[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 74 (Tuesday, May 8, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2542-S2543]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, situated off the northeast corner of
Australia lies one of the seven natural wonders of the world, a wonder
that is visible from space--the Great Barrier Reef. Each year, around 2
million visitors come from around the globe to experience the Great
Barrier Reef. They come to see hundreds of species of sharks, dolphins,
fish, mollusks, whales, seabirds, and other marine life thriving in
nearly 133,000 square miles of coral reef. Some of these coral
structures are thought to date back as long as 25 million years. When
Pope Francis spoke of the ``wonderworld of the seas,'' this is the kind
of beauty and bounty he had in mind.
It is difficult to imagine something so expansive and ancient
threatened so profoundly by one of Earth's more recent inhabitants--
humans--but it is. The oceans are taking the brunt of our modern
carelessness. They are warming, acidifying, and literally suffocating
under our carbon dioxide emissions. They are fouled with our plastic
garbage, and they are polluted with runoff from farming and storm water
wash into the sea.
I have come to the floor before to plead that my Senate colleagues
heed the warnings of our oceans. Those warnings are loud and clear and
measurable. They are measurable with thermometers, tide gauges, and
simple pH tests, and they are chronicled by the testimony of fishermen
and sailors.
Today I wish to focus on that Great Barrier Reef. A healthy coral
reef is one of the most productive engines of life on Earth. It is home
to 25 percent of the world's fish biodiversity. The corals use calcium
carbonate--a compound usually readily available in ocean water--to
build their hard skeletons. These hard structures shelter the living
coral polyps and undergird the entire ecosystem that depends on the
reef. Without the corals, the whole thing collapses.
The living corals have evolved a symbiotic relationship with tiny
photosynthetic algae called zooxanthellae. The algae live in the
surface tissue of the corals. It is the algae that provide the color
that you see healthy corals display. The corals' metabolic waste is
converted by the algae back into food and oxygen for the corals, and,
in turn, corals shelter the algae.
However, the range of pH, temperature, salinity, and water clarity
within which this symbiotic magic takes place is fairly narrow. Get
outside that comfort range, and the corals get stressed. When they are
stressed enough, they begin to evict their algae. This is what is
called ``coral bleaching.'' The corals whiten as they shed their
colorful algae.
Of course, without the algae, corals can't live for long. The algae
can resettle, and the corals can recover, but if the algae don't
resettle, the corals soon die. That is what is happening in huge swaths
of the Great Barrier Reef, and here is why.
As we have pumped massive quantities of waste CO2 into the
atmosphere, dramatically raising the concentration of carbon dioxide in
the Earth's atmosphere, the oceans have absorbed approximately 30
percent of all of that excess carbon dioxide.
We recently broke a dangerous new atmospheric record, exceeding a
monthly average of 410 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere for the first time in human history.
For comparison, at the start of the Industrial Revolution,
atmospheric carbon dioxide was around 280 parts per million. That is
280 not so long ago and 410 now, and 300 had been about the upper limit
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for as long as human beings have
been on this planet.
About a third of all of that added CO2 gets absorbed by
the ocean, and it is absorbed with a chemical reaction that makes the
ocean more acidic. That is why we talk about ocean acidification.
At the same time that the oceans have been soaking up all of that
excess CO2, they have also been soaking up heat--lots of
heat--roughly 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere
by these greenhouse gases. As a result of all of that heat, the oceans
are warming as they get more acidic, more often knocking the corals out
of the conditions they need for that symbiosis to thrive.
We are only 1 year out from the massive bleaching that tore across
the globe from 2014 to 2017. NOAA branded it ``the longest, most
widespread, and possibly the most damaging coral bleaching event on
record.''
This graphic shows how severe and pervasive the bleaching was. The
light blue areas on the map, which you really don't see any of,
represent the parts of the ocean that are under no stress. These are
the continents. There is North America and South America. Over here is
Australia. There is Asia. And the red parts are the oceans.
The lighter red is ``Alert Level 1'' areas, where heat stress led to
significant coral bleaching. The deeper red is ``Alert Level 2'' areas,
which experienced not only widespread coral bleaching but also
significant coral die-off. This white box right here marks the Great
Barrier Reef. You can see that severe coral bleaching in the northern
edges of the Great Barrier Reef, and this was new. According to NOAA,
these are areas where bleaching had never occurred before.
In 2016 scientists with the Australian Research Council's Centre of
Excellence for Coral Reef Studies undertook extensive aerial and in-
water surveys of the Great Barrier Reef to estimate the extent of the
damage. Out of the over 900 individual reefs that were surveyed, only 7
percent of those reefs escaped bleaching, and 93 percent were hit. In
the northern portion of the Great Barrier Reef, upwards of 80 percent
of the corals were severely bleached.
When the researchers returned, they found that up to two-thirds of
those corals in the northern section had died. The central and southern
sections fared better but still saw corals dying.
