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CNN One Thing
You’ve been overwhelmed with headlines all week – what's worth a closer look? One Thing takes you into the story and helps you make sense of the news everyone's been talking about. Each Sunday, host David Rind interviews one of CNN’s world-class reporters to tell us what they've found – and why it matters. From the team behind CNN 5 Things.
Coral Reefs, Cooked: A Climate Change Case Study
CNN One Thing
Apr 21, 2024
Two top scientific bodies recently announced that coral reefs around the world are experiencing a mass bleaching event for just the fourth time. It comes amid surging ocean temperatures over the past year, which has been the warmest on record. In this episode, we examine how a number of extreme climate change-fueled events – including coral bleaching – are on display in Australia and whether they could provide lessons in climate resiliency for the rest of the world.
Guest: Ivan Watson, CNN Senior International Correspondent
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:02
Earth day is tomorrow, and every year during this time, I see lists of things you can do to help the environment, even just in your backyard. Things like planting more native plants to attract pollinators, tearing a part or all of your lawn to cut down on water use. Now, don't get me wrong, these are good things. The bees need all the help they can get, and if it helps ease your climate anxiety, go with God. But global heat records are being smashed just about every month. Experts say these kinds of personal actions are just not going to make a dent in a meaningful way until we get to a place where the biggest emitters actually cut down on fossil fuels. We're going to be left to watch how climate change is already impacting some of the world's most beautiful places. And spoiler alert, it's not pretty. My guest this week is CNN senior international correspondent Ivan Watson. He recently went to Australia to figure out what fires, floods and bleached coral can tell us about all of our climate futures. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:01:20
So Ivan when we talk about climate change, it's obviously a global problem. But I realized that it is currently hitting some areas harder than others. So what did you find in Australia?
Ivan Watson
00:01:32
We got a view of a of a country that's kind of wrestling and a continent that's wrestling with these enormous disasters that that seem to come one after another, and they range from epic forest fires or bushfires and epic floods and coral bleaching. So it runs the gamut.
David Rind
00:01:53
So let's break down some of these one by one. What do the fires look like there?
Max Foster
00:01:58
Right. So the most epic bushfires that Australia has dealt with is the 2020 black summer fires. Right now more than a hundred fires are burning across Australia.
Rosemary Church
00:02:14
Tens of thousands of residents and vacationers in south eastern Australia are being told to evacuate.
Becky Anderson
00:02:21
At least 28 people have died. Nationwide, more than 3000 homes have been destroyed or damaged.
Becky Anderson
00:02:28
As a firefighter described to me, it was it was like something they'd never seen before. The duration of it, the intensity of it.
Will Ripley
00:02:35
In Winslow, Australia, nobody imagined the fire could move so quickly.
Man
00:02:40
I mean, I saw the sky go red and I go, that's not normal. Then we heard the sound of the fire. Like a furnace, like a freight train right next to you.
Ivan Watson
00:02:51
And our case study was a really stunning island called Kangaroo Island.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:02:58
I'm Ivan.
Justin Lang
00:02:59
Ivan.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:02:59
How are you doing?
Ivan Watson
00:03:01
Where among the victims were the father and brother of. Of a man I met named Justin Lang. And his father and brother had been out there helping put out fires on a friend's farm. And they were driving home, and they were caught in this inferno that basically killed both of them on a on a highway, on a road.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:03:26
Who thinks you could get burned to death driving on a road?
Justin Lang
00:03:30
Yeah, exactly. They pulled it off the road. So they're out of the way. But yeah, the car combusted. The whole car was on fire.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:03:39
Meaning that the fire would have jumped from trees and the vegetation into the middle of a highway.
Justin Lang
00:03:45
Yep, Ember attack.
Ivan Watson
00:03:45
and that's not even talking about the just the massive amount, the acreage of vegetation and the millions of animals. More than 50% of the koala population on Kangaroo Island was killed in those fires. Those are the estimates right now.
Billy Dunlop
00:04:03
We had local people showing up here with 30, 40 animals in their car that they'd picked up on the way here or that they'd, you know, gone back out to check their farm and they'd found, you know, a kangaroo with, with its legs, you know, melted off, essentially.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:04:16
Did you and the staff here have to euthanize 300 koalas?
Billy Dunlop
00:04:20
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that was that was on us.
David Rind
00:04:26
So that's kind of the fire situation. But what about floods?
