Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Did anyone notice the end of the world?
Ecosystems across Australia are collapsing under climate change
July 5, 2018 6.09am AEST
To the chagrin of the tourist industry, the Great Barrier Reef has become a notorious victim of climate change. But it is not the only Australian ecosystem on the brink of collapse.
Our research, recently published in Nature Climate Change, describes a series of sudden and catastrophic ecosystem shifts that have occurred recently across Australia.
These changes, caused by the combined stress of gradual climate change and extreme weather events, are overwhelming ecosystems’ natural resilience.
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Once an ecosystem goes into steep decline – with key species dying out and crucial interactions no longer possible – there are important consequences.
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Targeted interventions, like the assisted recolonisation of plants and animals, reseeding an area that’s suffered forest loss, and actively protecting vulnerable ecosystems from destructive bushfires, may prevent a system from collapsing, but at considerable financial cost. And as the interval between extreme events shorten, the chance of a successful intervention falls.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/ecosystems-across-australia-are-collapsing-under-climate-change-99367
The abstract of the study;
Biological responses to the press and pulse of climate trends and extreme events
R. M. B. Harris, L. J. Beaumont, T. R. Vance, C. R. Tozer, T. A. Remenyi, S. E. Perkins-Kirkpatrick, P. J. Mitchell, A. B. Nicotra, S. McGregor, N. R. Andrew, M. Letnic, M. R. Kearney, T. Wernberg, L. B. Hutley, L. E. Chambers, M.-S. Fletcher, M. R. Keatley, C. A. Woodward, G. Williamson, N. C. Duke and D. M. J. S. Bowman
The interaction of gradual climate trends and extreme weather events since the turn of the century has triggered complex and, in some cases, catastrophic ecological responses around the world. We illustrate this using Australian examples within a press–pulse framework. Despite the Australian biota being adapted to high natural climate variability, recent combinations of climatic presses and pulses have led to population collapses, loss of relictual communities and shifts into novel ecosystems. These changes have been sudden and unpredictable, and may represent permanent transitions to new ecosystem states with-out adaptive management interventions. The press–pulse framework helps illuminate biological responses to climate change, grounds debate about suitable management interventions and highlights possible consequences of (non-) intervention.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0187-9.epdf
Somehow I doubt things are quite as bad as the researchers claim. Thanks to the courage of Peter Ridd we have all seen what happens to researchers in Australian academia who criticise extreme climate claims.
Are you sure that the GBR existed 2000 years ago? If it is true that the GBR is dying now, why has it survived the warm periods of the last 10,000 years?
Methinks your math is off, Marty.
The GBR is about 800,000 years old according to drill cores. During that time it has died and regenerated about 10 times, since it ends up on dry land as a low limestone range every ice-age. And since glacials are much longer than interglacials it has actually been dead about 90% of those 800,000 years.
But on the other hand another and just as large reef comes to the surface halfway between Qld and New Caledonia during ice ages.
I have a solution. Send me $1billion US now and I will fix everything. I promise! Really.
These guys should be writing dystopian fiction not science!
Environuts say the same thing about ecosystems in every capitalist country. Most people live in urban areas and have never seen one of those ecosystems so they’re easy to fool.
Typical “The Conversation” alarmism, making the mostest disaster out of the leastest facts. Their big boogeyman is the 2016 bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR).
The 2016 bleaching was due to the El Nino, which caused water to slosh eastward from the western Pacific, lowering sea levels at the GBR. The tops of the shallowest reefs were now exposed to many more hours of daytime sunshine and UV, and the corals that were exposed at low tide for many more hours than they could handle, cooked in the sun. None of the usual suspects, ocean warming, ocean ‘acidification’ or CO2 back-radiation had anything to do with this bleaching. But round them up anyway, because this is “The Conversation.”
And they also remark about some big wildfires burning large swaths of brushland, and some mangrove swamps drying up and dying during a period of drought. I’m sure neither of those two things has ever before happened in the history of Australia. /sarc
You can tell it’s trash when you see phrases such as this:
“loss of relictual communities and shifts into novel ecosystems”.
Relictual, is that something like victual, something to eat. No, they mean “relict”, from relic- small things left over from something past.
Novel? New? maybe.
I was unaware that bushfires are a threat to aussie ecosystems, the vast majority of which have evolved to rely on/survive bushfires.