environment Politics: communities infrastructure sustainability urban planning
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 20: What Can A Poor Boy Do?
The Washington Post seems determined to atone for years of George Will columns. Here’s a perspective on climate change as it’s going to hammer cities, based on a new study in Nature:
Climate scientists sometimes talk about something called “climate departure” as a way of measuring when climate change has really changed things. It’s the moment when average temperatures, either in a specific location or worldwide, become so impacted by climate change that the old climate is left behind. It’s a sort of tipping point. And a lot of cities are scheduled to hit one very soon.
A city hits “climate departure” when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. For example, let’s say the climate departure point for D.C. is 2047 (which it is). After 2047, even D.C.’s coldest year will still be hotter than any year from before 2005. Put another way, every single year after 2047 will be hotter than D.C.’s hottest year on record from 1860 to 2005. It’s the moment when the old “normal” is really gone.
A big study, just published in the scientific journal Nature, projected that the Earth, overall, passes climate departure in 2047. The study also projects the year of climate departure in dozens of specific cities.
Dancing In The Streets! October 10:
Cities everywhere will need lots of preparation for a climate-changed future. Some aspects are easily predicted — bridges, drainage, power grids and communications networks must be strengthened with multiple levels of redundancy, so that extreme conditions can’t cripple an entire urban society overnight. But there is another, more subtle kind of infrastructure that also needs reinforcement.
Cities contain hundreds of interdependent neighborhoods, all with their own micro-cultures, mores, and local economies. Community centers, boys and girls clubs, volunteer groups, and block associations form the social systems that can make or break a city’s survival in difficult times. Just as nations anticipating millions of climate refugees must strengthen diplomacy and border security, cities must invest in nurturing healthy and resilient communities. Parks, civic spaces, arts and education programs are not frills, but necessities, if we want to avoid a worldwide and never-ending “long, hot summer” of dystopian urban collapse and violence.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists heroes Koch Brothers
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 19: I’ve Been In Some Big Towns, And Heard Me Some Big Talk…
In the Boston Herald, a report about the campaign to get uber-swine David Koch off the WGBH board of directors:
Draped in a WBUR windbreaker, Lee Stewart of Jamaica Plain called Koch — who has donated $18.6 million to ’GBH, including $10 million to the science program “NOVA” — “a climate denier, a polluter.”
“His presence is extremely offensive,” Stewart said. “People who are actively fighting to destroy the climate should not have equal political voice.”
Small and Stewart were among some 50 sign-waving activists who protested outside Channel 2’s Brighton studios before presenting a petition of 119,000 online signatures calling for Koch’s resignation. Among the protesters was an activist in an Elmo costume carrying a sign that read, “Elmo Love WGBH Elmo No Love Koch Lies.”
WGBH board chairman Amos Hostetter defended Koch, telling the protesters there’s no “political litmus test” for board members.
“Diversity is something we highly value,” he said.
“It’s not because we disagree with Mr. Koch politically,” Small said. “It’s because he is about the destruction of politics in America as we know it.”
Hostetter denied that trustees have any control over programming, and the board quickly moved on to other business.
The protest came just hours before “NOVA” aired a special on rising sea levels in the aftermath of Megastorm Sandy.
A Koch spokeswoman said he had no “immediate plans” to resign.
“He particularly enjoys WGBH’s outstanding program ‘NOVA,’ which he believes educates the public in a very entertaining way,” said spokeswoman Cristyne Nicholas. “As for climate change, Mr. Koch is interested in ensuring that energy policies are informed by sound science and economic reality,” she said.
But the activists said they’re just getting started.
“People aren’t going to let this go,” said Brad Johnson of Forecast the Facts. “We’re not going to stop.”
The Koch brothers are a blight on the world. October 10:
When his spokeswoman asserts that arch-conservative David Koch wants energy policies that are based on “sound science and economic reality,” it’s a little window into the thinking of a bazillionaire whose mindset is steeped in the McCarthy-era anti-communist hysteria of the John Birch Society.
