stopping climate change, the only countries that are in a position to do anything have gone through development to reach their 1st world status. China, India ect. dont give a hoot, they have 100s of millions of people to drag out of poverty.

The biggest question I have is, can the sea food chain continue without the reefs?

I'm by no means a marine biologist but feel fairly confident that nature can adapt to the changes however that doesn't mean it should be ignored just because we can still eat salmon, tuna & shrimp. It's like saying "I could live without internet and the earth will still function without it but why should I not have the option to use it just because a few powerful people decided that the internet should be closed down due to their business being hurt by it?" A bit of an extreme example but then again this is an extreme situation in my opinion.

DLuce510 · Jul 24, 2017

I understand the theme of this doc is a changing climate but I re-watched it and really theres only a 2 minute segment that actually implies this is due to burning of fossil fuels. The documentary did good in this aspect to focus more on the devastation of our beloved reefs.
Ive been active in showing the public the destruction and leaving out the fossil fuel debate and letting others draw their own conclusions.
The message might be more effective if we keep this documentary more about our reefs and leave out the political and energy reform out of it. Ive already talked to reefers who wont watch it because they don't want to watch "climate change propaganda", which i dont believe this to be.
This might seem hard to do but i just show people the results and let them decidide and theyre more likely to get involved.

Best Fish-Jake · Jul 24, 2017

neuwave said:
Wrong choice of words when I said they export energy, I assumed you knew that the energy itself wasn't being exported but renewable technology itself. Which is why I didn't go into detail, my apologies.

I understands that we have a higher population than Sweden and need to generate more power. Instead I looked at the total consumption of the countries as whole where US consumes 3,913,000,000,000 kw h per year and Sweden only consumes 127,000,000,000 kw-h per year in total energy consumption. But these figures are from each countries as a whole. Now lets break that down. So yes as a whole the US devours more energy but Sweden consumes 12583 kw-h per capita per year and the per capita only consume 12053 kw-h per capita per year. So per capita the Swedes love their power more than we do. lol
So how does that equal 7.7x higher amount of energy consumed per capita?
I didn't check the math on the dollar amount since your per capita was so far off for energy consumption.

Regardless it still doesn't account for the mass deaths your are speaking of or returning to the 1800s. Nor does it explain why we can't change over to more renewable technology or why we in the US don't have the ability to overcome your concerns, even fuel.

According to credit loan, as of April, 2017 the US consumes an average of 98,418 kw-h per capita per year. That is 9.8x more than your proposed statistic for Sweden. This is how I came to the number of ~$616 Billion

I thought I've made this clear by now but obviously not. Current solutions to global warming include population control (killing millions), or the riddance of fossil fuels (which would currently force us back to living standards of the 1800s). That's as plain as I can make it.

You really want to know the reason why Sweden is a leader in green energy? It uses government to cram green energy down the throats of all its citizens. That is the main reason why; in my opinion, the United States can't be Sweden.

Slarti · Jul 24, 2017

Bronx19 said:
There is no stopping climate change....

That is the crux of the matter, nobody can stop climate change. It has been happening for thousands of years and will continue to happen for thousands of years. Of all the scientific data and evidence around there appears to be not a single scientist that can give a clear indication of the link between carbon emissions and a rise in temperature. Every single model brought out has been wrong and had to be adjusted subsequently.

Best Fish-Jake said:
You really want to know the reason why Sweden is a leader in green energy? It uses government to cram green energy down the throats of all its citizens. That is the main reason why; in my opinion, the United States can't be Sweden.

I can't tell you about Sweden but I can tell you about Australia where something similar is happening. Our energy prices keeps on increasing and have more than doubled in the last 10 years, this is my personal account and there is regular reports of businesses where the increases are in excess of 100% in 12 months. We have an abundance of the best coal in the world, we should be able to produce the cheapest electricity in the world. Instead coal fire power stations are being closed down to achieve some mystical target. The result of this, the first and obvious the increase in electricity prices. Second we have one state who is aiming for a 50% renewable target at all cost. They had severe power outages last summer and when the power is on, it is the most expensive electricity in the world. This is leading to more and more businesses closing down, putting people out of work. they now going to spend billions in building the world's largest battery which to some in the know will provide the state with about 2 hours of emergency power next time around. Note the power was off for most of the state for 24 hours and longer in other parts.

