Canaries in the Coal Mine of Climate Change

Welcome back to WIRED Classics! My name is Sam, and I'm one of WIRED's fact-checkers—those behind-the-scenes reporters who make sure that everything you read on WIRED is accurate and fair. I'm taking the helm of Classics this week while Eve is away.

This year, Florida had one of its worst summers yet for Coral reefs, as astronomically warm waters—as high as 97 degrees Fahrenheit in some places—caused mass bleaching events. As we know, environmental scientists and journalists have for years been warning us about the precarious future of the world's corals and their role as canaries in the coal mine of climate change. In an April 2022 piece about coral-growing efforts, WIRED contributor Rowan Moore Gerety joined the chorus, suggesting that "by the end of this century, we may be speaking about healthy coral reefs in the past tense."

When I was assigned to fact-check Gerety's piece, I dove headfirst into a terror-induced research spiral akin to doomscrolling, discovering such terrifying statistics as the fact that the globe has lost half of its coral reefs since the 1950s and that reef biodiversity has fallen by nearly two thirds. Thankfully, promising Coral Restoration projects are working to salvage our reefs, and several were the focus of Gerety's ultimately optimistic piece.

Gerety also notes that, depending on your point of view, "coral restoration is either a profoundly pessimistic or optimistic undertaking. To some, it suggests we're past hoping humans will act forcefully enough to curb water pollution or slash emissions to help natural reef systems withstand global warming. To others, restoration serves as penance for the damage we've already done, and a way to maximize our chances of shepherding corals through the Anthropocene." Where do you land? Are efforts to restore coral reefs in Florida and the rest of the global tropics futile? Would those resources be better spent tackling the issue of our warming waters? Or should we give up on the possibility of climate change reversal and regard coral restoration as one of the hundreds of necessary efforts to protect global biodiversity from the inevitable? Write me a note or leave a comment beneath Gerety's story.

See you next week!

Sam

Sam Spengler, Research Editor

Read the Full Story

Originally published in April 2022.

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The Race to Rebuild the World's Coral Reefs

Nearly half of these ocean ecosystems have been wiped out since 1950. One man is on a mission to reverse that—by speed-growing coral in hyperefficient nurseries.

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The Tip of the AI Iceberg

In last week's Classics, Eve wrote about Steven Johnson's 2014 piece, Why Inventors Misjudge How We'll Abuse Their Creations, a meditation on the blind spots in tech history and what they might illuminate for us today. Johnson notes that we failed to see the social media age coming because we falsely assumed the focal point of the internet would be information, rather than, well, us. When Eve asked readers to think about current innovations and how they might revolutionize society, we (predictably) received responses focused on AI. Jeff Barrie believes that "we are just at the tip of the iceberg with AI/ChatGPT." Andrew Graylin wrote that "quantum computing that has an AI within reach of everyone, down to the device in your pocket" will likely have major ramifications, especially in a future when we have devices in our ears or even our glasses.

Tell me about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories, and each week I'll feature one of you here. Write to me at [email protected], and include "CLASSICS" in the subject line. Or, simply join the conversa

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