I live literally on top of an old coral reef. In the desert. This area was under an ocean 10's of millions of years ago.
As the earth warms won't coral simple colonize along the new coastline? Why will they suddenly be gone? (there may be an answer... I just don't know what it would be).
So unlikely that they will simply move. What is more terrifying is that as warming increases and acidity goes up, not only will the coral structures bleach and die out (50% complete), they will begin to actually dissolve, hampering any recovery. This would make the situation irreversible.
But many geological reef formations are very old, 10's or even hundreds of millions of years old.
At the time these reefs were formed, CO2 levels were much much higher than they are predicted to be any time soon.
Yet somehow the reefs were constructed anyway and corals as a species pulled through. In spite of CO2 levels (per Wikipedia) '''between 200 and 150 million years ago of over 3,000 ppm, and between 600 and 400 million years ago of over 6,000 ppm''' (what are we at today? like 400ppm?)
The reef I live on incidentally is thought to have been formed like 265 million years ago. At which time CO2 levels were possibly an order of magnitude higher than today.
So I really am a bit confused still.
This is a wonderful resource to see exactly how massive of a change in C02 this is.
It also goes into detail on many of the effects we are seeing now in response to climate change.
Bluntly, do you know how many people that would kill? Kill by lack of air conditioning, and lack of transportation for food, at a minimum. Lack of growing food, too, given how mechanized agriculture is now. It's not just a matter of needing "strong global policy". You need a way of making that transition without the transition killing large numbers of people.
I disagree with basically every point you made, but i wonder if extremist lunacy like this might be a necessary evil to punch through the inertia keeping us driving off a cliff, together and and globally.
If the rule we followed brought us here, of what use was the rule?
That's... one possible outcome.
(Hat tip to the "Sunset Grille" webcomic, where I stole this line from a character.)
When the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2013, it estimated that such a doubling of CO2 was likely to produce warming within the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C as the Earth reaches a new equilibrium. However, preliminary estimates calculated from the latest global climate models (being used in the current IPCC assessment, due out in 2021) are far higher than with the previous generation of models. Early reports are predicting that a doubling of CO2 may in fact produce between 2.8 and 5.8°C of warming. Incredibly, at least eight of the latest models produced by leading research centres in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and France are showing climate sensitivity of 5°C or warmer.
...
Even achieving the most ambitious goal of 1.5°C will see the further destruction of between 70 and 90 per cent of reef-building corals compared to today, according to the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C”, released last October. With 2°C of warming, a staggering 99 per cent of tropical coral reefs disappear. An entire component of the Earth’s biosphere – our planetary life support system – would be eliminated. The knock-on effects on the 25 per cent of all marine life that depends on coral reefs would be profound and immeasurable.
...
But these days my grief is rapidly being superseded by rage. Volcanically explosive rage. Because in the very same IPCC report that outlines the details of the impending apocalypse, the climate science community clearly stated that limiting warming to 1.5°C is geophysically possible.
Past emissions alone are unlikely to raise global average temperatures to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC report states that any further warming beyond the 1°C already recorded would likely be less than 0.5°C over the next 20 to 30 years, if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were reduced to zero immediately. That is, if we act urgently, it is technically feasible to turn things around. The only thing missing is strong global policy.