We had some scientist do a report for government and as expected he set a target much higher than what we currently have. Modelling done said renewable energy will be cheaper in 50 years! When the models were dissected it turned out some major capital costs were plainly omitted from his models. When asked the direct question of what impact Australia will have if they cut emissions to zero overnight the answer for once was at least honest...almost nothing i.e. less than 1% of world emissions.

I have said this before, if you want to understand global warming/climate change/mini ice age you need to follow the money. How can I believe an opinion from anyone when the livelihood of the person giving the opinion is dependent on said opinion. This is a self fulling prophecy where they keep on telling us how bad it is and they need more money to be able to keep tabs on how bad it is! Some are laughing all the way to the bank and the rest of us are paying for it.

I believe in climate change as I sated, it has happened forever. Should we look after the planet? Of course we should. But should we go overboard and throw the baby out with the bathwater? No.

Slarti · Jul 24, 2017

Just following on the above and an article in today's paper...

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...n/news-story/3357cece8e5e2c267611a36e4b75309c

Anyway, I will stop now...

VR28man · Jul 25, 2017

I'm not going to get into the politics of this.

But I forgot to add that - when I went to Hawaii and saw lots of dead coral, to include lots of bleaching at one of my favorite sites (Kapoho Tide Pools) - I contacted one of the scientists at UH-Hilo. She noted that there have been annual el Nino events for many years, and they started affecting the Hawaiian Islands in 2014. This killed lots of corals - like the majority of Montipora there in 2014 and 2015. Key point here is that this is an annual, worldwide phenomenon; IMO this suggests that this particular phenomenon doesn't have to do with localized pollution or anything like that, it's derived from global weather trends.

They have a website outlining trends for several sites, to include Kapoho/Waiopae tidepools, with an interactive maps and data, by species and aggregate, of the prevalance and severity of coral problems:
http://coralhealth.uhh.hawaii.edu/waiopae

(lots of interesting data on that site about corals)

So, AFAIC, rising global sea temperatures is real. I'll buy that it's anthropogenic, with the caveat that the role of natural temperature change is an important caveat. Waikiki and most of downtown Honolulu is built on the skeleton of a coral reef that died millions of years ago when the seas started receding/cooling.

All that said, again I don't like that Chasing Corals basically ignored the equally (maybe even greater) negative effects of localized pollution and/or exploitation (dredging, dynamite fishing, cyanide for the aquarium trade - some of these have had very bad local effects on coral reefs). To say nothing of completely ignoring that some areas have had their black corals completely removed for commercial exploitation.

Best Fish-Jake · Jul 25, 2017

Slarti said:
Just following on the above and an article in today's paper...

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...n/news-story/3357cece8e5e2c267611a36e4b75309c

Anyway, I will stop now...

We sadly are not able to view the newspaper unless we sign up for an account

Slarti · Jul 25, 2017

Best Fish-Jake said:
We sadly are not able to view the newspaper unless we sign up for an account

You should sign up, it is a great paper...I will see if I can get it somewhere else.

Slarti · Jul 25, 2017

Here you go...from The Daily Telegraph

TENS of thousands of people across Sydney are on the verge of having their lights turned off, with the government forced to roll out rescue cheques in a bid to help struggling families pay their electricity bills.

Calculations from The Daily Telegraph can reveal there are roughly 68,400 homes across NSW at risk of having their power cut because they cannot afford their rocketing bills.

It comes as the NSW government boosts the budget for their Energy Accounts Payments Assistance (EAPA) scheme to $17.1 million for this year. The scheme gives emergency $50 vouchers to households at risk of power disconnection — with the average household needing five vouchers.

Data released exclusively to The Daily Telegraph reveals Western Sydney is being hit the hardest, with the top 10 metropolitan postcodes needing the most government help to pay bills all in the region.

Campbelltown is set to receive the most financial help in the metropolitan area, with $404,750 set aside to help families pay their bills. Calculations by The Daily Telegraph reveal there an estimated 1619 families there at risk of disconnection.