Ivan Watson
00:04:31
The case study that we looked at was a town called Lismore. It's not a coastal town, it's in a river district that is prone to flooding. But in 2022, the levels that the waters reached broke every record. We're talking about water height in February 2022 of 14.4m. That's more than 47ft of water.
David Rind
00:04:58
Good Lord.
Ivan Watson
00:04:58
I mean it, it turned a city into a lake. Really?
Kate Stroud
00:05:05
Look at this...This is what's happening to our house.
Ivan Watson
00:05:12
So the many residents, thousands of them, were trapped on their roofs for hours. Or in the case of one woman that I spoke with. She basically had to crawl up into the small attic crawlspace of her house.
Kate Stroud
00:05:26
So once we were rescued from our kitchen window by the gentleman on the jet ski, we were on top of the water.
Ivan Watson
00:05:33
And she was rescued by a volunteer on a jet ski and described riding out, to dry land, ducking under power lines. That's how high the water was, and literally seeing cows on the roofs of of buildings that they went past, cows that had been swept downstream.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:05:54
What was the state of your home when you saw it again?
Kate Stroud
00:05:58
Completely covered in a thick sludge of river mud and silt.
Ivan Watson
00:06:03
Now to rub salt into the wound. A month later, the same town. It was hit by another flood a month later.
David Rind
00:06:13
And this is something we're kind of seeing, that these extreme weather events are not only becoming more severe, they're becoming more frequent. And the time that you have to rebuild anything, it's just kind of nonexistent.
Ivan Watson
00:06:25
Yeah. And that's a reality that is sinking in. So it's it's leading some communities and members of some communities to start to say, is this too much? Do we have to abandon a place? Southern Cross University is not a long drive outside of Lismore. It's kind of up in the hills from there, and I have over the years interviewed marine biologists there who study coral bleaching. That's a phenomenon where rising ocean temperatures, ocean heat waves can cook the world's coral to death. These scientists, based at Southern Cross University, have been going out to the ocean to see the impacts of climate change, and suddenly there was kind of a once in 100 year flood in their backyard. And it's an example of of climate change is not necessarily something that's happening out far away from us. It's hitting your community in your backyard. And that's what some of these marine biologists saw with the Lismore floods. The climate change was hitting bedroom communities that the marine biologists might have considered safe.
David Rind
00:07:49
So, Ivan, you mentioned this coral bleaching and this is something I've heard about that scientists are like, this is a big deal. But like I don't see coral reefs all that much. Most of us don't. So, like, why does this matter for the planet.
Ivan Watson
00:08:02
This massive marine ecosystem. But they're kind of living organisms and habitats for bajillion of different life forms. And they also protect coastlines from huge storm systems and things like that. They are dying off in increasing frequency with the rising of ocean temperatures.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:08:29
This is like bathwater right here, right?
Jodie Rummer
00:08:31
Yeah, we're we're in the sort of lower to mid 90s Fahrenheit.
Ivan Watson
00:08:37
In February of this year, the Australian summer. My team and I, we traveled to, I believe, at least five different coral reefs. And we saw that coral was turning bone white in front of our very eyes because of high water temperature.
Jodie Rummer
00:08:55
A lot of corals that had already been overrun with algae.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:09:00
Dead.
Jodie Rummer
00:09:01
Dead, Yeah, dead.
Ivan Watson
00:09:03
And weeks after we visited Australia, the Australian government announced that they were in the midst of a mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef. This is not the first time it's happened, but I think more concerning is that what was happening to the coral reefs in Australia, off the coast of Australia in February of 2024, was an echo of mass coral bleaching seen in the Caribbean in the fall of 2023. So this is a global event that.
David Rind
00:09:38
Just kind of made its way around.
Ivan Watson
00:09:40
It's just making its way around the globe. And NOAA, that's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that now we're in the midst of a fourth major global coral bleaching event, the fourth that's been kind of documented. And every time this happens, more and more of the coral dies off.
David Rind
00:10:03
And it doesn't come back.
Ivan Watson
00:10:04
It can take a thousand years to come back.
David Rind
00:10:07
Oh, wow.
Ivan Watson
00:10:07
So the coral that I'm lucky enough to go on assignment for CNN to witness and and marvel at and and say, wow, this is this is like a once in a lifetime experience. My two year old daughter will not get to see it. It won't be alive anymore. And that is rather sobering and sad to to have to admit to myself.
David Rind
00:10:31
So I guess this is kind of what I ask every time I talk about climate change on the show. Like, what is the fix? Are there lessons the rest of the world can take to try to put a dent in this problem?