Mr. Koch probably learned to trust medical expertise over the course of his experience as a cancer patient. I wonder: if 97 oncologists diagnosed a malignancy, while 3 said more tests were needed, would he start therapy…or would he decide that “sound science” demanded a rejection of the medical consensus?
Climatologists are our planetary physicians, and their diagnosis of the human causes and profound danger of climate change is overwhelmingly certain — as conclusive as the causal connection between smoking and cancer. Mr. Koch’s denialism isn’t based on sound science, and his rejection of policies that will end our dependence on fossil fuels is anything but economically realistic.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: carbon tax civilization heroes sustainability timescales
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 18: If I Ran The Circus
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune (CA) introduces us to the heroes at Citizens Climate Lobby:
Robert Haw says solving the problem of global warming is easy.
No, really. He’s dead serious.
Haw has a bona-fide plan and he’s taking it to each of the 535 members of Congress. As president of the Pasadena-Foothills Chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby, the JPL scientist from Altadena says his group is creating a buzz in Washington with a rebate version of a revenue-neutral carbon tax that combines market forces with consumerism to drive up the cost of fossil fuels and make renewable energy more affordable.
So far, the plan has picked up endorsements from former Secretary of State George Schultz and supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, who was an adviser to Ronald Reagan.
But the most important person to convince is the ordinary American, Haw said. His group is succeeding on that front, too. When Haw started the Pasadena-Foothills chapter a year ago, there were 33 chapters. Today there are 108 chapters. “We’ve been doubling in size every year,” he said.
Citizens Climate Lobby aims to convert Americans to the belief that the problem of rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, more droughts and melting glaciers is indeed fixable in our lifetime.
It’s not as simple as that. But it’s that simple. October 9:
A carbon tax is essential for reinventing our global energy economy. While it’s not the sole solution to climate change — because the climate crisis isn’t a single problem with a single solution — it’s a crucial ingredient in the mix.
The first law of problem-solving is a simple one: if you’re in a hole, stop digging. Industrialized civilization’s past century of greenhouse emissions has put us in a very big hole; even if we stopped releases tomorrow it’d be several decades at least before we could observe the slightest slowdown in climate change, due to the gradual nature of the buildup and the very long “residence time” of atmospheric CO2.
An old proverb puts it well: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” A tax on carbon emissions would benefit future generations enormously while mildly inconveniencing our own.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots industry IPCC Republicans
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 17: They Can Have Any Color They Want As Long As It’s Black
The San Antonio Express-News, on Republican denialism and foolishness:
So why is there such a disconnect between what scientists think and the public debate?
Recent cognitive research helps us understand this. Researchers find that beliefs on climate change science strongly correlate with other policy preferences.
For example, if you are skeptical of the science of climate change, then you almost certainly oppose the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and support gun rights.
Those who support action to reduce greenhouse gases very likely hold the opposite views.
If arguments about the science of climate change were actually about the science, then this result would make no sense. Whether climate change is true or not is a scientific matter, and it should be uncorrelated with philosophical views on the role of government in health care or the constitutional right to own a firearm.
But they are correlated. And this tells us that the arguments about the science of climate change are not actually about science.
So what is the argument about? The answer is policy.
If climate change is true and we decide to reduce emissions, then it will almost certainly require intervention by the government into the energy market. For some, that idea is so repugnant that the only conclusion is that the problem must not exist.
It is also about being part of the tribe. Climate change has achieved such an elevated status in the policy debate that it has become a litmus test. To be a Republican, for example, you must reject the science.
Any Republican who does not risks being voted out of office — as happened, for example, to Rep. Bob Inglis. (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/environment/climate- of-doubt/bob-inglis-climate- change-and-the-republican- party/).
As proud Texans, we are sympathetic to those who worry about out-of-control eco-totalitarianism. And we both love cheap and abundant energy and the lifestyle it allows us to lead. But, like most people, Republican and Democrat alike, we also want to protect the environment. Thus, we both support balanced action to address the clear and present danger of climate change.
