Will Corals Survive?, asks a group of international scientists.
Corals first appeared 540 million years ago, but having made it through supervolcanoes, mass extinctions, and an asteroid impact equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs, it’s now likely they will be wiped out because a trace gas has risen from 20% up to 25% of levels common for half of the last 300 million years.
Source: www.geocraft, Scotese and Berner 2001
Having made it through the volatile last 65 million years, and multiple ice ages where the oceans rose and fell by as much as 125m repeatedly, it will be tragic if the current man-made warming phase wipes them out. According to one thousand tide gauges the worlds oceans are relentlessly rising by 1mm every year. While corals coped with the last 125,000mm of sea level rise, it’s not clear they will still be around if it rises another 20mm.
Current climate change marked in
The team of 22 researchers admit “there is still a lot to understand about corals,” and “there are major knowledge gaps”. But despite not knowing much, the experts on marine ecosystems advise that “our only real chance for their survival” is to control the global climate.
While they don’t actually predict the exact year the world will be coral-free, they do say “The time to act is now, as the window of opportunity to save coral reefs is rapidly closing…”
Looks like that’s it for 542 million years of the evolution of corals. Pfft. A world without coral?
Pfft. How about a world without experts on marine ecosystems? Seems like that would be a relief to everyone, even the corals. But we would need to find new jobs for all those with marine ecosystems expertise. Perhaps they could hold up the charts at Al Gores next big presentation on global warming?
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But kidding aside, a mm a year huh? It could do you in if you’re around in another thousand years or so. People have drowned in their bathtubs after all.
Wasn’t there a cigaret commercial that made a big deal about being one silly mm longer? And look what that got the cigaret people, hated by nearly everyone. I wonder how long it will take for those who cry survival crisis all the time to be done in by their 1 silly mm/year of sea level rise.
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The year
2034“…time to act is now…” !!! Be sure to mark it on your calendar. You wouldn’t want to miss watching the biggest extinction since the dinosaurs.[Roy, you were fast. That line with what’s satire/science got blurred. I’m not sure if you were satirizing my satire or their work. To avoid misinterpretation I edited the headline within minutes, thanks to your comment.: -) — J]
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Forgive me. I should have mentioned this first. The official translation of the quote is, “Send more money.” Strangely that’s identical to what many parents of college students find in email from their matriculating offspring from time to time. I wonder if there’s a connection.
Naw! That would be to good to be true.
The asterisk [*] is left as an exercise for the reader.
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FROM The Free Dictionary; Imperative Verb—
acclimatise, acclimate, acclimatize:
adapt, conform, adjust – adapt or conform oneself to new or different conditions; “We must adjust to the bad economic situation”
Used way way before the asinine meteorological Clown speak!
Taken from the Realtor word to sell ‘this desirable property’. Properly understood with the same disdain!! 🙂
All the best!-will-
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542m
dollar sign is missing
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Especially when humans are completely unable to act effectively no matter what the answer is.
Making their rhetorical question abjectly ridiculous in any context of ‘helping the corals’. Leaving your translation summation the only reason for the question.
Framing the question into a ‘climate fear’ alarm accomplishes the same “send more money” as the usual shysters and grifters to hit the fearful up for donations.
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The real “science”(policy based) is this? “In this article I re-examine Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s account of the disenchantment of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment. I argue that they identify disenchantment as a historical process whereby we have come to find natural things meaningless and completely intelligible. However, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that modernity not only rests on disenchantment but also tends to re-enchant nature, because it encourages us to think that its institutions derive from, and are anticipated and prefigured by, nature. I argue that Adorno’s Negative Dialecticsand Aesthetic Theory show how constellations and artworks generate an alternative form of reenchantment which is critical of modernity and its domination of nature. This form of re-enchantment finds natural beings to be mysteriously meaningful because they embody histories of immeasurable suffering. This experience engenders guilt and antipathy to human domination over nature.” http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0191453706061094
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” The team of 22 researchers admit “there is still a lot to understand about corals,” and “there are major knowledge gaps”. But despite not knowing much, the experts on marine ecosystems advise that “our only real chance for their survival” is to control the global climate. ”
Isn’t that just the usual pitch to justify (being paid for ) further work?
The thing is a preserved climate, might not be what they need, whereas a rising (however minutely) sea level gives them something to grow for.
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You’d reason that not knowing much about the subject but still claiming to be an expert on said subject would be contradictory, I mean its not like climate scientists have been ignoring empirical evidence to keep the idea of a failed hypothesis alive the past 30 odd years………oh.
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I did a paper on corals years ago. In fact is was so long ago, that it was probably a scroll, rather than a paper, but I digress.
The thing that fascinated me at the time, was that corals grew to match the mean height of the water. If there was more water they grew higher. If the water subsided, the ones at the top, died, leaving their exoskeletons behind, for the next generation to build upon. That is sad but true.
Now I am left wondering how a snotty-nosed and spotty-faced kid could not only understand that, but remember it, a couple of generations later, whereas these so-called scientists cannot.
When I am left wondering, I look for reasons. The most obvious of which, is that “funding for the preservation of cute encrustations”, may have been politically redirected elsewhere, to a more scary, or more tear-jerking, meme.
