This kills me. I saw the reef for the first time around 2007. I went back twice, and the last time I was there (2017) I honestly couldn't believe what I saw. Wasteland? An under water desert? I don't have words for it, but I don't really want to go back because it hit me so hard. Our planet is dying and we're sitting here debating why/who and not doing anywhere near enough to fix it.

I'm so glad we have space rockets, flying cars and drone warfare...but I'd trade it all in for the reef to come back.

> I'm so glad we have space rockets, flying cars and drone warfare...but I'd trade it all in for the reef to come back.

It's really just climate change. (Ocean warming is what causes bleaching.) Luckily, since the 80s we've had the technology to generate energy without releasing greenhouse gases. I wish more people knew about the harms caused by climate change because maybe if they were they'd be more interested in preventing them.

I feel like the harms were really drilled into Millennials like myself but then we seem to have assumed that younger Gen Zs and gen Alpha will just receive the climate change wisdom via osmosis or maybe if we're lucky, their parents. I've seen more people worrying about under-population (under population! Remember over-population?) than the environment recently. Maybe we need to bring Captain Planet back.

To be fair, overpopulation was never an actual concern. Since the 1800s, food production growth rates have outpaced population growth rates. Underpopulation _is_ a concern when infrastructure and social structures may not be able contract quickly enough to sustain our current quality of life.

The food scarcity concern was certainly overblown, I was thinking more about the environmental concern.

Don't worry, overpopulation will come back as a concern when we get massive crop collapse due to climate change.

You can see all the bad things about modern cultivation but lack of resistance to climate change isn’t one.

Yes, for many swaths and types of traditional agriculture and fishing it will be doom, but this conversation isn’t about local ecosystem but global food production vs population growth.

Food production was never a problem, supply and management is.

As long as the population depends on non-renewable resources, technically any population size is overpopulation. With the technology we currently use our population levels can't be sustained for very long.

Do you know why and how food production has been able to match population growth and how long much more it can scale? We are using almost all of earth's farmable land right now.

That's not quite right.

While nearly half of all habitable land is used to some extent as agriculture, the total amount of land in active cultivation has actually been declining since the early 2000's and we currently abandon more farmland every year than we clear forest or convert to agriculture. Between 1992 and 2020, ~ 7% of all cropland was effectively 'abandoned' and much of the production capacity in the west is actually intentionally kept from being fully planted in order to control against overproduction of cereal crops which in the past has been justified by arguing that this control is necessary to prevent market crashes when distribution networks cannot absorb the full capacity of a harvest.

Globally, there are about a billion acres, 400ish million hectares, ~ about half the size of Australia, which sits unused according to FAO satellite and other observables datasets.

About half of the abandonment not due to cultivability at the simplest level, but rather that of transportation of the crops to market or of access to workforce (labor or equipment) to the land. Smaller, more distant crops without significant mechanization simply cannot compete at the prices possible through mechanization. With a lack of access to global niche markets and the higher prices for, say, premium organics, many successive generations of farming families have simply moved to town and left the land sitting, unused.

The other ~ half of abandoned land is because of degraded production capacity through mismanagement; either through over-application of petrochemical fertilizers instead of crop rotation, or through mechanized tilling without careful erosion management. Many farms have neither the time nor the resources (or in the case of large industrial operations the long-term financial foresight on the part of management) to engage in multi-year regenerative practices necessary to reestablish the soil mycostructure and probiotic ecosystems necessary to recover productivity.

However, if demand were to rise sufficiently and if production instead of distribution was the driving force behind food scarcity, we do indeed have arable land reserves which do not require further destruction of uncultivated wilderness to meet a growing demand.

