14 October 20
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14 October 20
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Charles Pierce | Is It Time to Call in the UN Elections Monitors?
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Republicans have said vote-by-mail will be a problem-and in California, they seem determined to make it so."
sn't it time to call in the United Nations monitors?The post, from Jordan Tygh, a regional field director for the California Republican Party, encouraged people to message him for “convenient locations” to drop their own ballots. The problem is the drop box in the photo is not official – and it could be against the law. The California Secretary of State has received reports in recent days about possible unauthorized ballot drop boxes in Fresno, Los Angeles and Orange counties, agency spokesman Sam Mahood said Sunday evening. Reports place such boxes at local political party offices, candidate headquarters and churches.
Secretary of State Alex Padilla said his office is coordinating with local elections officials to look into the reports. Only county elections officials can oversee ballot drop boxes, choosing the number, location, hours of operation and other details. County registrars are charged with making sure every box follows strict state guidelines for security, including making sure they can’t be tampered with and tracing the chain of custody of all ballots.
I'm serious. This is a job for those folks that Jimmy Carter ran with overseas, who knew kabuki democracy when it punched them in the nose. In yet another sentence I never thought I'd write: Tom Friedman is right. The call to ratfcking is right out in the open now, straight from the Truman balcony and streaming outward, like industrial runoff into a river, to all points of the compass.
But Friedman is too limited in his thinking. While the president* has brought it out into the open, rigging elections through manifestly discriminatory means has been a vital part of Republican electoral strategy since William Rehnquist was bullyragging Hispanic voters in Arizona back in the early 1960s. It has reached a positive frenzy ever since Chief Justice John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee in Shelby County v. Holder. Now, all that's different is that nobody is pretending any more.
Reports came out Saturday night about a metal box in front of Freedom’s Way Baptist Church in Castaic that had a sign matching the one on the Orange County box. The church posted on social media that the box was “approved and brought by the GOP.” The post said church officials don’t have a key to the box and that GOP officials picks up the ballots. A pastor for the church didn’t respond to a request for comment. On its website, the Fresno County Republican Party also shared a list of “secure” ballot collection locations. None are official county drop box sites, with the local GOP instead listing its own headquarters, multiple gun shops and other local businesses.
And this is the ethical and moral context in which Judge Amy Coney Barrett is willing and able to take a lifetime position on the Supreme Court from this President of the United States. No person of character would do that.
Investigators at the scene where Mr. Reinoehl was killed by law enforcement in Lacey, Wash., in September. (photo: Ted S. Warren/AP)
'Straight to Gunshots': How a US Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist
Evan Hill, Mike Baker, Derek Knowles and Stella Cooper, The New York Times
Excerpt: "A few days after a shooting left a far-right Trump supporter dead on the streets of Portland, Oregon, Michael Reinoehl, an antifa activist who had been named in the news media as a focus of the investigation, feared that vigilantes were after him, not to mention the police."
New accounts from the scene raise questions about whether Michael Reinoehl, suspected of killing a far-right Trump supporter, pulled out a gun before officers fatally shot him.
ichael Reinoehl was on the run.
A few days after a shooting left a far-right Trump supporter dead on the streets of Portland, Ore., Mr. Reinoehl, an antifa activist who had been named in the news media as a focus of the investigation, feared that vigilantes were after him, not to mention the police. Even some of his close friends did not know where he was.
But the authorities knew.
On Sept. 3, about 120 miles north of Portland, Mr. Reinoehl was getting into his Volkswagen station wagon when a pair of unmarked sport utility vehicles roared through the quiet streets, screeching to a halt just in front of his bumper. Members of a U.S. Marshals task force jumped out and unleashed a hail of bullets that shattered windows, whizzed past bystanders and left Mr. Reinoehl dead in the street.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, talks with Chief Justice John Roberts on the steps of the Supreme Court following his official investiture at the Supreme Court June 15, 2017, in Washington, DC. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
The Supreme Court Just Let the Trump Administration Shut Down the Census Early
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Excerpt: "Low-income people and minorities are now more likely to go uncounted."
he Supreme Court handed down a brief, unsigned order on Tuesday that is likely to shut down the 2020 census count. Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented publicly from the Court’s order in Ross v. National Urban League, although it is possible that as many as two other justices dissented without making that dissent public.The case involves a late effort by political appointees to shut down the census count earlier than professionals within the Census Bureau determined that that count can be completed during a pandemic. The practical impact of the Court’s decision is that marginalized groups — including people of color, low-income individuals, and those who live on tribal lands — are especially likely to go uncounted.
