glass-and-concrete research complex, and just beyond it down a brushy
path is 5 miles of wilderness beach facing out on the world’s largest liv-
ing reef.
“Climate impact has happened. The four most serious bleaching
events were in 1987/1988, 1992, 1994, and 1998, which was the
biggest,” explains Katharina Fabricius, a bright, vivacious AIMS
research scientist with firsthand knowledge, also a refugee from
Germany’s harsh winters. “Corals can take a fair amount of distur-
bance, they’re not fragile,” she tells me in an office filled with soft coral
samples as varied and unique as snowflakes. “If these disturbances
become more frequent, however, weedy species will take over. You
already see branching species replacing massive slow-growing brain
corals. We lost a 1,000-year-old coral head off Pandora reef in 1998.
These reefs are really the canaries in the coal mine where you now see
a whole ecosystem being impacted.”
I tell her I know an Antarctic scientist who thinks his penguins are
the canaries for climate change.
“Ten years ago people were blasé about this being a pristine area,”
Fabricius continues. “Now with climate change, even the most conser-
vative projections are pretty bleak. And if your [Australian] government
wants to sell brown coal, they may not be likely to consider alternative
fuels or solar or other changes that need to take place.”
In fact, Tager and other local environmentalists are now fighting a
plan to start mining shale oil in the rain forests of North Queensland,
arguing that the last thing the world needs are new sources of fossil
fuels. Still, not everyone is convinced.
“In many ways the jury’s still out on the global climate effect on
coral bleaching,” claims Virginia Chadwick, a former regional tourism
minister and the political appointee who chairs the Great Barrier Reef
Marine Park Authority. “Not to say this apparent correlation between
bleaching and temperature isn’t a worrying trend,” she adds. “From a
local management agency point of view we’re wondering about adapt-
ability, about corals’ ability to adapt to temperature changes.”
“We have no evidence corals can adjust to rapid temperature
changes,” counters Fabricius. “Maybe they can over hundreds of thou-
sands of years, but that’s not the scale we’re now dealing with.”
Australia, Florida, and Fiji 133