Global Warming & Climate Change News Desk – Climate scientists don’t like surprises. It means our deep understanding of how the climate works isn’t quite as complete as we need. Unfortunately, as climate change worsens, surprises and unprecedented events keep happening.

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Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Apr.06: 2024: The Conversation by Dana M Bergstrom Published: January 9, 2024 7.17pm GMT: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

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In March 2022, Antarctica experienced an extraordinary heatwave. Large swathes of East Antarctica experienced temperatures up to 40°C (72°F) above normal, shattering temperature records. It was the most intenseheatwave ever recorded anywhere in the world.

So shocking and rare was the event that it blew the minds of the Antarctic climate science community.

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A major global research project was launched to unravel the reasons behind it and the damage it caused. A team of 54 researchers, including me, delved into the intricacies of the phenomenon. The team was led by Swiss climatologist Jonathan Wille, and involved experts from 14 countries. The collaboration resulted in two groundbreaking papers published today. The results are alarming. But they provide scientists a deeper understanding of the links between the tropics and Antarctica – and give the global community a chance to prepare for what a warmer world may bring.

Head-hurting complexity

The papers tell a complex story that began half a world away from Antarctica. Under La Niña conditions, tropical heat near Indonesia poured into the skies above the Indian Ocean. At the same time, repeated weather troughs pulsing eastwards were generating from southern Africa. These factors combined into a late, Indian Ocean tropical cyclone season.

Between late February and late March 2022, 12 tropical storms had brewed.

Five storms revved up to become tropical cyclones, and heat and moisture from some of these cyclones mashed together. A meandering jet stream picked up this air and swiftly transported it vast distances across the planet to Antarctica.

Below Australia, this jet stream also contributed to blocking the eastward passage of a high-pressure system.

When the tropical air collided with this so-called “blocking high”, it caused the most intense atmospheric river ever observed over East Antarctica. This propelled the tropical heat and moisture southward into the heart of the Antarctic continent. 

Like rivers in the sky: the weather system bringing floods to Queensland will become more likely under climate change

Luck was on Antarctica’s side

The event caused the vulnerable Conger Ice Shelf to finally collapse. But the impacts were otherwise not as bad as they could have been. That’s because the heatwave struck in March, the month when Antarctica transitions to its dark, extremely cold winter. If a future heatwave arrives in summer – which is more likely under climate change – the results could be catastrophic.

Despite the heatwave, most inland temperatures stayed below zero.

The spike included a new all-time temperature high of -9.4°C (15.1°F) on March 18 near Antarctica’s Concordia Research Station. To understand the immensity of this, consider that the previous March maximum temperature at this location was -27.6°C (-17.68°F). At the heatwave’s peak, 3.3 million square kilometres in East Antarctica – an area about the size of India – was affected by the heatwave.

The impacts included widespread rain and surface melt along coastal areas. But inland, the tropical moisture fell as snow – lots and lots of snow.

Interestingly, the weight of the snow offset ice loss in Antarctica for the year. This delivered a temporary reprieve from Antarctica’s contribution to global sea-level rise.

Learning from the results

So what are the lessons here? Let’s begin with the nice bit. The study was made possible by international collaboration across Antarctica’s scientific community, including the open sharing of datasets. This collaboration is a touchstone of the Antarctic Treaty. It serves as a testament to the significance of peaceful international cooperation and should be celebrated.  Less heartwarmingly, the extraordinary heatwave shows how compounding weather events in the tropics can affect the vast Antarctic ice sheet. The heatwave further reduced the extent of sea ice, which was already at record lows. This loss of sea ice was exacerbated this yearresulting in the lowest summer and winter sea ice ever recorded. It shows how disturbances in one year can compound in later years.

The event also demonstrated how tropical heat can trigger the collapse of unstable ice shelves. Floating ice shelves don’t contribute to global sea-level rise, but they acts as dams to the ice sheets behind them, which do contribute.

This research calculated that such temperature anomalies occur in Antarctica about once a century, but concluded that under climate change, they will occur more frequently. 

For example, if a heatwave of similar magnitude hit in summer, how much ice melt would there be?