There is actually an inverse relationship to land productivity at scale; the larger farms do extract more gross tonnage of product at lower costs of per-unit equipment and labor, but actually those operations significantly underproduce volumes of harvestable food if measured in 'per unit of land' instead of labor hours. Fields with multi-level, interconnected plant communities significantly overproduce in terms or total volume. This has been demonstrated in nearly every place on earth using very simple techniques that have varied names and different approaches to marketing, but are all very much the same thing: call it Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution", Bill Mollison's "Permaculture", Historic Food Forests in Africa and the Decca in India, or in the Middle East "Oasis". In the Americas it still is "Three sisters" gardening. These techniques simply are not mechanized and delivering mass volumes of single commodity product into a global distribution network and that's where the difficulty and disconnect between global populations and available nutrition originates.

If there was a technological and market incentives to connect abundant and diverse harvests in rural communities with Bodegas, restaurants, and grocery store chains in the big cities without ten middle-men adding cost for the consumer without improving the product in the least, then half of the land abandonment issue could unwind and small farms could thrive, not by delivering bulk raw indistinguishable commodity to food manufacturing, but by delivering farm fresh produce to kitchens and fruit stalls.

If that were both low-cost for the consumer, and high earning for the farmer while having quality control and assured provenance then the conversation could center around making better use of even less total cropland and restoring wilderness to a near-native sustainable state.

But as it stands now, we're not short on crop land to human population ratio so much as short on effective distribution and incentives for responsible production.

/todays-soapbox

... this is kind of my area of peculiar skill and work. I've tried to steer multinational, multimillion Euro/dollar agriculture operations that produce significant volumes of global "organically produced" harvests in the direction of cooperating with rural and indigenous farming communities in conserving soil health to the benefit of all. That's been a mixed bag, so the forward momentum is with the local rice production in rural Yamagata. Same objectives, more cooperation and long term planning.

Not through farming a larger area of land, that's for sure. It's been mostly up to improvements in crops, nitrogen fixing, the invention of the reefer car, and other things.

Additionally, I'd like to remind you that we have a lot of wiggle room: if we stop growing alfalfa and stop doing stupid things like biofuel, that will free up an enormous amount of land.

GenZ and GenAlpha are yet to reach a point where they can do anything about it. Boomers are still making decisions and there's plenty of GenXers that are still clinging to the myth concept.

Until the Boomers finish ageing out and GenZ/A grow up to take the reins, the status quo stays

They don't have low turn out in general elections and almost non existent during the elections that matter the most, the primaries. Boomers are reliable vote so they pick the candidates and elect the candidates.

Sounds like you're agreeing that GenZ/GenA need to do some more growing up to me.

Well, they could do more about it now, but it's the classic 'young people don't turn out to vote' issue.

They’ll vote for a candidate they feel interested in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_York_City_mayoral_ele...

doesnt cover the common case when candidates are crap left and right, does it

I really think that Disney shit really fucked your head up, NGL Gen Y.

You don't have to trust a kids' show, that's just to help build general awareness. The proof is clear enough in rising CO2 levels, global average temperatures, ocean heat content etc.

The power is yours.

To me, the proof things can change was during the lock downs and saw how quickly things changed once all of the automobile pollution approached zero.

> ..the proof things can change was during the lock downs and saw how quickly things changed once all of the automobile pollution approached zero

This is not mentioned enough. The world, nature and all of its glory will thrive once human activity comes to a standstill as seen though the lockdown.

> Luckily, since the 80s we've had the technology to generate energy without releasing greenhouse gases.

Longer. Nuclear power tech was pretty good in the 60s (outside of the Soviet Union).

For a recent informative update from the Australian Long-term (coral) Monitoring Program see https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co.... The graphs show that Northern Barrier Reef and the Central Barrier Reef coverage have record high coral cover while the Southern Barrier Reef, "hard coral cover was relatively stable although decreased slightly to 26.4% (22.9–30.2% CIs) from 26.9% (23.0–30.9% CIs) in 2025. This represents a relative decline of 2.0% of 2025 levels, which is within the margin of error, and regional coral cover remains below the long-term average of 29.3% (27.5–31.3% CIs).". The sea surface temperatures remained 0.7–1.2°C above average across the Great Barrier Reef. The Australian Environment Foundation finds that ~80% of Australians think that the reefs are at a record low. Apparently, CO2 in 1985 was about 345.9 ppm. In 2026 it's was about 432 ppm - I haven't checked the actual Mauna Loa site.