Writing a letter like this is like shooting fish in a barrel. October 8:
The extraordinary thing about self-styled “fiscal conservatives” is their near-pathological readiness to bet against their own country. Just look at the people who whine that changing emissions regulations to cut down on greenhouse gases is going to handicap American manufacturers. They’re the same ones who screamed in the 1960s that making seat belts mandatory was going to cripple the automobile industry. Last I looked, there were plenty of cars on the road, and while auto companies have had their problems, nobody believes seat belts are the reason why.
For all their loud professions of American exceptionalism, conservatives’ opposition to sensible climate change policy is rooted in a “can’t do” ideology. We can’t change our energy economy (even if it saves us money) — because it’s too hard. We can’t take a position of global leadership (on the most important challenge facing the world today) — because it’s too hard.
That’s not fiscal conservatism. That’s laziness. That’s not economic responsibility. It’s whining.
Imagine these people running the Apollo program. We’d never have gotten into orbit, much less reached the Moon.
Warren Senders
environment: arctic methane economics permafrost sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 16: For Seven Long Years I’ve Been A Rover
The Anchorage Daily News says that Alaska is ground zero, the “world’s laboratory for climate change”:
When Jerry Otto started hunting for Alaska oil in 1980, his tractor-trailers barreled along ice roads that were up to 10 feet thick for 180 days every year.
Last winter, when he set out to drill for Australia’s Linc Energy, regulators opened the roads for 126 days. The rest of the time, warm weather left the routes too mushy for vehicles, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine.
Then, in January, in a twist that embodies the perplexing reality of life and commerce amid a changing global climate, the temperature dropped suddenly to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, encasing drilling rig components in ice as Otto waited for roads to solidify to ship the gear to Linc sites.
After thawing the equipment with blowtorches, he discovered that the cold was reducing oil flowing into Linc’s well. With 200 workers standing by, the company lost $300,000 a day with each delay, ending 2012 with a $61 million deficit.
Otto plans to try again in December, this time drilling sideways into a hill to get underneath 1,000 feet of permafrost and up into reservoirs he says hold 1.2 billion barrels of light, sweet crude.
“It’s getting more unpredictable,” said Otto, 59, who runs Linc’s drilling rig in Umiat, 80 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, which is within the National Petroleum Reserve that President Warren G. Harding created in 1923 to guarantee oil for the Navy.
Try looking at it from an interstellar alien’s perspective! October 7:
While its Arctic location indeed makes Alaska a “laboratory” where our transforming climate’s effects can be witnessed first-hand, industrial civilization’s experiment on Earth’s atmosphere has consequences everywhere around the planet. Alaska’s melting permafrost may be a vivid demonstration of the higher temperatures triggered by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, but climate change is equally tangible for Pakistani farmers losing their lands to torrential flooding, African villagers facing devastating drought, or island nations confronting the reality that their entire existence may be ended by rapidly rising sea levels.
Earth’s oil and coal was built up in the Carboniferous Era over a span of hundreds of millions of years; our civilization is now burning all that fossilized carbon and reintroducing it into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate: five million years’ worth per annum.
Alaska may be one of the places where the greenhouse effect’s ramifications are most obvious, but make no mistake: there’s no place on Earth where climate change is not happening. We’re all lab rats; no one is exempt.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 15: If Pigs Could Fly, We’d All Have To Carry Really Big Umbrellas
Brian Dickerson writes in the Detroit Free Press about the chimerical Republican enlightenment on climate change:
But just a year later, Michigan environmentalists have been heartened by signs that politicians from both parties are coalescing around their key objective: increasing the state’s use of cleaner energy sources.
A draft report being circulated by the Michigan Public Service Commission says that, contrary to the dire warnings of electric utilities who opposed Proposal 3, the costs of generating renewable energy are plunging.
Produced at the behest of Gov. Rick Snyder, the PSC report says the surcharge that utilities have been levying on their customers to finance the transition to renewable power sources — such as wind and solar — could shrink to zero by 2014, “because project costs are, in some cases, essentially equivalent to conventional generation.”
“From a technical perspective,” the report adds, it would be possible for Michigan utilities to generate as much as 30% of their electricity from renewable fuels like wind and solar “from resources located within the state.”