If an atmospheric river hit the Doomsday glacier in the West Antarctic, what rate of sea level rise would that trigger? And how can governments across the world prepare coastal communities for sea level rise greater than currently calculated? This research contributes another piece to the complex jigsaw puzzle of climate change. And reminds us all, that delays to action on climate change will raise the price we pay.

Record-smashing heatwaves are hitting Antarctica and the Arctic simultaneously. Here’s what’s driving them, and how they’ll impact wildlife

This article has been amended to correct an error in converting a 40°C temperature difference from Celsius to Fahrenheit.

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GlobalWarming & ClimateChange News Desk – Melting polar ice caps are a sad sign of our times, but they may have given global timekeepers an unexpected reprieve, according to new research.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Mar.28: 2024: ABC Climate Change News: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

For decades, experts have been trying to reconcile the precise time, as set by atomic clocks, with the somewhat unreliable speed at which the Earth spins.

Since 1972, authorities have added 27 leap seconds to our time standard – UTC, or Co-ordinated Universal Time – to compensate for a slow-down in the Earth’s spin caused largely by the pull of the Moon on the oceans known as “tidal friction”.

Keeping UTC in step with the Earth’s rotation means, among other things, that we can expect the Sun to come up at a particular time in the morning, and astronomers can easily work out when to point their telescopes at a particular part of the sky. But the addition of leap seconds happens at irregular intervals, with just six months’ notice, causing a headache for global technology systems – from power grids to financial markets, and from satellites to social media networks.

Recently however, Earth’s spin has sped up suggesting we might need to remove a second from UTC, rather than add one to it.

This has caused widespread concern that computers might not cope well with this “negative leap second” and there could be unprecedented disruption to global systems. But what if this dreaded negative leap second was postponed – even for just a few years? A new study, published in the journal Nature, suggests we may well get such a delay from the melting of Earth’s ice caps, which are having a slowing effect on the planet’s rotation.

Melting ice putting the brakes on Earth’s spin

Duncan Agnew, a professor of geophysics at the University of California, San Diego, set out to model all the factors impacting the speed of Earth’s rotation. Some factors cause the Earth to spin faster, others cause it to slow down, and their net effect should explain the speed the planet spins at. “ It’s almost a book-keeping exercise,” Professor Agnew said. His work adds weight to the idea the recent speeding up of Earth’s rotation is due to changes in the Earth’s liquid core.  On the other hand, apart from tidal friction, he found another factor slowing the Earth’s spin was the increased rate of polar melting, mostly from the Greenland ice cap but also from Antarctica. “ That was the most interesting result,” he said. “ Global warming is … changing the rotation of the whole Earth.”

So how does that work?

As polar ice melts, more water flows towards the equator and the impact can be likened to a figure skater who stretches out their arms and legs to slow down. The slowing is due to a property of spinning systems called conservation of angular momentum. “ Because the shape of the Earth is changing, that causes the rotation to vary,” Professor Agnew said.When a spinning skater puts their arms and legs out they slow down the speed of their rotation.

He found the Earth was spinning ahead of the atomic clock and this would eventually require a leap second to be removed from UTC, in order to keep the two with a second of each other.

But Professor Agnew also found the impact of the Earth’s melting polar ice has postponed the need for this negative leap second by three years. According to his modelling, a second will need to be removed from UTC in 2029, rather than 2026. “ If global warming hadn’t occurred over the last 30 years, we’d be very close to a negative leap second already.”

The spectre of the negative leap second

The practice of adjusting UTC with leap seconds was put in place in a time before the internet. In the ’70s, it was important UTC matched the period of the Earth’s rotation for purposes of celestial navigation, Patrizia Tavella, who is in charge of UTC at France’s Bureau International des Poids et Measures (BIPM), said. But since the advent of GPS and precise technologies that rely on atomic time, adjusting UTC has become a greater headache. Adding leap seconds has led to computer glitches with widespread effects, including outages on social media site Reddit and Qantas servers in 2012, and web services company Cloudflare in 2017.An atomic clock at the National Measurement Institute in Sydney.