As Sotomayor explains in her dissenting opinion, the census count was originally supposed to end on July 31, but the Census Bureau decided to extend that date until October 31 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As one high-ranking bureau official explained, “It was ‘ludicrous’ to expect the Bureau to ‘complete 100 percent of the nation’s data collection earlier than [October 31]’ in the middle of a pandemic.”
For several months, political appointees within the Trump administration supported this decision. They even backed legislation that would have extended the December 31 deadline for the Census Bureau to report the full results of the 2020 census to President Trump. But in early August, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross abruptly changed course. He announced that the census count would end on September 30, and the administration stopped lobbying Congress to extend the December deadline.
In response to these developments, a lower federal court ordered the Census Bureau to continue counting individuals until October 31 — the date when the count would have ended if Ross hadn’t intervened to shut down the count in September. Now that Ross is no longer bound by this order, he can call a halt to the census count.
The Court’s order halting the census count is consistent with its laissez-faire approach to voting rights
The Court’s one-paragraph order offers no explanation of why a majority of the justices chose to end the count. It doesn’t even purport to be the final word in this litigation. Rather, the Court’s order ending the count merely stays the lower court’s order while this case is fully considered by an appeals court and then potentially appealed to the justices again.
As a practical matter, however, the Court’s order in Ross is likely the final word on the census count. By the time this case is fully litigated in the appeals court (and potentially in the Supreme Court), the census will almost certainly be over and the case will be moot.
Yet, while the Court does not explain its decision, said decision is not particularly surprising. The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has largely called upon the federal judiciary to defer to other government officials in cases asking how the government should respond to the pandemic. And the Court’s majority has shown particular indifference towards voting rights.
As Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained in a recent voting rights opinion, courts should typically defer to “a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19.” A similar logic could also apply to a federal Cabinet secretary’s decision about how the census should adapt during a pandemic.
And, make no mistake, Ross is a voting rights case. The census doesn’t simply determine how federal resources are allocated; it also determines how congressional representation and Electoral College votes are allocated among the states. As Sotomayor explains in dissent, “the percentage of nonresponses” during a census “is likely much higher among marginalized populations and in hard-to-count areas, such as rural and tribal lands.”
So the Court’s order in Ross is likely to transfer power away from marginalized communities (that often vote for Democrats over Republicans), and toward wealthier and whiter communities (that are more likely to support Republicans).
If the Trump administration can be believed — and the Supreme Court has caught the administration lying about the census in the past — the impact of the decision in Ross is likely to be marginal. The administration, Sotomayor notes, claims that “over 99 percent of households in 49 States are already accounted for” in the current census count.
But even if the administration is telling the truth, Sotomayor continues, “a fraction of a percent of the Nation’s 140 million households amounts to hundreds of thousands of people left uncounted.” And these households are likely to be disproportionately lower-income and less white than the people who are counted.
British filmmaker Duncan Roy, right, in 2012 announces a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of arrestees who said they were improperly denied bail because of federal immigration holds. (photo: Reed Saxon/AP)
Los Angeles to Pay Million to Immigrants Who Were Illegally Detained by Police
Alene Tchekmedyian, Los Angeles Times
Tchekmedyian writes: "Los Angeles County on Tuesday agreed to pay out million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Sheriff's Department routinely held people in jail beyond their release dates solely because of pending immigration investigations."
os Angeles County on Tuesday agreed to pay out $14 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Sheriff’s Department routinely held people in jail beyond their release dates solely because of pending immigration investigations.More than 18,500 people who were held illegally for days, weeks or months from October 2010 to June 2014 because of requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement could qualify for a share of the settlement, attorneys for the plaintiffs said. The Sheriff’s Department agreed to stop honoring detainer requests in 2014.
“It should send a very strong message to law enforcement agencies around the country who continue to blindly comply with ICE’s requests that are patently unlawful,” said Jennie Pasquarella, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represented the plaintiffs.
Lindsay Battles, another attorney for the plaintiffs, said the case is significant because it establishes that for years, the Sheriff’s Department “callously denied immigrants constitutional protections that universally apply to all other jail detainees — including the right to post bail and the right to be released from custody under the same terms as any other arrestee or jail detainee.”
The ACLU said that each class member is eligible to receive from $250 to $25,000, depending in part on how long they were held. Any leftover money will go toward programs that provide legal aid to people in L.A. County facing immigration consequences because of an arrest or conviction, plaintiffs’ attorneys said.
