[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.