CORAL REEFS are DYING, however THERE IS STILL HOPE... according to an article by The Atlantic Magazine (published online this Monday, November 21, 2017 at
 https://www.yahoo.com/news/coral-researchers-coping-death-reefs-155000252.html 


 It was titled How Coral Researchers Are Coping With the Death of Reefs. The beginning of this article is really depressing, in fact leading researchers are going through a tough period because they see the corrals of the world's oceans die off every passing year. However, ocean experts; researchers, marine biologists and scientists agree that action is what is needed now- and the good thing is that it is happening. people all over the world are taking positive action to save our planet. Here's a few paragraphs from this article.
"Everyone I spoke to talked about becoming very good at compartmentalizing—at acknowledging the scale of the tragedy, but also putting it aside to focus on their work. “I don’t find it productive to be angry or depressed all the time. It’s corrosive, and it isn’t going to solve the problem,” says Knowlton. She is perhaps the poster child for ocean optimism, having created a movement called ... Ocean Optimism. “I started that because there was no way to get people engaged in doing something about these problems, if they didn’t realize that there was something they could do.”

“I find it worrying that people think we have time to plan, and the research is telling us that we have to act.”

There is reason to hope, she says. Large protected areas have been established around coral reefs, which will protect them from overfishing and pollution, and make them more resilient. That won’t ward off bleaching events, which will continue as long as the climate keeps changing. But Knowlton thinks that the rise of electric cars and the increasingly competitive costs of renewable energy will reduce the pace of global warming, even if the current administration refuses to enact policies to mitigate it.

And on June 23, 2017, National Geographic too  published an article on the same topic. The title was: Coral Reefs Could Be Gone in 30 Years.World Heritage reefs will die of heat stress unless global warming is curbed, a new UN study finds.

The world’s coral reefs, from the Great Barrier Reef off Australia to the Seychelles off East Africa, are in grave danger of dying out completely by mid-century unless carbon emissions are reduced enough to slow ocean warming, a new UNESCO study says.

And consequences could be severe for millions of people.

The decline of coral reefs has been well documented, reef by reef. But the new study is the first global examination of the vulnerability of the entire planet’s reef systems, and it paints an especially grim picture. Of the 29 World Heritage reef areas, at least 25 of them will experience twice-per-decade severe bleaching events by 2040—a frequency that will “rapidly kill most corals present and prevent successful reproduction necessary for recovery of corals,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization concluded. In some areas, that’s happening already.

By Laura Parker and Craig Welch

 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/coral-reef-bleaching-global-warming-unesco-sites/