The lawsuit was filed against former Sheriff Lee Baca in 2012 by British filmmaker Duncan Roy, who said he spent nearly three months in L.A. County jails without a chance to post bail after his 2011 arrest. Roy said that the Sheriff’s Department denied his requests to post $35,000 bail because of an ICE hold.
A federal judge concluded in 2018 that holding inmates beyond their release dates under civil immigration detainers violated their 4th Amendment rights. A judge still needs to sign off on the settlement agreement, which was unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
The Sheriff’s Department’s policies and practices have changed significantly since the lawsuit was filed.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva said Tuesday that the settlement should be paid by the county’s general fund, not out of the Sheriff’s Department budget, arguing that it’s not fair to slap his department for the mistakes of previous sheriffs when he has been proactive about keeping ICE out of the jails.
“Both sheriffs, Baca and [Jim] McDonnell, they cooperated with ICE, ICE was in the facilities, they facilitated the transfers of inmates to ICE’s custody,” Villanueva told the board. “I kicked ICE out of the jails and I banned all transfers of inmates to custody of ICE.”
Villanueva stopped the Sheriff’s Department’s participation in a federal grant that required sending federal officials personal information about inmates who were in the country illegally. In April, he put a moratorium on ICE transfers over concerns about conditions at immigration detention facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. He made the moratorium permanent in August, banning inmate transfers to ICE unless the federal agency obtained a judicial warrant.
Terron Belle is photographed outside a brownstone in Harlem, N.Y., on Oct. 11, 2020. (photo: Kendall Bessent/The Intercept)
Stop-and-Frisk Never Really Ended. Now It's Gone Digital.
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Speri writes: "A federal class-action lawsuit accuses New York police of unconstitutionally detaining people in order to run their IDs."
erron Belle was walking home from an upper Manhattan subway station one evening, three years ago, when an unmarked police car pulled up behind him. Four officers in plainclothes surrounded him on the sidewalk, ordering him to turn around against a gate so they could search him. Belle complied, and the officers found nothing on him, but they then demanded his ID, telling him that they were looking for guns and doing a “warrant check.”
“I didn’t have any warrants,” Belle told The Intercept. “I was a bit confused, like, why were they searching me for a warrant?”
Still, he complied. “I wasn’t going to argue,” he said, fearing that if he had, the encounter would have quickly turned dangerous for him. “It could have gone different, it was night time, there was nobody around us.”
When they found no warrant for Belle officers returned his ID and let him go without so much as an apology.
Police did the same to Edison Quito, a few blocks away. He was standing in front of his building, waiting for his wife, when a group of officers walked into the building. Two different officers approached him to ask him what he was doing. “I’m standing in front of my building, nothing else,” he said he told them. The officers demanded Quito’s ID. “And I’m like, what’s the reason for you asking for my ID, I’m not doing anything wrong,” he said he replied. One of the officers warned him that if he didn’t comply, he would be arrested, so Quito pulled out his New York State learner permit, which confirmed he lived in the building in front of which he was standing. Officers ran the ID but found no warrants. They handed it back and drove away.
“They always go around stopping random people, but around that area they mostly always go target Spanish people,” Quito told The Intercept. “Whenever they see a Hispanic, they’ll go ahead and stop him.”
Plainclothes officers also jumped out of an unmarked car to surround Richmond Appiah, in the South Bronx, while he was walking to a corner store. They pushed his hands against their car and searched his pockets. As he grew agitated, Appiah said police told him that if he knew he hadn’t committed any crimes, there would be no reason for him to panic. “I’m panicking because of what you guys are doing to me right now,” he said he responded. “You guys just automatically rushed out as if I was a suspect or a drug dealer. … You guys are holding me hostage as if I just hit somebody or did something wrong.”
When the officers demanded his ID, Appiah asked them why. They told him to obey their orders, he said, and if he didn’t like them, to file a complaint.
