Coral Before People: Hawaii Bans Popular Sunscreen Products

Sunscreen does hurt corals, but not as much as the many mass and minor extinction events which they’ve survived during the past 500 million years.
The Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was about six degrees C hotter than now. for instance, and it was paradise for reef-building corals.

There it is … save the planet, kill the people.

Haha, another rube falls for the myth about DDT. Never banned for use on insect disease vectors anyplace in the world where it was needed and certainly not even in the USA. The real reason DDT use declined was the universal evolution of DDT resistance in populations with long term exposure to DDT. This myth is easily debunked and DDT continues to be used all over the world if it works, which is rare.
It’s hard to understand how so many people who realize that antibiotic resistance has evolved in numerous bacteria (like MRSA) but fail to understand the same process universally occurs in insect disease vectors.

Going to make a ‘huge’ difference. No. It. Won’t. Like all claims about global warming, it’s is immeasurable, unfounded and shameless posturing by those who should know better.

The crazy thing is that the Greens went after products like DDT but for years did nothing about asbestos in buildings or arsenic in ‘treated’ timber. If they’d got those products banned a long time ago the health hazards to anyone working in older buildings would have been greatly reduced.

And what have here if not yet another Panic Response to a (possibly) trivial, ill considered, poorly researched and in all probability, imagined problem.
An ill conceived, barely even actually thought about or researched knee jerk reaction.
Precautionary Principle on speed.
Not like that’s ever happened before..
Not like:
Global Cooling
Ozone and CFCs
Mad Cows
Diesel
Millennium bugs
Ebola
Avian influenza
and now the Hell Child of those illustrious parents: Global Warming.
So what gives?
Why all the panic responses?
What *is* panic?
Do we say its the/a/any situation where someone/anyone is confronted by ‘a new situation’
Classically of course, the sighting of a Sabre Tooth Tiger (STT) eyeing you up from behind a nearby shrub.
If a rapid and safe exit cannot quickly be evaluated then all the hormones fire, insulin, adrenaline, cortisol etc. Chances are there will be screaming and shouting and rushing/racing off in a wrong direction – perfectly alerting the STT that you are any easy target and ripe for the picking.
Great for the tiger, not so much you.
IOW: Panic endangers our own existence – classically we say that ‘The turkeys are voting for Christmas’
Now.
We obviously evolved to evade the excess attentions of STTs so we must, somewhere between our ears, have an organ that can respond quickly & appropriately to new & rapidly changing situations.
We do have within us the ability to quickly formulate measured words, deeds and actions and hence not descend into inappropriate panic responses.
Question: Where is that ability now?
If anybody has ever read a word I’ve said on here they’ll know where I think its gone.
Eroded by carbohydrate food, refined sugar and alcohol and then flushed away down the pan.
They are all chemical depressants. They switch off large parts of the human brain, possibly the brain trying to protect itself. They bring on paranoia after long term use (abuse)
It’s not easy to tell though is it?
Not when *everyone* is as equally paranoid as you yourself might be
Check out a guy called (Dr) Mark Hyman – he has words for what inappropriate diet does to people – he calls it the ‘Broken Brain’
Consider that the continued piss-take of Ehrlich (50 years and counting) might just represent the fact that you and many people are, in fact, genuinely and deeply worried about something.
Take it as given that, the human animal can not pass off untruths without giving itself away somehow, even ‘L1es by omission’ or AKA secrets.
The worst person for keeping a secret is the person whose secret it is..
(Some wise old sage said that, I ani’t that brihgt)

Never been to Hawaii, nor wanted to go there. Even less desire now.
However, I have many friends in the Navy who have been stationed there, or will be. I will post a link to this elsewhere, and see how much they howl about it.
It seems as though hastily created, poorly though out legislation like this is rammed right through a law body as quickly as possible, sometimes in “secret” (no published notice) for the sole purpose of the creators having their way. The best example of that is the ACA Act, written and passed behind locked doors, because ‘we have to pass it so that we know what’s in it’. And what a disaster that has been.

