DAUPHIN ISLAND - As the Group of 8 Summit (G8) convenes in Heiligendamm, Germany, bringing together economic powerhouses including the United States, France, Japan, Russia and the U.K., the contentious climate change debate will be on the table with G8 governments arguing over mandatory greenhouse emissions caps while considering long-term economic growth. 

Scientists over the course of the past three decades have been pulling on the heart strings of political leaders, asking for action and restrictive policy regarding the rise in earth’s average temperature due to greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, from vehicles, industry and so on. 

Richard B. Aronson - senior marine scientist at Dauphin Island Sea Lab, a marine science institute located on a barrier island off the coast of Alabama - has seen the effects of climate change first-hand in numerous underwater expeditions along the Belizean coast. 

A 1985 Harvard PhD and the president of the International Society for Reef Studies, Aronson has witnessed the collapse of the Belizean barrier reef, bleached as a result of increased sea-temperatures in the summer and fall of 1998.

Coral bleaching, the loss of coral color due to stress-induced factors including elevated water temperature and chemistry changes, is becoming a global-phenomena on an unprecedented scale with bleaching events occurring at alarming and historically unheard of rates.  

Aronson’s study, “The 1998 bleaching event and its aftermath on a coral reef in Belize,” published June 2002, deduces coral bleaching as augmented by climate change.

In a phone interview, he said the El-Nino-Southern Oscillation, the natural warming of the Eastern Pacific Ocean beginning in late December, has increased in intensity in recent years, most likely correlated to record-breaking global temperatures. 

The advancement of El-Nino’s intensity, thus inciting an increase in oceanic temperatures, stressed the Belizean reefs, causing a massive coral bleaching.  

In 1999, “coral populations on reefs in the central shelf lagoon (off the coast of Belize) died off catastrophically…This was the first bleaching-induced mass coral mortality in the central lagoon in at least the last 3,000 years,” according to the study. 

Overall, Aronson is troubled by the far-reaching effects of climate change, beyond coral reefs, since it affects the entire ecological complex. 

“The whole system is being ramped up into a hotter state,” he said.   

He is concerned that with inflated greenhouse gas emissions and corresponding accelerated global temperature increases micro-managing environmental issues may be futile, such as the conservation of coral reefs through marine protected areas, which try to replenish impoverished reefs.  

“We cannot lapse into paralytic nihilism and assume that global environmental issues – greenhouse-gas emissions…are intractable problems,” he stated in “Conservation, precaution, and Caribbean reefs,” published in 2006. 

“Local management…will amount to little more than a series of rear-guard actions, which will at best delay the demise of coral populations.”

Bottom line: “This is the time to take action on climate change.  It is an issue on such a large scale and we have to be brave and we have to face up to it,” he said.  “There is a huge cost to do nothing and that cost is far greater.”