The same scene, plainclothes officers rushing out of unmarked cars to stop mostly Black and Latino New Yorkers and demand their IDs, has played out thousands of times, according to a federal class-action lawsuit currently before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In each case documented in the lawsuit, officers stopped and searched people in mostly poor communities, then, even after finding no unlawful items on them, they demanded to see identification. Officers sometimes told the suspects that they were looking for guns — and ran their IDs to search for arrest warrants or possibly matches in other law enforcement databases, including ones tracking alleged gang affiliation or connections to open cases. But police ran those checks without any basis or reasonable suspicion, making the temporary detentions and digital searches unconstitutional, the lawsuit claims. “By exploiting surveillance technology, the NYPD has replaced traditional — and largely discredited — police practices such as stop-and-frisk with invasive digital searches that rely on surveillance systems,” the complaint says. “The NYPD’s policy and practice of detaining people without individualized lawful justification in order to search NYPD databases violates the United States Constitution and is the latest tactic in a long history of unwarranted search and seizure practices.”
“They have nothing besides the fact that these are young men in certain neighborhoods,” said Cyrus Joubin, an attorney for the plaintiffs, arguing that the practice violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches, and the 14th, which prohibits racial discrimination. “They have at most a baseless hunch and they’re just going on a fishing expedition.”
The practice appears to be sanctioned by the NYPD itself, the lawsuit notes, with officers sometimes telling the individuals they stopped that they were just “following procedure.” The lawsuit accuses department officials of failing to properly train and supervise officers on the legality of these searches.
“We have reason to believe that it’s just common practice for them to run warrant checks on the vast majority of people whom they stop,” said Molly Griffard, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project who is also representing plaintiffs in the case. “The NYPD’s own data confirms that the vast majority of people who they stop each year are Black and Latinx. So, when they run warrant checks and record searches on the majority of people who they stop, it is a continuation of their racist stop-and-frisk practices, but with an invasive digital component.”
The NYPD declined to comment.
Digital Frisks
The stops and physical searches described in the lawsuit are reminiscent of the widespread stop-and-frisk practice of the Bloomberg era in New York City, at the height of which, in 2011, officers stopped and searched more than 685,000 people: almost all Black and Latino men. A federal judge ruled the practice unconstitutional in 2012 — a landmark victory for civil rights that led to a series of police reforms in the city, including the appointment of an independent monitor and the use of body cameras. But despite both Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio claiming credit for ending stop-and-frisk, the practice has continued. In particular, while stops are down overall, racial disparities remain rampant: During de Blasio’s first term in office, Black and Latino New Yorkers accounted for more than 90 percent of reported stops in at least 30 precincts, and for a majority of stops even in mostly white neighborhoods. In 2019, the number of reported stops was up by more than 20 percent over the previous year. And the number of stops, critics warn, is underreported.
But while stop-and-frisk is nothing new, the lawsuit argues that not only are police still stopping and searching New Yorkers with no basis, but that they are doing so in order to run searches on their IDs that do not meet legal standards. Attorneys believe officers are motivated at least in part by arrest quotas the NYPD has consistently denied are in place despite significant evidence to the contrary.
Warrants for an arrest can be issued whenever someone fails to show up in court — often over low-level summonses for things like littering or carrying an open container. That kind of low-level, “broken windows” policing has left New Yorkers with hundreds of thousands of outstanding warrants — up to 1.6 million in 2018 — despite city efforts to clear the backlog.
“It has created this incentive structure, where police feel that if they just detain and do warrant checks on random people on the street, they feel that because of these huge numbers of outstanding warrants there’s a good chance they might just through luck capture somebody who has an outstanding warrant,” said Joubin, noting that even if police did get a hit, the search itself, when conducted with no reasonable suspicion, would remain unconstitutional.
The widespread practice of stopping people in order to check their IDs against digital databases reveals police’s growing reliance on data-driven, so-called predictive technology over the last several years. “Agency practice has adapted to allow officers to conduct comprehensive searches of City databases from remote locations, including patrol cars,” the lawsuit alleges. But these “digital frisks,” as attorneys have dubbed them, raise questions about the accuracy and due process by which officers feed a number of law enforcement databases that remain shrouded in secrecy, despite repeated calls for transparency.
Officers demanding the IDs of the individuals they stopped usually told them they were looking for warrants, before taking the IDs with them back to their cars, effectively detaining people for as long as 10 minutes at a time. Officers likely ran the IDs against the Domain Awareness System, or DAS, a searchable citywide database police can access from their smartphones, which contains details of at least two million warrants, 11 million arrest records, and 100 million summonses. Or they could be calling the department’s Administrative Impact Office or Central Dispatch to run names against the “NYPD Z FINEST” system, which also includes warrant and summons records. But attorneys believe officers are not just checking for warrants but also for investigation cards, or “I-cards,” which are records of individuals who may be subjects or even simply witnesses in an investigation. And they believe officers may be checking IDs against a sprawling and controversial database which includes the names of tens of thousands of New Yorkers whom police claim are associated with gangs, usually on the basis of broad and arbitrary criteria and in the absence of criminality.