Don’t mind the boiling lava pooring into the ocean or the oil and chemical spils from WWII and the odd eartkuake/Tsunami, just ban sun screen products to punish humanity. I wonder what tar and feathers will do for the corals when people finally wake up and provide their sociopatic establishment the treatment they deserve.

Guess I could smuggle in a suitcase or two of sunscreen next trip I make to Hawaii. I’ll make enough money to pay for my trip selling tubes on Waikiki Beach.

I think it’s fantastic that factors other than Global Warming are finally being considered to explain the decline in coral reef health! This sunscreen ban is quite possibly a good thing.
The original abstract of the published paper is available at the link below:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00244-015-0227-7
The main mechanism is action is on coral planulae (free swimming planktonic baby coral polyps) and it seems it can also directly damage the DNA of coral by producing AP-sites on the DNA backbone (wondering if it does this in people as well???). The measured concentration of the chemical on actual reefs (Hawaii and US Virgin Islands) was above the LC-50 determined to be harmful.
This makes me think of the Elkhorn and Staghorn corals of the Caribbean. Despite extensive efforts to propagate and replant both of these species on Caribbean reefs they have not yet made a comeback. Perhaps these sunscreen chemicals are affecting larval recruitment??? Just a thought.
It’ll be interesting to see if Hawaii observes any improvements in the health of their reefs after this ban takes affect.

Friends recently went to Fiji and stayed at a new, high-end place where everything had been bulldozed and dredged and an artificial reef built. After just three years, they said the brand new reef was amazing, teeming with fish and color.

