Coral Reefs Declared Collapsed
Scientists concede first planetary tipping point with 99 percent certainty.
Escaping notice while the world suffers the madness of Trump, a major study was published October 13, 2025, by the University of Exeter and international partners including the Stockholm Resilience Centre, The Global Tipping Points Report 2025. You can find a download of the report here.
The findings and recommendations of the paper preceded the annual jester party — COP30 — in which wealthy oil producing nations come together on their private jets and pretend to care about climate change and the rights of victimized poor countries. Another predictable abject failure, the words “fossil fuels” weren’t even included in the final 2025 “agreement.” The conference’s seriousness was preceded by chopping down tens of thousands of acres of “protected” Amazon rainforest for a four-lane highway paving its way to the summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
This article claims because the highway was planned since 2012, COP30 had nothing to do with yet more destruction of the Amazon which accounts for over 50 percent of such remaining forests. Never mind that rainforests store 250 billion tons of CO2 and are in danger of tipping into CO2 emitters.
While a 78 percent drop from 2024, in 2025, 9.5 million acres of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest still burned — about 50 times the land area of New York City. A better rainy season accounted for that drop in a rainforest never less increasingly besieged by drought. As rainforests are laid low for cattle grazing and soy, moisture from the dense shade of the canopy down to the thin layer of soil is lost resulting in man-made drought. The improvement in 2025 is no cause for a sigh of relief.
Back to the fishes in the deep blue sea.
Authored by 160 scientists from 87 institutions in 23 countries, The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 covers both cryospheric and biospheric tipping points, and warns the planet is dangerously close to triggering other catastrophic failures aside from our doomed coral reefs. Melting ice sheets, aforementioned Amazon rainforest dieback and the collapse of key ocean currents are among them.
This as you know is happening at just 1.5° C of average global warming.
It’s going to get worse.
Hundreds of climate scientists polled in May 2024 agreed we’re going to fly by that figure, predicting at least a 2.5°C temperature rise by 2100. “Hopeless and broken,” is how one scientist described her feelings. As dreary as those assessments are, worse can be found, believing 2.5° C is possible by 2050. Well-known climate scientist James Hansen who first testified the dangers of global warming before congress in 1988 is among those with a more pessimistic assessment. This AI assisted study found that regions including South Asia, the Mediterranean, Central Europe and parts of sub-Saharan Africa could reach 3.0° C by 2060.
Seven of nine planetary boundaries breached
Global warming acceleration: Hope versus hopium.
Predicted global temperature increases
Coral reefs were critical were to our survival
From The Global Tipping Points Report 2025:
Even under the most optimistic emission scenarios of stabilising warming at 1.5°C without any overshoot, it is considered that warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain (>99% probability) to tip, given the upper range of their thermal tipping point is 1.5°C.
Coral reefs have been the rainforests of our oceans, providing habitat for thousands of fish species alone. They have acted as a carbon sink and provided protection of our eroding shorelines during storms. Coral reefs have fed nearly a billion people and sheltered a quarter of all marine life. It’s estimated their contribution to the economy in environmental protection, as a food source and tourist attraction has amounted to $2.7 trillion USD. This figure is measured in perverse GDP, a metric of destruction that must be replaced and may be wildly conservative. This article from Science Daily puts that figure at an incomprehensible $9.8 trillion. How does one measure the value of an inhabitable planet?
The now largely dead Great Barrier Reef was the largest living organism on Earth, 1,429 miles long and covering approximately 133,000 square miles. Composed of nearly 3,000 individual reefs, it was large enough to be seen from outer space. Now it’s pronounced officially DOA by science. Way to go Homo sapiens. The University of Exeter report, led by Professor Tim Lenton, a pioneer in Earth system science, covers far more than the reefs, encompassing perhaps the most comprehensive evaluation to date of how close humanity is to breaching all identified planetary boundaries.
When I was a child my favorite television shows were often about the wild world. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Jacques Cousteau specials stand out in my child’s eye. The movie Born Free about Elsa the lion club raised by the game wardens George Adamson and his wife Joy in Kenya left a huge impression on me about the dignity and awareness of animals, and their inherent right to exist.
I, too, was wild in those days running from sunup to sundown, becoming encrusted in sweat, dirt, itchy weeds and wonder over alien crawdads in the creek, frightening yet beautiful praying mantises, clever stick bugs and thousands of fireflies so tricky to catch on humid summer nights before the reluctance of having to go indoors. I was naturally connected to the Earth at birth as I should be until as I grew older and forced to spend more and more time servicing her destruction.
I have never scuba dived, I have never been to Kenya, but just knowing such places exist have made my world a better place. This may be the saddest article I have been forced to write. To have seen what is coming and not done anything breaks my heart. As the most powerful creatures on the planet our job should be to take care of her. That’s where meaning and connection live in our ever-growing alienation and psychotic disconnection. That’s not just what our physical health depends on, but our mental and spiritual health as well. After all, we are made by the same elements of the planet, which was made by the elements of the cosmos. The Earth is not a checkbook and everything cannot be quantified. Attempting to so do murders our souls, killed the coral reefs and turns us into false gods.
Thank you for being with me.
Beyond sad. Thanks for writing Geoffrey
Thanks for your excellent and alarming reporting. I am in deep grief about all of this and most personally about the dying coral reefs. I have been lucky enough to dive and snorkel through some of the most amazing coral reefs in the world. And now, if they are not completely gone, they are not even close to what they used to be.