I’ve got some swampland in Florida he should see. October 6:
It’d be great to see conservative politicians supporting clean energy and environmental responsibility. Once upon a time, there were pro-business Republicans who recognized that sensible public policies required, well, sense. But that was long ago; rejecting anything that smacks of expertise, today’s anti-intellectual GOP can’t solve even the most trivial policy problems. And climate change is no trivial problem, but the central issue of our time.
Republicans should embrace strategies for reducing greenhouse emissions, reinforcing infrastructure, and educating the public about the causes and consequences of climate change — but because their ideology defines itself in simple-minded opposition to everything “liberal”, they won’t. A recent study showed that conservatives eagerly bought CFL bulbs when they were labeled as money-savers, but rejected them if the packaging mentioned the environment.
Such doctrinal rigidity may lead the Republican Party to extinction. Let’s hope they don’t take the rest of humanity with them.
Warren Senders
Education environment: activism divestment heroes IPCC
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 14: Congeniality
Emily Tucker, in the Bowdoin Orient (college paper, Bowdoin college, Maine) discusses the IPCC report:
For example: climate skeptics often point to the slowdown in global temperature change over the past fifteen years as evidence that climate change has stopped.
This, however, doesn’t account for the abilities of oceans and glaciers to absorb heat energy up to a certain point.
Beyond that point, though, the effects of absorbing all that heat will become eminently clear.
About half a trillion tons of carbon have been released into the atmosphere since the late 19th century. In some ways, this is good news.
We haven’t hit the tipping point yet, and there’s still time to change our trajectory.
But let’s not get too comfortable. If we (speaking globally, since most new emissions come from developing nations that rely largely on coal power) stick to our current rates of energy consumption, we’re set to hit the trillion-ton mark around 2040.
By that time, current Bowdoin students will be between the ages of 45 and 50, slightly younger than most of our parents are right now.
It’s interesting to note that the earth’s crust still contains an estimated three trillion tons of carbon-rich fuels.
If we’re to observe the trillion-ton limit, most of these reserves will have to either remain untapped or be harnessed in a way that does emit greenhouse gases or other pollutants.
From the right point of view, this situation can be seen as a gateway to revolutionary technological innovations in renewable energy production, greenhouse gas sequestration or (hopefully) both.
The 2013 IPCC report includes very little in the way of new discoveries.
The authors simply note that, as opposed to being 90 percent confident in human-caused climate change in 2007, they are now 95 percent confident.
If this can’t end the so-called “climate debate” and usher us into an era of groundbreaking new green technologies, I don’t know what will.
After all, there are no 100 percent guarantees in science, and we probably aren’t going to get much closer.
All good stuff. October 6:
In the sixties, college students were at the forefront of protests against the insanities of war and racial bigotry. In the eighties, it was the campaign for divestiture from the racist apartheid government of South Africa that galvanized campuses across America. While college students today may seem to have a wide menu of possible choices for their activism, ultimately there is only one central cause.
In the final analysis, all human progress has been made possible by the fact that our Earth’s climate is relatively benign, providing us the ability to feed ourselves and others while still having time left over to figure out ways to make things better. Our social advances — expansion of the franchise, the gradual elimination of slavery, the emancipation of women, the once-radical idea that children had rights, an end to the marginalization of LGBT people — are all contingent on environmental stability.
If we fail on climate, we fail on everything.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists IPCC media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 13: The Germ Of An Idea Blossoms In My Fevered Brain
McClatchey’s Eric Pooley discusses the IPCC report, in the Fresno Bee (CA):
The people who are paid to spread doubt and confusion about our changing climate have been working overtime this week, because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body that includes thousands of the world’s best climate scientists, has just issued its latest assessment. The IPCC report is the Olympics of climate change – once every few years the best in the world show us the results of thousands of the most recent research studies. Inevitably, it brings out the peddlers of doubt, people who do their best to muddy the waters about our changing climate. It’s so predictable you could write a book about it.
In fact, I did write one. Six years ago, when the last IPCC assessment came out, I left my day job in journalism and started work on “The Climate War.” I thought it would be a book about how we finally started to get serious about climate change – I figured we had to, because that report declared that global warming was “unequivocal” and that most of the observed warming was “very likely” caused by human activity.