There’s also little standardisation around how organisations adjust to UTC changes, with companies like Meta and Google taking different approaches.

“All that creates a great confusion on what time it is on the day of the leap seconds,” Dr Tavella said. Subtracting a second could cause unprecedented problems. “ A negative leap second has never been implemented. “ There are systems which have not been designed for this case, and the risk of failure is surely a concern for all the users and the metrologists.” Dr Tavella welcomed Professor Agnew’s findings that climate change has delayed the need for a negative leap second. “ If confirmed, it can be good news, as we have more time to study and take a sound decision on the future of the UTC.” The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service currently makes announcements on leap seconds, giving 6 months notice of changes.

Michael Wouters from Australia’s National Measurement Institute shared Dr Tavella’s concerns.

But he emphasised the lack of certainty in predicting the required timing for negative leap seconds – which is why actual decisions about leap seconds are only made six months out. “[Professor Agnew] really only looks at the effect of the polar melting on the timing of a leap second … and does not consider uncertainties in the other processes that affect Earth rotation,” Dr Wouters said. But he agreed with the key finding that polar melting may give some reprieve on the requirement for addition of a negative leap second. 

Studies shows reach of of global warming impact

Professor Agnew said his model involved the “simplest possible” extrapolation and acknowledged there was a “fairly large” amount of error, due mainly to the activity of the Earth’s core being “fundamentally unpredictable”. Despite all this, an Australian expert in the study of the Earth’s changing shape and rotation described the work as “robust” and “elegant” in its key finding. “ Enough ice is melting to change Earth’s rotation rate and so our length of day,” Matt King, a professor of polar geodesy at the University of Tasmania, said. “ We know [melting ice] also changes the location of the axis upon which Earth spins. “ These are profound things are happening outside the sight of most of us, but that doesn’t mean they are trivial.”

What happens next?

International time-keeping authorities are in the process of moving away from binding UTC so tightly to the rotation of the Earth. By 2035 they hope to have a new system that requires fewer adjustments to UTC, but that will have no noticeable effects on our experience of daily things like sunrise and sunset times. But what happens in the meantime?

Professor Agnew said the overall trend would be for Earth’s rotation to slow, and the need for negative leap seconds in the long-term was “unlikely”.

He said authorities should forget about introducing them and simply allow UTC and the speed of the Earth’s rotation to diverge more before making adjustments. And what if we gave up entirely on linking atomic clock time with the Earth’s rotation? Ultimately, it could result in some pretty strange phenomena.

GlobalWarming & ClimateChange News Desk – The global effort to keep climate change to safe levels – ideally within 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures – is moving far too slowly. And even if we stopped emitting CO² today, the long-term impacts of the gas already in the air would continue for decades. For these reasons, we will soon have to focus not only on halting but on reversing global warming.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Feb.26: 2024: The Conversation by Tim Flannery Published: January 21, 2024 7.03pm GMT: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

We can do that in two ways. The first is by “drawdown” – strengthening natural processes on Earth that withdraw CO² from the atmosphere. The second is through vast experiments with the climate known as geo-engineering, some of which sound like science fiction, and could be extremely dangerous if ever tried.

The dangers of some forms of geo-engineering

Geo-engineering proposals to arrest climate change range from the seemingly sensible – painting our roofs and roads white – to the highly speculative: solar radiation modification, or putting mirrors in space to reflect some of the Sun’s heat away from Earth.

Probably the most commonly proposed form of geo-engineering involves putting sulphur into the stratosphere to dim the power of the sun. The natural 1991 eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines showed the effects of sulphur in action.

The eruption measurably cooled the Earth’s surface for almost two years. But we don’t have to wait for an erupting volcano: all we need do is add some sulphur to the emissions of the world’s airline fleet, and release it once planes are in the stratosphere. The sulphur layer, which would also reflect some of the Sun’s heat back to space, would be a relatively inexpensive global cooling mechanism, instantaneous in its effect and implementable right now. Yet this approach does nothing to remove CO² from the atmosphere, or to reduce the rising acidity of the oceans.