Well, it's not the space rockets etc. that do this. It's the single-family homes with large yards with no apartment buildings nearby, and the ability to not look at wind turbines, and the community that we have managed to cultivate by living in our own detached homes. The things you have to trade to get the reef back are not usually the things you want to trade. Otherwise, we could happily trade those things. It's not like there are that many people making space rockets, after all. The hard part is giving up the things you want, like personal delivery food or a large car with a big road that has no traffic, or a large yard that you water, or living in the forest with two day delivery.

We don’t really have to give these things up now though, renewable energy and EVs can guve us all this for no emissions. We for the first time ever, have the technology.

We just aren’t applying it fast enough for terrible & lazy reasons.

With a lower population, everyone will have a higher quality of life.

That's horrifying to hear. I also went on a multi day dive trip at gbr and the coral sea in 2007 and it was spectacular; I can't imagine going back and seeing it degraded.

It's not degraded....this is misinformation lol. Please think for yourself and verify.

> Our planet is dying and we're sitting here debating why/who and not doing anywhere near enough to fix it.

If only we were just debating why/who! Thanks to Social Media, filter bubbles, and “alternative facts,” we are back to debating whether it is actually even happening or not.

The same type of people who ran interference for the tobacco industry to prevent the public from believing cigarettes cause cancer are at work confusing people about global warming. In fact it's the same people in some cases.

Happy to report the northern and central GBR coral cover is currently higher than any time measured before 2020. Southern is currently below its long-term average, but 2024 was a record high in coral cover.

https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...

This doesn't mean everything is fine, but it is doing way better than 2017.

I wonder if coral coverage is a meaningful stat itself. Does that directly translate to diversified creatures?

Was in central GBR this year, can't say I'm super impressed but not sure how I should set my expectation

Not necessarily but they do measure diversity too, and it has not changed dramatically.

Typically the biggest change in diversity is due to cyclones which kill of the delicate and fast-growing corals like staghorns, which are also the fastest to grow back.

Wow, I wasn’t aware of this. I’ve always read climate change as the primary driver for bleaching. If that is the case, do we know why/how they’ve recovered?

Corals are killed en masse by other events, particularly cyclones. These have a much bigger affect on coral coverage, in the short term, than ocean temperatures / bleaching (which is transient and more localized).

Bleaching is not death of the coral, it is the expulsion of algae (typically in high temperatures). The coral can find a different species of algae, or the algae can return once temperatures drop.

There are corals living in regions of the ocean with different temperatures, so it is not that high temperature alone would kill all coral, but populations adapted to a given region (like north vs south GBR) are being affected by the speed of the changes.

People believe the doomers a little too much. We should do everything we can to protect the coral reefs but I'm exhausted by the cynicism that's rampant. Even here in the HN threads people are convinced the GBR has collapsed and it is devastation. Couldn't be further from the truth. By the way...the GBR is collapsing and reforming all the time throughout the last ~30K years. It wasn't just some paradise that started to decline when humans showed up

Surely the 2026 El Niño is going to drive hotter GBR temperatures?

Corals are warm water animals, so it's pretty obvious that they'll grow out more when the water gets warmer.

How many humans are worth restoring the coral reef?

Because it’s nice to say these things in Sentiment, until you see past the naïveté to see human lives are what cause the wear and extraction on the environment. Humans live, eat, shit in, consume their environment for their lives.

How many humans are worth restoring the reef for you? And would you sacrifice your own friends and family?

This is an absurd remark.

You don’t need to sacrifice humans, you need humans to behave different. Do you know the energy requirements that go into war? The chemical, carbon and physical changes to the ocean from all we do?

We don’t need to kill more humans, we just need to stop being fucking idiots for a few hundred years.