Instead, it became a book about how we didn’t get serious. The peddlers of doubt won that round and, in 2010, they defeated climate action in the U.S. Senate.
Now the IPCC is back with a new report. Basically, the scientists are as sure that human activity is warming the planet as they are that cigarettes cause cancer.
Miley Cyrus! October 5:
If the greenhouse effect was a nubile starlet offending our sensibilities on national television, newspapers, TV pundits, and Facebook would be full of discussion about the implications for our children, and the future of our civilization. If oceanic acidification was the newborn scion of a hereditary dynasty, we’d be able to read about it in every supermarket checkout line in the nation. Our collective ignorance of the single largest threat our species has yet faced in its time on Earth is enabled by our mass media’s obsession with trivial scandals and irrelevancies.
This, then, is the central challenge of our time. All humanity’s other struggles — the fight to end slavery, to spread democracy, to empower women, to stop the exploitation of children, to curb epidemic diseases — require a stable environment. Earth’s climate is the stage upon which history’s greatest ideas are realized, upon which the dreams of a better future are shared.
If this is destroyed because of the irresponsible consumption of fossil fuels, our aspirations will be replaced by a grim fight for survival on a newly hostile planet. Fail to address climate change, and we fail at everything.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots IPCC
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 12: Plus ca change…
Who the fuck is “Ambrose”? The Henderson (KY) Gleaner:
Given what the report seeks, you’d think it would deal at length with a major fact in conflict with its tone of certainty, admonition and fright. It’s that there has been no global, atmospheric warming for 15 years. The report belittles the issue, saying 15 years isn’t so long in the time span we’re discussing, and, besides, all that warmth may be hiding in the depths of the ocean.
Here’s the thing. The computer models that predicted something more accelerated than what has actually happened since 1998 are the same ones predicting disaster in the long run. If they were wrong about the past 15 years, it is a good sign they are wrong about the long run, too.
Sheesh. There’s that year again! October 4:
On reading Ambrose’s opinion piece belittling the IPCC report on Earth’s transforming climate, I wondered: why is it that when climate-change denialists assert that the atmosphere hasn’t warmed, it’s always “since 1998”? What’s so special about 1998?
Well, that year had a drastic temperature spike, so if we start there, the resulting graph sure looks like a decline. But since our measurements go back long before Monica Lewinsky made the headlines, we can look at planetary temperatures recorded over the past hundred and twenty years or so — and the picture’s very different: a zigzagging line climbing steadily across the page, accelerating significantly faster after around 1975.
Because competent scientists — unlike op-ed columnists — know the difference between statistical “noise” and genuine long-term trends, 1998’s anomalous heat is as irrelevant to the overall picture as 1995, a year of equally anomalous cold. Mr. Ambrose’s statistical cherry-picking irresponsibly misrepresents the overwhelming climatological consensus.
Warren Senders
Education environment music: climate change cultural extinction extinction music
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Music Is A Climate Issue — Endangered Musics: Sunda
I am not a climate scientist. I’m a scientifically literate musician. Climate change scares me for dozens of reasons. And it makes me deeply and terribly sad.
With rising sea levels, many island nations will lose much of their land, or even cease to exist. Which raises the question:
What music will become extinct?
A look at the list of island nations gives you a sense of what’s at stake. A large nation, like Indonesia, will experience incredible economic impacts and the forced inland migrations of entire regional populations. Perhaps millions of people will be forced by rising sea levels to abandon their homes and their traditions. A small island nation may find its land area reduced to the point of unsustainability; its culture and population forced into refugee status.
Languages will become diluted and eventually dissipate. Cultural forms (like dance, drama, traditional storytelling, and music) will lose much of their context and setting, eventually becoming preserved by a few interested afficionadi as “museum pieces” — no longer embodied as living, breathing traditions.
There are a lot of island nations. Each one has its own music.