Whatever officers may be looking for, checking the IDs of individuals who are not committing crimes or are not reasonably believed to be connected to criminal activity is unconstitutional, the attorneys maintain. And yet the practice has continued, even after the NYPD announced on the heels of the George Floyd protests this summer that it was disbanding its notorious plainclothes “anti-crime” unit.
“It’s really these plainclothes officers who feel empowered to do this,” said Joubin. “Somehow they feel like they can get away with it. And they often have.”
“They Are Not Supposed to Do That”
Much like more severe incidents of officer brutality, daily harassment and humiliation of the sort doled out by officers against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit has long shaped tensions between Black and Latino New Yorkers and the police, tensions that once again blew up this past summer following the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis.
The plaintiffs said that they were breaking no laws when police stopped them. They knew that officers had no reason to search them, but they did not want to put themselves at risk by arguing. “I just go to work, I come home, that’s it,” Belle told The Intercept. When officers mentioned they were looking for guns, he added, “That’s all I needed to hear. I just complied after that.”
Plaintiffs said these encounters with police left them scared and humiliated, even though they led to no arrests or further police action. And they feared they could have turned violent.
Appiah, the plaintiff from the South Bronx, was confused when an unmarked car abruptly braked as he walked across a public housing project, and as a group of officers surrounded him. He was scared, but he knew he had done nothing wrong and felt that he had to defend himself. “As the young black man that I am, what options do I really have besides to speak up?” he told The Intercept. “And that’s all I was doing basically, speaking up, saying, What are you doing?”
The encounter was turning tense when a bystander pulled out his phone to record it. The officers had violated Appiah’s rights, the man said. “They are not supposed to do that to you,” he told him. The man, who spoke to The Intercept but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, tried to record the incident but ended up taking a photo instead, which he later shared with Appiah. “They are not supposed to stop you for no reason,” added the man, who had once worked with the Bronx Defenders on a campaign to pass the Right To Know Act, which requires officers to identify themselves and explain the reason for a stop. “And they are supposed to give you their information.”
The man, in his 40s, added that he had also been stopped “countless times” and felt the need to intervene. “I know what it looks like, they’ve been doing that my whole life,” he said. “If I wasn’t there, they would have harassed him even longer than they did.”
Appiah, who lost many friends to gun violence, said police “have never done anything but made me scared for my life.”
“They have labeled all the young men in this community as either violent or in some type of gang,” said Appiah. “So if you’re outside minding your business, there’s a high chance that the police will pull you over. It’s sad.”
Demonstrators confront security forces during the protests in downtown Beirut in September 2020. (photo: Mohamed Azakir/Reuters)
Lebanon: Hundreds Protest Against Deteriorating Living Conditions
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Hundreds of Lebanese on Wednesday held sit-ins to protest against the dire living conditions and the plan by the Central Bank to lift subsidies on medicines, wheat, fuel, and food."
Protesters cut roads all over the country while calling for the formation of a cabinet capable of dealing with the dire situation in the country.
Head of the General Confederation of Lebanese Workers Bechara Asmar urged for the formation of a cabinet while holding all politicians accountable for their past malpractices.
Asmar also called upon all the Lebanese to stand by the confederation of Lebanese workers to recuperate people's rights.
Lebanon has been going through its worst economic and financial crisis amid a shortage in foreign currency reserves, prompting Lebanese banks to impose unofficial capital control on withdrawals in Lebanese pounds while the U.S. dollar is no longer available at banks.
Moreover, the outbreak of COVID-19 exacerbated the problems, leading several companies to go out of business while laying off thousands of employees.
According to the World Bank, the poverty rate in the country exceeds 55 percent, noting that citizens who are still employed have lost around 80 percent of their salaries' value.
An aircraft flies close to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia this month. (photo: James D. Morgan/Getty)
Warming Has Killed Half the Coral on the Great Barrier Reef, Study Finds. It Might Never Recover.
Darryl Fears, The Washington Post
Fears writes: "Bleaching events in back-to-back years so thoroughly wiped out coral that it cannot easily reproduce."
Bleaching events in back-to-back years so thoroughly wiped out coral that it cannot easily reproduce
alf of the coral populations on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — from “big mamas” to the little baby coral they spawn — have been wiped out in the warming ocean, a new study says.