Ivan Watson
00:10:43
Australia's an interesting case study. It's a relatively wealthy country that has made commitments to try to reduce its carbon emissions. And yet Australia is the world's second largest exporter of coal.
David Rind
00:10:57
Oh, wow.
Ivan Watson
00:10:58
Australia is also one of the globe's biggest producers of natural gas. So Australia is a victim of climate change, but it's also contributing to the carbon emissions that are driving up temperatures around the globe. And that's kind of this, this kind of almost Gordian knot, you know, what are you supposed to do to stop cooking the planet's corals and reduce the warming temperatures? Well, burn less stuff, right?
David Rind
00:11:30
Shut down the coal plants.
Ivan Watson
00:11:31
Australia is not ready to do that yet. It's making a lot of money.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:11:35
You have a coal ship kind of steaming in behind you here.
Bill Carmody
00:11:38
Rather perfectly timed. That's right, so we are the world's largest exporting coal port.
Ivan Watson
00:11:43
I interviewed the CEO of the Port of Newcastle. As I'm interviewing him, quite literally, there are coal ships steaming in and being loaded up and going out, and they're selling coal to countries like Japan and South Korea and China.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:12:02
Do you want this shut down?
Zack Shofield
00:12:05
Not immediately. Not overnight. You know, that's not going to help anyone in Newcastle or in Australia. But what we do need is no new fossil fuel projects to be approved, because that's just going to make the problem worse.
Ivan Watson
00:12:18
It's not illegal for Australia to sell coal. It's not as legal for it to export or mine the coal. And it's not illegal for these other economies to purchase this coal and burn it to provide electricity. But everybody knows it's not good for the planet. Who's going to take the first step and reduce this consumption?
Peter Gash
00:12:42
You got it.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:12:43
Got it. Beautiful. Wow.
Peter Gash
00:12:46
Welcome.
Ivan Watson (field)
00:12:45
Thank you. That was incredible.
Ivan Watson
00:12:48
Peter Gash is. A very charismatic, frankly somewhat inspiring man. And I met him because he flew me in a propeller plane from Brisbane to Lady Elliot Island, which is this tiny island, and his family operates, an eco resort on this island that he leases from the Australian government.
Peter Gash
00:13:08
I couldn't walk here 15 or 20 years ago. So rough here. Now we've got the natural soil. Magnificent.
Ivan Watson
00:13:16
Is this from yours? And it had been an island that since the 19th century, miners had been raking it for phosphate. Basically bird trap bird guano to use for fertilizer, and I believe also for gunpowder. And it was almost completely denuded, this island in the middle of the ocean.
Peter Gash
00:13:37
This is a man made for us. Everything you see here we planted.
Ivan Watson
00:13:40
And Peter has helped replant trees on the island. And what he's found is that they're kind of manmade forests that are growing there. They brought birdlife back at its peak.
Peter Gash
00:13:53
It's in excess of 200,000 birds.
Ivan Watson
00:13:55
on this tiny island?
Peter Gash
00:13:59
Tiny tiny island, it's crazy to think that.
Ivan Watson
00:14:01
But he argues that the island is growing by, I believe, about a centimeter a year. Naturally. Wow. With this animal life. Not only that, but the lagoon and the coral reefs around it are teeming with life.
Peter Gash
00:14:17
What we do see is more and more bleaching and more stress on the corals.
Ivan Watson
00:14:24
At the same time, we saw evidence of coral bleaching in these very waters.
David Rind
00:14:29
Just like an example of no matter how much you do in your own little personal space, to clean up the environment and be as eco friendly as you can be. There are still greater forces around the world, and that can come right back to your backyard no matter what.
Ivan Watson
00:14:45
I think you put it really well. And that was, you know, there was this kind of gleaming, a little bit of hope on this island, but but a much bigger planetary phenomenon that it's now part of our everyday lives.
David Rind
00:15:02
Yeah, well, it's great reporting, Ivan. Thank you so much.
Ivan Watson
00:15:05
You're welcome. Great to talk to you.
David Rind
00:15:10
And if you want to see more of Ivan's reporting, you can catch it next month on the whole story with Anderson Cooper. Catch it on CNN on May 5th and stream it later on Max.
David Rind
00:15:27
One thing is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Faiz Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Bex Wright, Desmond Chung and Katie Hinman. We'll be back next week. Talk to you then.