It’s like a Band-Aid over a festering sore. And, beyond its cooling effect, its impact on the climate system as a whole is unknown: no one to my knowledge has modelled the effects of using the jet fleet in this way.

No international treaty exists to regulate such experiments. In April 2022, the US start-up company, Make Sunsets, released weather balloonsdesigned to reach the stratosphere, carrying a few grams of sulphur particles. There was no public scrutiny or scientific monitoring of the work. The company is already trying to sell “cooling credits” for future flights that could carry larger volumes of sulphur. And what if climate change brings mass famine and civil disobedience to China? It is already seeding clouds to make rain on a massive scale. China might think it is doing the right thing by putting sulfur into the stratosphere. But that decision might lead to war with other countries. What if this form of geoengineering affected the monsoon in India and caused famine? We just don’t know what the climatic and political impacts would be.

From laggard to leader? Why Australia must phase out fossil fuel exports, starting now

Drawdown’s potential to store carbon

Drawdown, by contrast, involves withdrawing CO² from the atmosphere and storing it in other planetary organs, such as rocks, oceans or plants. Drawdown is much longer term than geoengineering, and most initiatives are only in the research and development stage. The most advanced and practical, by far, is forest protection and reafforestation. Today humans emit about 51 billion tonnes of CO² a year. Protecting and regenerating forests draws down 2 billion tonnes a year. Other approaches, such as direct air capture of CO², draw down much smaller volumes.  So forest protection and reafforestation is our best bet for getting us closer to limiting warming to 1.5°C. A recent paper in the Nature journal argues we could draw down as much as 226 gigatonnes by allowing existing forests in areas where few humans live to recover to maturity, and by regrowing forests in areas where they have been removed or fragmented.

Australian homes can be made climate-ready, reducing bills and emissions – a new report shows how

We should not ignore other drawdown pathways, however. Seaweed is a promising option for drawing down a billion tonnes or so of CO² by 2050.

But we need a lot more scientific research to understand how to do that, and what its wider impacts might be. Today only one commercial kelp farm exists – Kelp Blue, off the coast of Namibia, where four hectares of kelp are not only storing carbon but are used to make biodegradable food packaging and crop stimulants. Silicate rocks, which are common in many places, including Victoria’s Western District, also offer great hope. Once the rocks are crushed, a kilogram of a mineral they contain, olivine, will sequester 1.5 kilograms of CO² from the atmosphere within a few weeks of being spread on a farm field or put onto a beach. The crushing speeds up a natural sequestering process of thousands of years. Field trials conducted in Brazil and other countries show using crushed rocks on crops can bring another benefit – significant increases in the yields of corn, cocoa and many other crops. The problem is that the way we quarry and transport rocks today creates a lot of fossil fuel emissions. Once a farm is more than a few hundred kilometres from the quarry most of the benefit is gone. So until we can decarbonise transport and industrial energy, the benefit of silicate rocks will be minimal. A process known as “direct air capture” sucks CO² out of the air and either puts it deep into rock strata or uses it for greenhouses or as the basis of concrete, plastic and other products that can sequester carbon long term. Nineteen plants using this technology are already operating around the world, including in Switzerland, the US and Iceland. But again, a lot of industrial capacity and a clean energy to run the plants are needed to get the value.

Green growth or degrowth: what is the right way to tackle climate change?

What the Albanese government should do

For these reasons, the Albanese government should focus its drawdown efforts on forest protection and regrowth. This could be a theme of the UN climate conference Australia is bidding to co-host with Pacific nations in 2026. Our temperate forests contain more carbon per hectare than almost anywhere on Earth. Stopping old-growth logging would be a magnificent contribution to arresting climate change. The government should also back research and development on seaweed and silicate rocks so that the country’s huge resources can be responsibly deployed in future. Finally, Australia must push urgently for a global treaty to restrain sulphur geoengineering. Today governments are busy just trying to reduce emissions and haven’t looked closely at drawdown and geoengineering. But things are moving fast, and it’s time to start.

