caribbean coral bleaching 2005

http://www.bonairetalk.com/newsgroup/messa...html?1130194941

Google reveals lots of articles on the subject.

Very saddening

It's bad all over the Caribbean. Some areas have up to 90% of the coral bleached. Here's a summary report from NOAA

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2526.htm

Very sad indeed. It would appear that we have changed our enviroment for the worse with no solution in sight.

In one of the matrix movies the 'machine' states that they see humans as a virus plaguing the earth slowing killing it. This sort of rings true when you see what it happening today and the dramatic changes taking place.

Hopefully things can rebound.

Its all happened before and I am sure it will all happen again .. the difference now is we have the intelligence and the means to see it happening and measure it. Ice ages come and go as do Global warming periods .. In todays world many of us like ot lay blame and so we blame us all for messing up the world .. it's just a changing environment that we help to change. maybe we sped up the process I dont know .. but I am pretty sure it was going to happen anyway.

of course I am not a scientist .. but i do watch discovery channel

I think that Cayman has benefitted a bit in this respect from the poor weather there in late September and then the passing of Wilma in October. Both should have helped to restrict the bleaching a bit.

Interestingly the bleached colonies were spawning along with the unbleached colonies in Cayman at the end of September.

Alex

Let's summarize. This year we've had:

Very high water temperatures in the Carib

26 named tropical storms and 5 WHOPPER hurricanes

Incredibly strong and persistent LOOP current in the gulf

Coral Bleaching

Things are hot, latent energy is high, we're going to be seeing more of this.

Cheers

James

There is almost universal consensus that global warming is accelerated by human activities:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20..._consensus.html

<Scientific Consensus

To prove a scientific consensus on global climate change, Oreskes searched the scientific literature for papers published between 1993 and 2003 with the words "global climate change" in their abstracts. She found 928.

"Not one of the papers refuted the claim that human activities are affecting Earth's climate," she said. >

I've seen it first hand at the extremes of our planet: glacier retreat in Alaska, bleaching coral near the Equator, spruce bark beetle in AK and Canada and weather shifts in the Pacific. It is difficult, I think, for many to accept that an entity as large as the Earth can be affected by humans burning carbon. All that carbon in coal and oil, sequestered for millions of years, is now free in the atmosphere.

In 1950 there were 8 major hurricanes. One more than 2005. I think Giles is right on this. While our refuse and fossil fuel burning can't be a good thing, we're simply one of the events assisting this natural weather pattern or cycle along its due course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_Atlantic_hurricane_season