For 20 years now, Ken Nedimyer has been strapping on his scuba gear and diving into the waters off the Florida coast in a desperate effort to restore coral reefs that have been decimated by climate change and pollution. In 2019, he founded his latest venture, Reef Renewal USA. The group’s YouTube channel shows Nedimyer and other members underwater, carefully attaching nursery-grown coral to structures designed to build healthy reefs.

“We’re working hard under pressure with innovation, speed, and efficiency to repopulate our coral reefs,” the narrator says.

Diver-conservationists like Nedimyer will lose the race against time, scientists say, unless humanity acts quickly to end emissions of climate-warming pollution. In the Southern Hemisphere’s Coral Sea, home of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, extreme temperatures have recently hit their highest in 400 years, according to an article in the journal Nature.

“If we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of Earth’s great natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef,” paleoclimatologist Ben Henley at the University of Melbourne told the New York Times.

‘Out of sight’

According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, a majority of Americans consider global warming to be a major threat. If you drill down a bit and ask this group which ecosystem most concerns them, odds are they’ll cite tropical rainforests, or maybe alpine areas or the Arctic tundra.

And they’re not wrong to be concerned about these important communities. But our terrestrial bias blinds us to what is arguably an even more endangered ecosystem lying beneath the ocean’s surface.

“Coral reefs suffer from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ dilemma,” said Jessica Levy, a marine biologist working for the Florida-based Coral Restoration Foundation.

“What we’re looking at is the potential loss of an entire ecosystem, which we’ve never experienced in human history,” Levy said, “and I don’t think anyone wants to find out what that would mean if we had a complete collapse of our coral-reef ecosystems.”

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China and India are so big. Do my country’s climate actions even matter?

Posted on 26 August 2024 by dana1981

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections

At a Republican presidential debate in 2023, several candidates articulated a common sentiment about whose climate policies really matter.

“If you want to go and really change the environment, then we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions,” said Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and ultimate runner-up to Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary race. “We also need to take on the international world and say, ‘OK, India and China, you’ve got to stop polluting.’”

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina agreed, saying, “The places where they are continuing to increase [climate pollution] – Africa, 950 million people; India, over a billion; China, over a billion.”

It’s true that China and India are each home to just over 1.4 billion people. Both have rapidly growing economies that largely depend on fossil fuel energy. China is responsible for about one-quarter of annual climate-warming pollution, and together with India, the two countries account for one-third of yearly global emissions (the U.S. accounts for about 11%).

Given the size of the economies of China and India, it’s understandable to wonder if the climate actions of smaller countries matter. But they do, for several reasons: because the Chinese and Indian governments are making great efforts to deploy climate solutions; because China and India are responsible for much lower per-person and historical climate pollution than many other countries; and crucially, because the climate crisis can only be averted if every country does its part.

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