Abstract
Climate Change is now accepted as the biggest challenge facing the planet. What is it, and what evidence is there to support it? The IPCC Reports catalogue the reality and the speed of change over the past four decades, and suggest possible courses of action aimed at slowing the warming trend. The impact of global warming is already being felt in a global water supply crisis, and in the challenges to food production to feed a world population that has already seemingly reached its sustainable limits. Changes in the ocean are being observed, both in its nature with increasing acidification and warming surface waters, and in its behaviour as witnessed in the Meridional Overturning Circulation. Can reefs survive?
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Notes
- 1.
From island dive operator records. Serious bleaching, coral fragmentation, and white band disease were since observed by the author in March 2012.
- 2.
Devout Catholics in Latin countries, including some reef scientists, consider the term La Niña inappropriate because it implies a female saviour, and prefer the term “anti-El Niño”.
- 3.
Sources listed in Wikipedia, s.v. Mount Kilimanjaro.
- 4.
Also, on-site interview by Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, Friday, 25 July 2008.
- 5.
See NASA/JPL online releases 23 January 2008 and November 2009.
- 6.
Internet release 22 November 2009, BBC News, Green.Blorge.
- 7.
Internet report by Henri Weimerskirch, Director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Villers en Bois, France.
- 8.
R. Stewart 2012 in a NOAA online article entitled “Ocean motion and surface currents”.
- 9.
Sverdrup et al. (1942). The thermohaline circulation: 509–511; 747–755.
- 10.
Posted by James Kloeppel, Physical Sciences Editor, UI (Urbana-Champaign) in EurekaAlert! AAAS Science News.
- 11.
Kiehl and Shields (2005); press release Helen Briggs, BBC News Science Report, 28 August 2005.
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Bowen, J. (2015). Climate Change and the Future of Reefs. In: The Coral Reef Era: From Discovery to Decline. Humanity and the Sea. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07479-5_15
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