Australia’s new dawn: becoming a green superpower with a big role in cutting global emissions

GlobalWarming & ClimateChange News Desk – If you’re in the northern hemisphere, you may have noticed plants flowering earlier. It’s not your imagination: a 2022 study revealed that spring blooms are arriving a month sooner in the UK due to climate change.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Mar.26: 2024: The Conversation by Jack Marley Published: March 6, 2024 5.45pm GMT: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

For a new series on the seasons and how they’re being warped by a warming climate, over the coming months we’ll be examining the consequences of these wrinkles in nature’s calendar.

How plants sense the seasons

Other species can’t coordinate their activities around a date and time. Plants, the bedrock of most ecosystems, stay up to date by paying close attention to changes in light and temperature says Paul Ashton, head of biology at Edge Hill University. Plants are among the first to know when the days start to contract in autumn, as they use a pigment called phytochrome to detect changes in red light.” While this subtle shift escapes humans (our eyes are not sensitive to this part of the spectrum) a plant can detect this transition and start to change.”

“ Just as the autumn can engineer a drop in the level of the hormone serotonin in our blood, a plant that has sensed winter’s approach will increase the production of a hormone called abscisic acid,” Ashton says. Abscisic acid makes deciduous trees shed their leaves and grow tough winter buds that are resistant to frost.

Temperature tells many plants when to start growing in the spring. Ashton says it isn’t clear how plants sense this, but again, pigments in their cells probably play a role.”[Plants] sense the days getting warmer and alter their spring development in a manner akin to humans feeling warmth on their skin and so stepping out with fewer layers of clothing,” he says.

Plants are flowering earlier than ever – here’s how they sense the seasons

That’s where climate change has complicated things: rising air temperatures have yielded shorter, milder winters. Since 1986, plants in the UK now greet spring 26 days earlier, on average.

This relatively rapid shift has severed an arrangement plants and animals have negotiated over thousands of years.

“Insects that are used to feasting on April-flowering plants may find themselves arriving a month late if warmer temperatures mean that the plants now flower in March,” say Chris Wyver and Laura Reeves, PhD candidates who study pollination and climate change at the University of Reading.

Plants are flowering a month earlier – here’s what it could mean for pollinating insects

Out of the loop

Hungry bugs are bad enough. But if insects are emerging too late to visit expectant flowers then it’s the entire ecosystem that suffers. “ Take, for example, the birds of European oak woods, such as the blue tit, great tit and pied flycatcher,” says Charlie Gardner, a lecturer in conservation biology at the University of Kent. Caterpillars are emerging earlier than they did in the past, and the birds that eat them can’t keep up. “ For every ten-day advance in caterpillar emergence, the birds are only able to bring forward their egg laying by three to five days, depending on the species,” he says.

Climate breakdown is knocking the natural world out of sync – and we should all be worried

Freak weather, a more common feature of our heating climate, can also confuse the finely calibrated senses of wildlife and trick some species into thinking the season shifted while they weren’t paying attention. 

Stuart Thompson, a senior lecturer in plant biochemistry at the University of Westminster, highlights how the drought that parched Europe in 2022 convinced some trees to lose their leaves – giving the impression of autumn in mid-August.

Drought: why some UK trees are losing their leaves in August

Across the broader trends that scientists have documented at least one thing is consistent: winter is being squeezed from both sides as the world heats up. 

“Climate researchers now have nearly five decades of satellite observations at their disposal,” says Jadu Dash, a professor of remote sensing at the University of Southampton. “ Analysis of this data reveals that spring has advanced by approximately 15 days, while autumn has been delayed by a similar amount.” But climate change won’t simply usher in seasons where everything happens either a month earlier or later. Some species will delay hibernation and emerge in spring sooner, but others will stick to their original schedule, taking their cues from day length rather than temperature. 

The result will be chaos, says Gardner:

“If we are to have any chance of preserving the living planet and avoiding the extinction of a million species, then we need to do more than stop climate breakdown. We need to invest in conservation too, to help wild plants and animals adapt to the changes we’ve already locked in. Not doing so would be bad news for all of us.”