I’d like to ask that this be read by Anthony himself before anyone writes it off. I’m fully on his side and have been from the start and only want to help the cause. The important stuff is at the end. Thanks. I added that after, and now here what I wrote.
Great article, So worthy of comment.
Aloha brother.
This is a very topical subject that we will see spread as another green disease imposed on us all, like the protection of the totally unendangered alpha-predator shark species (bull and tiger) whom we are told we must allow our children to be eaten by because that is the only way the greens can save the world. Like the super effective practice of cutting virgin’s hearts out and throwing the sacrificed victims into the volcano, these social scientists know that the greater the extremity of their call for sacrifice, the more the masses will take seriously and fear the catastrophe the priests both threaten and profess to know how to alleviate. All they need to do to make the people accept it is to repeat and repeat it, and keep calling for even greater sacrifice, and control opposition by control of education and information. So, yeah, the call to risk skin cancer by not using sunscreens is perfect in its ludicrous extreme for the purpose of mind manipulation BECAUSE every skerrick of common sense and intelligence we all have, cries out that the parts per trillion of a product so harmless at a cellular level that the giant cosmetic houses’ labs have approved it to be rubbed into rich women’s faces, risking billions in law suits if it is found dangerous to their cells, and which obviously floats on the surface, nowhere near the coral, and it is beyond belief when so little of the product goes into such enormous quantities of water etc. But everyone thinks that if they keep calling for it, what they say must be true and the danger extreme if such dire straights have to be gone to.
That’s the important point in this. The climate war is now run by a different set of scientists and has nothing to do with the science of climatology.
On coral, it’s bleaching and the conditions needed for it’s ability to survive and prosper, my knowledge is limited to a sparse amount of literature on it and 44 years and thousands of hours diving on the fastest growing reef in the world, one which also has an incredible variety of different coral species, so just about all major types and not just one are there for me to observe.
My reaction to bleaching was, “Bleaching!? A problem!?” Parts of our reef bleach every year, through various causes, and they recover within a month every time. And when you look at things like the big study on the Great Barrier Reef, they say the same thing in it, but the press release conclusion at the end stresses a danger of what might happen, if they are not funded to survey it, meaning, in reality, we should pay them to continue producing the same result. The reef is in no danger under the present conditions with which Australians have been protecting it. These people think the people who dig holes in the Queensland sun for them should pay them to play around in tropical lagoons provided with every toy they wish for and the service they are actually providing is no more use than surveying a hole that is already dug and filled in. They, the ones who know best that the bleaching scare is a hoax, are the ones being paid to perpetuate it.
This whole sunscreen thing is a joke we can all see through, yet they will surely force it on us everywhere.
Why the article uses 55,000 out of the millions of global deaths per year, as some type of thing for concern and that you tend to have concern yourself is an eye-opener. A staggering omission was that there was not one mention of any danger to the Hawaiian people, who are the obvious potential victims, who will be in the sun their entire lives. Please realise it paints statesiders as being all in tears and fury about the 7 million tourists per year who will average maybe 10 days each of exposure. Also, looking at it, it appears a bit weak that the fear about the likelyhood that, of 55,000 worldwide deaths, out of 6 billion people, some tragedy will fall on possibly one of the 7 million tourists who are only exposed for 10 days, and it is about as sympathy inspiring as using 5 deaths caused by the flood of the Yangtze River to anyone but an American tourist, if no one knew that previously.
The bottom line is that the tragic victim of the piece, statistically, is zero, especially when you discard the Hawaiian people as meaningless and non existent. Even the rest of the world appears meaningless in the way the 55,000 had to be footnoted as worldwide and not American.
The point in mentioning that has nothing to do with my detestation and fight against political correctness and its insidious takeover of our minds through our guilt in continuously chastising ourselves for thinking the old “bad” word before searching for the new flavour of the month word. My reason for doing so has to do with climatology and is to highlight the Northern Hemisphere geocentricity that appears to be blinding you all to the fact that the Northern Hemisphere plays no part in global climate. The Atlantic Ocean is not the centre of the universe. You basically totally ignore the South.
The answer to everything is contained in the 100,000,000 tons of frigid water that passes any given point every second that is circulating round the planetoid size ice block, occupying everything up to 40°S and reaching all the way to the sea floor and driven along by the spinning of the Earth.
I have no idea why the sole regulator of Earth’s temperature is ignored. I mean, don’t you hate it and have a huge urge to reject any idea that doesn’t come from one of your post doctoral peers!
All I ask is stuff like how does the alarmist’s “warm” Antarctic meltwater get through the CIRCUMPOLAR Current retaining any of it’s heat or freshness after spinning round the bottom 40s 50s 60s, some of the 70s and the ice for who knows how long before it gets back out into the world?
Then you have to ask how the rest of the world’s heat could ever have the slightest chance of getting through the circulating water and winds without having it’s heat bled off long before it could get anywhere near the ice.
Am I correct in saying it does have an affect on global climate seeing that before it was there, average ocean temperature was 21°C and now the Earth’s heat content, the thing they say is increasing 3°C, the ocean, is reflected in average ocean temperature being about 6°C, and that it is, also, the known cause of ice being present in today’s world?
It just sucks in any amount of heat from the rest of the world and throws it back out cold. Antarctica is like the bottom of the abyss, a totally isolated climate of it’s own, which highlights the idea of separate climates making up a whole, but the whole or global climate could just about be called an invention.
The SOUTHERN Oscillation, in reality, cools the world in one phase and cools it even more in the other. That should be stressed in every mention of it.
In order to make the world hotter or colder, polar amplification proves that can only be done if something affects Antarctica, and seeing Antarctica cannot be affected by the rest of the world, that points to global climate being driven by things that affect Antarctica. That’s the place to look and we know the few options.
Like Copernicus, all you have to do is observe it all then get the idea that possibly the Earth spins, and everything fits. Funny that that’s where the current gets all its gargantuan energy, and the CO2 thing being all about energy, there we find, apart from the heat energy contained in the ocean, you are all ignoring the thing that no doubt possesses the greatest amount of energy in the world.
A look at a map of the world from where climatologists should be looking will show you that that’s what drives the Gulfstream and all major currents. Our globe spins brothers. That thermal haleine action in the North Atlantic little offshoot couldn’t drive a nail in comparison. Start by seeing the Agullus Current being water that is pushed by the spinning Earth’s circumpolar current and you see how it is diverted by West Africa, across toward Brazil and despite the Corialis Effect it is then pushed, by its confrontation with the hip of Brazil, across the equator into and driving, along with the Corialis Effect, the Gulfstream, which we all know heads across to Africa and circles, and the part that heads north is only a minor offshoot, regardless of how much importance you pay it because it affects your climate with its landlocked sea at it’s pole.
They may have tagged the sinking cold salty water up there and followed it to the Pacific but did they even look for the tags down in the frigid giant waves and storms of the Great Southern Ocean, which you only believe is not the biggest ocean in the world because of lines drawn on a geocentric piece of imagination we call a map..
All your years of study and I learnt that from a NGS map of Antarctica and a couple of paragraphs from Asimov’s 1980 edition of his Book of Science. Plus looking into the curiosity that some scientists no longer believe in Polar Amplification in Antarctica when, because of the ice cores and other proxies it surely occurs there. That led to being sure Antarctica controls it all, and it all fits. I have spent a decade of self education on it and spent maybe a year all told just sitting thinking about how each change to one thing changes other things and what those changes are and what they change. As mental exercise, climate is top notch.
So the models may well be correct about what the increase in CO2 should do and us deniers are correct in following the observations and denying there is any significant warming, and that makes everyone is correct. It’s just that when the greenhouse gases heat the rest of the world, it’s ocean, the circumpolar current takes in the warm water circles it round bleeding it to space in the cold dark winter, in degrees Kelvin to space at 0°K. Space doesn’t care if it is 250°K or 274°K, it bleeds. It never gets near Antarctica and Antarctica doesn’t bleed more than it receives from the sun, it’s only source of heat, so it doesn’t get colder. It’s reached equilibrium.
That agrees with the melting Arctic because of greenhouse gases and black soot. It agrees with everything. It is there to see and examine. It answers every question and arguement. It imbibes an overall understanding.
Global Warming should be happening, but it is not. And the reason why it is not happening is the same reason why there is ice on our planet. A radiator powered by the spin.
What do you reckon?