Studying coral as if it were a residential demographic, and counting its abundance over 30 years starting in 1995, four Australian researchers determined that size didn’t matter when bleaching events, such as two that occurred in recent back-to-back years, strike the giant reef.
“The decline occurred in both shallow and deeper water, and across virtually all species — but especially in branching and table-shaped corals,” Terry Hughes, a professor at the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Queensland and a co-author of the research paper, said in a statement Tuesday. “These were the worst affected by record breaking temperatures that triggered mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017.”
On some areas of the northern half of the reef, “the abundance of large colonies on the crest dropped” by up to 98 percent, according to the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. By contrast, there was a slight increase on the southern slope, about 25 percent.
It’s a clear sign of rapid decline.
“We expect this decline to continue” because of warming caused by humans, Hughes said. “The only effective way to improve the outcome for coral reefs is global action on greenhouse gasses. If global temperatures rise to 3 or 4 [degrees Celsius], the reef will be unrecognizable, so there is no time to lose.”
“We have evidence from some parts of the reef that recruitment rates are only recovering very slowly … and are nowhere near levels prior to the bleaching events,” Andreas Dietzel, another professor at the ARC Center and a co-author of the paper, said in an email.
Coral that spawn the larvae that makes more coral “have declined dramatically over vast stretches of the Great Barrier Reef,” Dietzel said. “It will therefore take time for reproduction to recover. Corals are tremendously resilient because of their capacity to produce millions of babies but they/we desperately need a break from disturbances.”
The Great Barrier Reef is incredibly important to Australia. Before the coronavirus pandemic, more than 2 million tourists traveled to Queensland each year from all over the world to experience its color and biodiversity. Worldwide, reefs provide habitat for a quarter of marine animals and plants, coastal protection that limits flooding for 500 million residents, and fishing that provides protein and revenue, according to the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.
The institute and the University of Sydney recently partnered to develop an experimental technology called marine cloud brightening to offset bleaching events that kill coral. It’s a Hail Mary attempt to block sunlight and reflect it back to the sky to limit warming and higher rates of ocean acidification that cause mass mortality on the reef.
But that extreme measure, combined with other actions such as limiting reef fishing, might not be enough for a country that continues to lead the world in exporting coal, a fossil fuel that contributes to warming, which hastens the decline of coral, experts say.
“Our results show the ability of the Great Barrier Reef to recover — its resilience — is compromised compared to the past, because there are fewer babies, and fewer large breeding adults,” Dietzel said.
Bob Richmond, a research professor and director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, called the study “a really excellent piece of work,” with the most comprehensive research on Great Barrier Reef coral populations that he’s seen.
“What they’re showing is these demographic changes are occurring on a regional scale … on reef slopes that make it difficult for coral reefs to persist over time,” Richmond said. In his long experience of visiting and researching reefs around the world, “if I don’t see one-year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old corals, I know that reef is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”
As the population declines, the distance between coral formations increases, limiting their ability to reproduce. “These bleaching events are just hammering these reefs. This is just a really bad time and a really bad combination,” Richmond said.
Although half of the Great Barrier Reef’s loss of abundance happened over three decades, Richmond said the world doesn’t have three more decades before the rest potentially disappears.
“The problem is it’s an accelerated loss,” he said. “It’s hard to have a crystal ball and say a date. Scientists are always trying to be careful, but if we don’t act meaningfully in the next five years, we will not have vital and vibrant coral reefs as a legacy for future generations.”
There is hope in Australia and other reef formations around the world, such as in Indonesia, said Gabby Ahmadia, director of ocean science at the World Wildlife Fund. Some coral is developing a resistance to rising temperatures and even acidification.
“The reality of the situation is that coral reefs are declining around the world, but the hope is we can have better local solutions to overfishing, runoffs from land and farming practices,” Ahmadia said. “They are going to decline, no doubt, but we can conserve what’s left.”
Ahmadia looks at coral reef conservation as if it were a management portfolio, with high and low risks. Reducing pollution and fish harvests on reefs is a reliable, low-risk solution for governments to consider. At the high end are attempts to harden reefs in labs and desperate heaves such as blocking sunlight and cooling water.
“We work in Indonesia and reefs haven’t been hit as hard there,” Ahmadia said optimistically. The peril faced by coral “really varies,” she said. “There are a lot of studies predicting the future. I don’t think we know.”
But her optimism only goes so far if aggressive action isn’t taken.
“A lot of people say 90 percent of the coral loss will happen by 2050,” she said.
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