Auburn is second on the list of areas facing the most bill pressure with $317,650 allocated and 1270 households estimated to be at risk of disconnection, followed by Blacktown and Bankstown

NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin is so concerned that he revealed he has ordered the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) to investigate what is causing the soaring bills amid accusations energy providers are price-gouging customers.

It comes after Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims announced he was investigating whether there was price manipulation occurring in NSW as a result of only a few generators operating.

Mr Harwin told The Daily Telegraph he had asked IPART to “examine” energy and gas price movements into 2017-18 and report back on whether the price increases reflect “efficient costs in a competitive market”.

He said nationally the energy market was “broken” with clean energy policies, gas exportations and the shutdown of power stations creating a perfect storm.

“We are concerned about national energy rises and we are pushing our federal counterparts hard to ensure there is a sensible plan to fix the broken national energy market,” Mr Harwin, who believes more competition is needed to drive down prices, said.

He said he was also making the emergency support vouchers digital to help speed up access for families in crisis.

Charity workers said Western Sydney was being hit with a double whammy because the freezing temperatures and high proportion of fibro homes meant families were being whacked with bigger bills.

The situation has become so dire that 77 per cent of low-income NSW households are going without heating in a bid to reduce their onerous power bills, new research from the NSW Council of Social Service (NCOSS) shows. And one in three low-income earners have been forced to stop using hot water for bathing to pay for energy bills.

Economist Dr Bruce Mountain called for an investigation into the profitability and costs of the energy retail sector, noting the difference between the profitable established retailers compared to the new entrants.

NCOSS chief executive Tracy Howe said “electricity poverty” was becoming just as big a concern as housing affordability in the state.

“We’ve seen the lengths people are taking to pay their bills get more extreme in recent years,” Ms Howe said.

“The recent price hikes are only going to make the situation worse and we don’t want to see more households choosing between putting food on the table and paying a bill.”

No power to the people as desperate families shiver
ANY time Yarnel Tuau switches on a light her mind is sent into overdrive calculating about how much it is costing her.

Like a worrying number of Western Sydney residents, Ms Tuau’s family cannot afford any heating.

The 25-year-old lives in a seven-person household with her mother, adult siblings and some of their partners.

Their Macquarie Fields rental home is a fibro property with no insulation that becomes an ice brick at night. But rising costs mean all the family can do to fight the freezing temperatures is wrap up in blankets and huddle up in bed early.

Now pregnant, Ms Tuau said she is often sick and had to call an ambulance a few weeks ago when her flu took a turn for the worse.

“I just can’t handle it, it’s too cold to do anything but go to bed,” she said. “My brother’s girlfriend liked to stay up when she was here because it’s her routine, but even she’d have four pairs of pants on, a dressing gown and a blanket.”

She said the family also cut back on groceries when bills got high.

Ms Tuau’s brother James said that the family was still being priced out of heating their home.

“It gets hard … we all wander round with blankets wrapped around us,” the 26-year-old labourer said.

“My mum tried putting in a rule where there were only allowed to be two lights on, so if you turned on an extra one another one had to go off.”

At the Macquarie Fields Salvation Army, Lieutenant Christian White is seeing more families being disconnected because they cannot afford their bills.

“People are cutting back on food, kids’ school excursions, you name it,” he said.

Volunteer Jan Nicoll said she had even seen families who had stopped washing clothes. “Hot water washing is not even in existence here,” she said. “You can actually see that reality in their clothing and their blankets, towels.”

Alice, a local pensioner, spends her evenings rugged up in a beanie and scarf trying to fight the cold. Her husband has cancer and if they stopped heating their house it could put his health in jeopardy. But they have started sleeping in a smaller room than their usual bedroom because it’s cheaper to heat and she only uses a tiny convection oven to cook.

“Across the community people are struggling,” Alice said.

Roy 9121 · Jul 25, 2017

ianf77 said:
This is why our hobby is important. We are the preservers.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Lowstorm · Aug 1, 2017

I cried. Had to watch it in two parts. Its a lot to see.

eschulist · Aug 1, 2017

Was anything ever discussed on what made the corals in New Caledonia fluoresce bright yellow or blue? I get that they were bleaching but they did something unique instead of just losing all their color and turning white.