I am a resident of Hawaii. I swim, snorkel and scuba the West Hawaii reefs. We had a significant coral bleaching events in 2014 and 2015. It looks like a coral graveyard out there. From a NOAA report “Alarmingly, in the present report, the researchers found that 68% of West Hawaiʻi’s shallow coral reefs and 60% of its deep reefs were partially or fully bleached in October of 2015. Between 50 and 99% of the corals died due to the bleaching event at some sites surveyed along West Hawaiʻi. Since ocean waters are expected to continue to warm, bleaching events are expected to increase in frequency and severity.” Nature has a way of adapting to change given a chance, albeit extinctions happen. We need to give the reefs every chance to recover and adapt to our changing ocean as acidification and warmer temperatures kick in. And the science has been coming in from all over the world and being published in highly regarded journals; oxybenzone has lethal impacts on juvenile corals and also disrupts development in other invertebrates as well as vertebrates (fishes).
I’ve noted that some comments painted the issue as an Us vs.Them dynamic, with Them being the corals. Let’s talk about that. We need coral reefs for the well-being of the human race. They protect the coastlines from the damaging effects of wave action and storm surge, and as a biodiverse ecosystem, they assist with carbon and nitrogen fixing, and provide shelter for many marine organisms. They provide the breeding grounds for fish spawns and serve as a nursery for many juvenile fish before they fledge to the open sea, and thus are the foundation of the fishing industry. Billions of people worldwide rely upon the ocean for food and jobs. There is no separating the human race from the natural world; we need a healthy planet.
And a little bit about the human health aspect in all this. Oxybenzone is an endocrine disruptor. It acts like estrogen and suppresses mightily those androgenic hormones that make for manly men. And guess what? It gets absorbed through our skin. The research is starting to come in documenting that it messes up development in humans as well as promoting endometriosis,metastasis of breast cancer, inhibiting sperm viability, and causing a serious birth defect. And by the by, it’s not such a great sunscreen. It’s not nearly as good as zinc oxide which is broad spectrum (blocks UVA and UVB). But it is cheap to make and corporations make a lot of money selling products that they know are harmful to people and to reefs. Those CEOs didn’t choose between corals and humans. They chose between harming humans and corals and getting a bigger Christmas bonus. Your health vs. a Lexus. Surprise. You lose.
The reality is that the Hawaii Legislature has done it’s homework. Hawaii is leading the way toward a healthier world for the corals and a healthier world for people. Aloha.