I told him thanks, but I already had plans. How about Thursday?
So, on Thursday, I have plans with him.
(smile)
Kevin asked me last night if I wanted to do a "Tina Tuesday" movie tonight.
I told him thanks, but I already had plans. How about next Tuesday?
He'll have to get back to me on that.
(smile)
I had no idea that I would sit through much of it in tears.
The reason the coral is bleaching is not because of pollution or direct damage by people.
No, the reason for the deaths of massive beds of coral over the last thirty years is this: the average temperature of the oceans has risen by 2 °C.
For those still not on that scale, that's a change of only 3.6 °F.
That small increase is not something we can easily correct.
Consider the human body. When a 200-pound person has a fever of 102.2 °F - which is just 3.6 °F higher than the normal average - that means the body has absorbed roughly 418,000 Joules of energy. (That's based on the person's body containing 55% water by mass.) To lower the fever, that same amount of energy must be dissipated, generally through the application of cooled washcloths, ice baths, and aspirin.
Let me put that into a better perspective, shall I? A 200-pound iron beam will have an increase of 3.6 °F simply by absorbing 180 Joules of energy. By comparison, the human body of the same weight required more than 2300 times that amount of energy to cause the same rise in temperature. That means metals do a poor job of maintaining a constant temperature. (There's something to keep in mind when building an android.)
The human body has many temperature-sensitive organs and molecules. Maintaining a near-constant internal temperature is vital for the continued functioning of those organs. Water has an extremely high specific heat, making it ideal for handling fluctuations in external temperature (think hot summer day or freezing winter night) without crashing the body's internal temperature.
The oceans, likewise, have many temperature-sensitive species of life, including mammals, fish, mollusks, and coral. For those species to all thrive, the oceans must be able to absorb vast quantities of energy without causing a change in their average temperature. For centuries, the 1,390,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water in the Earth's oceans have succeeded in maintaining that average temperature.
For centuries.
But now the canaries in the coal mines are dropping dead. The many varieties of coral have been "bleaching" since 1979 in small isolated incidents. The numbers have steadily increased ever since. 2016 is on record as being the worst, with almost half of the coral populations - of all types of that fauna - falling prey to death by 'fever', leaving only their white skeletons as evidence of their once-thriving existence.
How did this happen?
Well, it's all due to the ever-increasing human consumption of fossil fuels over the past eighty years. When fossil fuels are burned, carbon dioxide is released into the air. The forests which once consumed that gas and released oxygen in its stead have fallen under the ax, to build housing tracts and high-rises and shopping districts, as well as the paved parking for those structures. The carbon dioxide then rises into the atmosphere, trapping increasing amounts of heat from the sun inside the closed-system we call home.
The oceans have been doing their best at absorbing that excess heat for many decades after industrialization. But the strain is beginning to show. The average temperature has not been simply spiking upward a degree or so, it's been increasing and staying elevated.
"Chasing Coral" documents, in no uncertain terms, the damage already done. It also forecasts more damage which certainly lies ahead. Scuba divers and snorkelers, go see the coral RIGHT NOW.
We do not have the means to turn back the dial on the temperature of the oceans. The coral will continue to die out in the wild, leaving only that in well-maintained aquariums for us to enjoy.
The best we can do is try to use genetic engineering on the coral. Perhaps there is a way to alter its DNA and make it more heat-resistant, as has been done for so many of the world's crops and livestock.
Truly heartbreaking.
We would never have allowed climate change to kill off that much life, had it been visible. The very fact that coral lives by being below the surface of the oceans has allowed the problem to go unchecked for so long. "Out of sight, out of mind" fully applies.
Truly heartbreaking.
I missed the opening number, but I was there for "Fate of The Gods".
Introduced as a piece about a sea journey, it was an appropriate segue from the multi-ocean film I had just viewed to carry me back to this time and space on terra firma.
How's that for coincidence?
Definitely right place, right time.
i thank You, God.
I very much enjoyed that piece by Steven Reineke. He had based it on Nordic tales. He was only 31 years old when it was published in 2001. Quite remarkable!
That was not the only piece of his music which was chosen tonight. Of the four student conductors featured at this performance, two of them selected his music. (The other piece was "Into The Raging River", selected by the percussionist.) I'm sure the energy of the works is what attracted them, but I wonder if they realized he was one of their peers, in age, when he wrote them?
What a marvelous Tuesday I have had... and completely free, thanks to my Eagle ID.
(smile)
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