News Watch, Honolulu Advertiser, July 26, 2009
The scientific projections are ominous.
If substantial steps aren’t taken globally to counter the effects of climate change, reefs in Hawai’i and around the world eventually could become coral wastelands, decimated by increasingly acidic and warming ocean waters.
Some scientists say such a scenario, which would wreak havoc with Hawai’i’s fisheries and the state economy, could come by the end of the century, perhaps even a few decades sooner. […]
One wild card is whether corals, resilient organisms that can rebound from some major stresses, will be able to adapt to climate change-related chemical alterations in the environment that are occurring at rates not seen for millions of years.
Scientists also are uncertain whether the predicted effects will happen as quickly or as severely as the models indicate.
“The thing to worry about is not that it will be as bad as we think,” said Paul Jokiel, researcher at the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology. “It’s that it will be much worse than we think.”