A recent paper in Nature by Australian and NOAA researchers totaled
the damage. The paper's lead author, Dr. Terry Hughes, told The
Atlantic: ``On average, across the Great Barrier Reef, one in three
corals died in nine months.''
In the northern section of the reef, researchers found that some
species, such as staghorn and table corals, suffered what they called a
``catastrophic die-off.'' In total, about one-half of the northern
range's corals died.
Dr. Hughes went on to say the Great Barrier Reef ``has transformed
into a completely new system that looks differently, and behaves
differently, and functions differently.'' That is climate change.
In an interview with Huffington Post, Dr. Hughes said the heat wave
that caused the bleaching was so intense that some of the corals
basically ``cooked'' and died quickly. Usually, if corals can't recover
their algae after a bleaching event, they slowly starve to death. Some
of the less resilient species crashed by up to 90 percent in the recent
bleaching.
Dr. Hughes made clear to the Atlantic that human-caused climate
change was the driving force behind this coral bleaching. Indeed, the
title of his nature article is, ``Global warming transforms coral reef
assemblages.''
[[Page S2543]]
Dr. John Bruno from the University of North Carolina said that the
loss of the Great Barrier Reef's corals is ``like clear-cutting a
redwood forest.'' He went on:
In 10 years, you're going to have a lot of stuff on the
ground, but you're not going to have the old-growth forest
back. Some of these corals were 10, 30 years old, but a lot
of them were centuries old. In 100 years--if there is no more
warming--they could return.
In 100 years, they could return.
Dr. Hughes and his colleagues, however, were less optimistic in their
nature paper. They wrote: ``The most likely scenario, therefore, is
that coral reefs throughout the tropics will continue to degrade over
the current century until climate change stabilizes, allowing remnant
populations to reorganize into novel, heat-tolerant reef assemblages.''
Remnant populations are all they expect to survive.
Researchers are trying to understand the consequences of losing so
much coral in our seas. Obviously, if you harm the corals, you harm the
reef; if you harm the reef, you destabilize life throughout the reef,
and that is bad for oceans.
A recent paper in Global Change Biology found severe declines in the
populations of the fish most connected with the corals hit hardest by
the bleaching. So the cascade effect is already observed.
The Great Barrier Reef even sounds different. A study published last
week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared
the lively underwater cacophony of a vibrant Great Barrier Reef in 2012
with the quiet of bleached locations in 2016. The life that teems
around a healthy reef decreased with the loss of the corals.
There are actually some open-ocean species, like juvenile clownfish--
or the Nemos--that actually rely on sound coming off these reefs from
all the life and all the feeding and all the activity and that actually
use that sound to find reefs to go settle on. So this quiet of dying
reefs makes their job of finding new homes harder.
Climate change makes the heat waves that spur coral bleaching more
intense and also more frequent, leaving corals less time to recover
before the next heat wave hits, and we may see the more vulnerable
corals fail to recover at all as the waters warm too much for them to
survive.
A study published earlier this year in Science looked at 100 tropical
reefs and found that only 6 had avoided bleaching. Bleaching events
that occurred in the past, once in a generation, now occur around every
6 years. As the Guardian summarized it, ``Repeated large-scale coral
bleaching events are the new normal thanks to global warming.''
So what can we do about it? Scientists are working to better
understand what makes certain corals more resilient and to try to use
these lessons to protect more vulnerable species. But that research
nibbles at the fringes of this global die-off. There is some localized
work on things like sun shields to help protect shallow corals during
peak heat. Senator McCain and I visited efforts to rebuild shattered
coral reefs in Indonesia, but these tiny efforts can't offset the
global onslaught of climate change unless we move fast to address the
real problem.
Australia announced last week that it would invest around $400
million in a patchwork of efforts to protect the Great Barrier Reef:
increasing monitoring and enforcement, for instance; limiting pollution
runoff from shore; trying to keep out certain invasive starfish; and
trying to help restore lost corals. But the plan does not address the
main culprit behind coral bleaching, and that culprit is climate
change. Scientists noticed that omission, including the Australian
Academy of Science, which pointed out the problem that the reef is
``highly vulnerable to climate change,'' and ``urge[d] the government
to address the cause of the problem.''
The call of those scientists is a call that we, too, ought to heed.
One of the great wonders of God's Earth is on its way to turning into a
sandy relic because we are unwilling to say no to the fossil fuel
industry. It is that simple.
This coral die-off is one of innumerable consequences that our Earth
is already warning us with. It is not the only signal; it is one of
many. But nothing that can't be monetized for an industry seems to get
our attention around here. Instead, it appears we will have to look
future generations in the eye and tell them that there was once a Great
Barrier Reef, that it was one of the wonders of the world, and that we
let it die to keep the fossil fuel industry happy.
It is time we woke up.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.