For example, in Indonesia, there is an ethnic group called the Sunda:
The Sundanese are of Austronesian origins who are thought to have originated in Taiwan, migrated though the Philippines, and reached Java between 1,500BCE and 1,000BCE.[2]
According to the Sundanese legend of Sangkuriang, which tells the creation of Mount Tangkuban Parahu and ancient Lake Bandung, the Sundanese have been living in the Parahyangan region of Java for at least 50,000 years.[citation needed]
Inland Sunda is mountainous and hilly, and until the 19th century, was thickly forested and sparsely populated. The Sundanese traditionally live in small and isolated hamlets, rendering control by indigenous courts difficult. The Sundanese, in contrast to the Javanese, traditionally engage in dry-field farming. These factors resulted in the Sundanese having a less rigid social hierarchy and more independent social manners.[1] In the 19th century, Dutch colonial exploitation opened much of the interior for coffee, tea, and quinine production, and the highland society took on a frontier aspect, further strengthening the individualistic Sundanese mindset.[1]
Court cultures flourished in ancient times, for example, the Sunda Kingdom, however, the Sundanese appear not to have had the resources to construct large religious monuments similar to those in Central and East Java.[1]
Wikipedia says around 27 million people speak Sunda. That’s a lot of people.
Here’s some of their music. It’s beautiful.
This music is called Kacapi Suling, a style which developed in the 1970s. The name simply refers to the instruments involved. There are two stringed instruments (kacapi) and a flute (suling):
The Sundanese zither (kacapi) often serves to represent Sundanese culture. It plays as either a solo or an ensemble instrument, associated with both villagers and aristocrats. The instrument may take the form of a boat in tembang Sunda, or the form of a board zither in kacapian.
{snip}
In a typical performance (still primarily in recordings, as kacapi-suling is rarely performed live), the kacapi player outlines a cyclic structure of a song and the suling player improvises a melody based on the original song from the tembang Sunda repertoire. Kacapian refers to a flashy style of playing a board zither, and it is known as one of the sources of Sundanese popular music. It can be accompanied by a wide variety of instruments, and can be played instrumentally or as the accompaniment to either a male or female vocalist.
What will rising sea levels, an acidified ocean, and drastically increased heat do to Sunda, and to the rest of Indonesia?
Climate Change in Indonesia:
The devastating impact of global warming is already evident in Indonesia and will likely worsen due to further human-induced climate change, warns WWF.
The review from the global conservation organization, Climate Change in Indonesia – Implications for Humans and Nature, highlights that annual rainfall in the world’s fourth most populous nation is already down by 2 to 3 per cent, and the seasons are changing.
The combination of high population density and high levels of biodiversity, together with a staggering 80,000 kilometres of coastline and 17,500 islands, makes Indonesia one of the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change.
Shifting weather patterns have made it increasingly difficult for Indonesian farmers to decide when to plant their crops, and erratic droughts and rainfall has led to crop failures. A recent study by a local research institute said that Indonesia had lost 300,000 tonnes of crop production every year between 1992-2000, three times the annual loss in the previous decade.
Climate change in Indonesia means millions of fishermen are also facing harsher weather conditions, while dwindling fish stocks affect their income. Indonesia’s 40 million poor, including farmers and fishermen, will be the worst affected due to threats including rising sea levels, prolonged droughts and tropical cyclones, the report said.
“As rainfall decreases during critical times of the year this translates into higher drought risk, consequently a decrease in crop yields, economic instability and drastically more undernourished people,” says Fitrian Ardiansyah, Director of WWF-Indonesia’s Climate and Energy Programme. “This will undo Indonesia’s progress against poverty and food insecurity.”
WWF’s review shows that increased rainfall during already wet times of the year may lead to high flood risk, such as the Jakarta flood of February this year that killed more than 65 people and displaced nearly half a million people, with economic losses of US$450 million.
Climate change impacts are noticeable throughout the Asia-Pacific region. More frequent and severe heat waves, floods, extreme weather events and prolonged droughts will continue to lead to increased injury, illness and death. Continued warming temperatures will also increase the number of malaria and dengue fever cases and lead to an increase in other infectious diseases as a result of poor nutrition due to food production disruption.
Sunda Islands Part of the coral triangle, one of the most diverse coastal areas. Already at threat from destructive fishing and reef fish trade.