Global Warming & Climate Change News Desk – London, 22 March – A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation challenges the widespread but mistaken belief that weather extremes – such as flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires – are more common and more intense today because of climate change.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Mar.23: 2024: GWPF News Ralph Alexander: Weather extremes in historical context (pdf) TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Drawing on newspaper archives and long-term observational data, the report, written by Dr Ralph Alexander, documents multiple examples of past extremes that matched or exceeded anything experienced in the present-day world.

Dr Ralph Alexander said:

“That so many people are unaware of past extremes shows that collective memories of extreme weather are short-lived.” “ The perception that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity is primarily a consequence of new information technology – the Internet and smartphones – which have communication and made us much more aware of such disasters in all corners of the world than we were 50 or 100 years ago.”

Contact: Dr Ralph Alexander
ralexander@ameritech.net

GlobalWarming & ClimateChange News Desk – Coral reefs, like sprawling cities of the sea, support an estimated 25% of all plants and animals in the ocean. Worldwide, 1 billion people depend on these ecosystems for food, income and coastal protection. 

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Mar.21: 2024: The Conversation by Heidi Burdett Published: March 19, 2024 7.16pm GMT: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Unfortunately, coral reefs are dogged with endless sources of stress, from climate change and pollution to overfishing and unsustainable coastal development. The outlook for corals and the reefs they build is not good: without drastic action on greenhouse gas emissions scientists predict that conditions in tropical coastal waters will become inhospitable to corals by the year 2100. If we want coral reefs in our future, we need to be proactive. Scientists, conservationists and local communities are working to recover unhealthy reefs. There are many options for doing this: encouraging coral sex in the lab to produce enormous batches of coral larvae that can be released into the wild, for example, or selectively breeding and genetically engineering specimens to create stress-resistant “super corals”. 

Although coral restoration has become a multi-million dollar business, many restoration projects fail to transform the ecosystem’s long-term prospects, wasting time and resources and raising questions about the ethics of simply putting corals “back out to die”, as Ian Enochs, a US marine biologist who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s reef monitoring programme in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea recently described it. 

In our new paper, we propose a new way of thinking about coral restoration: making environmental conditions, such as temperature and nutrient levels, the determining factor for whether reef restoration should go ahead. This might seem obvious, but our survey of academic research on coral restoration from 1984 to 2022 suggested these questions have been neglected. 

Reefs of tomorrow

Coral restoration so far has been highly reactive. Efforts have focused on recovering reefs in areas where they have previously been, despite those reefs having recently died. When the cause of a dead reef is distinct and known, such as a one-off pollution event, this might be an appropriate response (so long as the cause of death has been removed).  But degraded coral reefs are more often the result of stress that is not easy to deal with, such as marine heatwaves caused by climate change or vast coastal developments. It’s no surprise that efforts to restore reefs in areas plagued by these problems often fail – the original issue is still present.  We think there are two ways to give coral reef restoration projects the best possible chance of success. First, when restoring corals to a reef that has died, do so with an in-depth knowledge of the area’s environmental conditions – both as they exist today and as they are expected to in future. This information can indicate which coral species are most sensible to use, how they should be grown, when to plant them in the wild and how to attach them to the seabed.

Option two is to nurture new coral reefs in areas where they have not been historically present, but where environmental conditions in coming years and decades may be favourable.

We might find these areas at the edges of where coral reefs are currently found. Other areas may emerge as the resolution of environmental monitoring improves.

Go with the flow

Innovation in coral restoration is evidently needed; a host of ethical, political, economic and ecological questions need addressing. It’s time to ensure these decisions are grounded in a robust bedrock of environmental knowledge – to break the restoration cycle of failure we are locked into. We must recognise that, although a coral reef used to be in a particular place, it might now (or in the near future) be more effective to “restore” that reef elsewhere. Coral restoration could become more goal-oriented and forward-looking. There are technical limitations to measuring environmental conditions and predicting what they will be like in future. Nevertheless, this fresh outlook allows us to work with environmental change rather than fight against it. If successful, it could help coral reef ecosystems endure for future generations to enjoy.