I think you are still naive and IMO ignorant, as I was getting to in my comment.

So don't straw man please into changing the focus into war because you're uncomfortable. I can see I struck a chord - would you agree you're shifting onto a straw man? And sounds a defensive retort to then reduce my argument to absurdity to dismiss it and invalidate it.

Why should I engage your straw man? Are you uncomfortable? I'm not - but why would I engage you if you failed to demonstrate you heard me. edit: if you're going into an emotionally hostile state, I refuse to take on the emotional labor of being your emotional processing for you - we can agree to mutually disengage.

We need the matriarchy instead of the patriarchy.

Sorry, but the ignorance and intellectual dishonesty of that comment is too thick to even warrant rebutting.

Sounds like instead you're just uncomfortable and with your hypocritical Ad hominem you justify your own intellectual dishonesty.

You responded with Ad Hominem, which is fundamentally intellectually dishonest - and then accused me the exact thing you're doing.

I can only assume this is satire.

"The planet is fine, the people are fscked!"

"The Industrial Revolution and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race -- and every other living being on the planet as well."

At least we are owning the libs.

Why did you go three times? It is overpriced. Diving in Indonesia is much cheaper, and is less affected by bleaching.

Grew up in Australia, live in Canada. It’s just fun to stop up on the north before meeting up with family down south, gives me time to adjust and get some solo vacation time.

Last I looked into this the reef was showing signs of recovery and when I was in Okinawa I saw that a man there has been breeding corals that are more resilient to warmer waters

The GBR is huge. Are you sure you visited the exact same spot (confirmed by GPS coordinates from the trip back in 2007)?

Anecdotally I was also there around 2006/2007 - somewhere near Cairns - and the part I saw was esentially dead, not just bleached. It really depends on where you go.

Btw since many in this thread mention ocean warming I want to mention that after having followed this for many years, and observed changes first hand in different parts of the world, my conclusion is that the main factor is direct human influence, not something more abstract like global warming. Especially water pollution as a result of agriculture, unchecked population growth and tourism.

One of the problems is all the people who say they love the reefs want to go where the reefs are still intact, after other parts have already been destroyed. Which then puts even more pressure on those last remaining healthy reef systems. Just talk to divers and listen to the exotic locations they travel to these days. I think many aren't even aware they're part of the problem. Or maybe they subconsciously shift the blame. Reefs are usually healthiest where there are no or very few people around.

Global warming is not "abstract", and IS the main factor according to exhaustive data from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

It is an extremely complex topic that the average person has almost no understanding of, especially not after reading a few contradictory pop science and news articles written by non-experts.

The good news is you don't have to be an expert in geoscience to see the connection isn't as simplistic as many assume. Look at the data instead of having preconceived ideas. As an example, when you look at sea temperature data for many of the areas worst affected by coral death in recent decades (Maldives, Seychelles, parts of the Caribbean) you will see they have only seen moderate or even no temperature rise, while many other regions have seen more dramatic rise in local sea temperature and yet have healthier coral.

The fact that the GBR in Australia has seen temperature rise and coral death does not necessarily mean that there is a direct causation or even that it's the main cause. Have you considered other causes play a role?

I mean this in the kindest way possible...stop being glad about that stuff. It's technobabble nonsense. It's not cool, innovative, or even truly productive. The "we can fly a rocket backward" shit is so boilerplate obviously iterative from a physics perspective. It's a mistake to be happy for these peoples' achievements anymore and it's old news.

This is the only planet we'll ever meaningfully have and we're killing it for "eternal" growth.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Our planet is not actually dying or anything close to dying. It is however rapidly changing and may reach a point where the planet is no longer survivable to humans, but life will go on without us. I get your point though and yes it is sad that we as a species have largely ignored the impact of our actions at the cost of our planet.

Most parts of the planet have never been survivable to humans. That's why we have invented fire, clothes, houses, air conditioning, water pipes, etc. And that continues to be the case whatever happens to the planet.