[Coral-List] Florida's barrier reef seen doomed by 2000
Peter Sale
sale at uwindsor.ca
Wed Jul 15 15:52:06 EDT 2015
Hi Gene and listers,
Yes, old news reports can bring back memories. Thanks for sharing.
Some will immediately latch onto the date, 2000, and say, "hey, there is
still some living reef here, therefore those ancient scientists did not
know what they were talking about." Others may latch onto Walter Jaap's
dismissal re the amount of reef area sampled as further proof against
those ancient scientists. Others may vaguely (or more clearly) remember
that it is not the total area in sample plots, but their dispersion across
the area and how their data are handled statistically that determines
whether the sampling was adequate. And others will reflect on the real
message conveyed by Shinn, Porter, Ogden and others: that the Florida
reef tract was in decline, that there were diseases and pollution, and
likely too many people -- and these others will know that those
observations were correct back then, and that things have not improved
very much if at all since then, except that the question of whether we are
the cause, or whether climate change is involved is now in far less doubt
(emphatic yes to both).
No, it did not "disappear" by 2000, but we still seem to ignore the need
to substantially change our behavior in order to give it much chance for
the future.
And the Florida reef tract is just one of many reef regions around the
world where our conservation efforts could be far more robust than they
have been to date.
Gene keep up your photo documentation effort. we need a visual history
for that day in the future when we finally want to see exactly what the
Anthropocene has wrought.
Peter Sale
@PeterSale3
www.petersalebooks.com
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