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I literally grew coral out of the water in my display tank which had a pumped artificial high/low water level. As you say, the stands grew flat and solid on the top. I recently removed all of the old corals from the display … +10 years old … as they’d almost covered the entire 3m2 surface area. The growth patterns were very interesting. Still hav the now bleached white skeletons to show the “deniers” 😉
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“whereas these so-called scientists cannot.”
Indeed!
The asinine meteorologist Clown speak is competing with the asinine oceanographer Clown speak, competing with asinine bankster Clown speak, competing with asinine politician Clown speak; in the global SCAM Olympics! Who will win? What will they win?
I dream of the old days when I\we only had to put up with Realtors, Used car salesmen, and Dronk neighbors! I are now the latter for good reason 🙂
All the best!-will-
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Ah but isn’t it the rate of change that’s now unprecedented that they’re going to be struggling to cope with? These poor researchers have so little information about corals from the past to go on. I mean it’s not as if coral records are so plentiful that they keep needing adjusting, is it.
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As you say there is no data to base any claim about the current rate of temperature change.
That doesn’t stop the claim being made, as far as I can see, on the basis of highly smoothed proxy reconstructions with the past 150 years of alleged temperature records tacked on.
The calcification rate of reefs seems to be increasing with atmospheric CO2.
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Everybody is concerned about temperature, sea level, and ocean acidity – except corals themselves. Don’t underestimate their devotion to Al Gore. They’ll die gladly to prove Him right.
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Nope! Gonna’ be a sea-change folks,
rich and strange, that’s fer sure,
coral-free, polar-bear-free, ice-free
and no more snow; hot-models tell us so.
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Al Gore told us so hisself!
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Al Gore is hardly, “a hot model”, Beth. He is not even photogenic.
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I thought “I” was a has been,
OTOH I’m not as good as I once was; but as good once, as I ever was! 🙂
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“International researchers are concerned about [fill in blank]. The time to act is now. It’s about what kind of world we want to leave to our grandchildren and to their children.”
Actually, I couldn’t care less about the pesky children of our grandchildren. They’ll probably be cruising the Brisbane streets in their coal-powered snowmobiles making lithium jokes at our expense. Just remember that before you make fun of great grandma’s whale bone corset shortage.
As for save the coral…save the lantana first. Lantana is more delicate.
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Only two words describe how well corals can survive man’s abuse of them …
Bikini Atoll!
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I come back here after a coffee break and see I was bitten by jumping in too soon and the moderator patched up my comment, sort of, to match a change Jo made (#1.1.1) so maybe I should be reluctant to comment on Bikini Atoll. But at least it’s safely in the past.
So here goes: The most noteworthy thing about that atoll now is its having the same name as an item of women’s swim wear that’s getting smaller by the year and likely to disappear before the corals do.
Sorry, I could not resist that.
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Groaaaan…..yes its a polypopular joke Roy.
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Did the garment name the atoll, or did the atoll name the garment? Curious people would like to know.
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Morning Rereke,
If I remember correctly, the atoll named the garment.
I think it was because there was a bigger explosion of angst about the removal of the first wearer of one from Bondi Beach than there was about the atomic tests on Bikini.
Cheers,
Dave B
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini
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Rereke:
The bikini was named after the atoll. The name for the design was coined in 1946 by engineer Louis Réard the designer and named after the site of the above ground atomic test.
Fashion models refused to appear in it so he engaged a nude dancer at the Casino de Paris to model it on July 5, 1946
Fashion designer Jacques Heim also from Paris, released a similar design earlier that same year, the Atome.
Bikini was the colonial name the Germans gave to the atoll, transliterated from the Marshallese name for the island, Pikinni.
There! I knew you would think it a subject worth looking into.
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I believe his name was Louis Renard, thus giving life to the term “Foxy Lady”.
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Over time it was an interesting exercise in social studies. A generation later tolerance became such that bare breasts were permitted on the beach in Australia. When I heard of this I expected a personal problem if I went to the beach. I needn’t have worried.
However, forty years on the number of bare breasts on the beach seems to have diminished greatly. I suspect out of fear of being seen on the nightly news.
Meanwhile, cleavage is heading for the navel!
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After the above comments by and about yours truly I think I would plead the Fifth Amendment even if I did know, which I do not. I’m sure those who answered you have done their homework. I but watch the trend lines, which are disappearing and comment accordingly.
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It is interesting how often the phrase ” much to the surprise of scientists.” appears in climate/coral reef articles.
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This “revelation” by climate scientists is nothing more than pandering to human emotions through fear and deceit.
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I notice that the ” red thumber” has been VERY active this morning…….but not one comment…..about why they dis-agree with the statement.
VERY strange…..
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The Warmunists remind me of hogs rooting around everything looking for something edible. In their wake much is ruined or eaten leaving a wake with less for others.
Lets liken the hogs behavior to the Alarmist Climate Change proponents.
Hogs root around and will eat almost anything, Alarmists root around for anything to claim horrors and disaster.
Hogs leave a trail of destruction of roots and plants, Alarmists leave a trail of fake science which is destructive to public belief in science.
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The idea of Gore or Mann rooting around is sickening, please stop.
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“Most people harbour questions about their roots”, said the man in the corner, trying to raise the tone of the discussion.
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RW
A lost cause when Al is concerned I fear
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This is actually a very important post by Jo (aren’t they all) where the warmist claims on the future of corals are solidly debunked by easy to read graphs that show earths phases over millions of years compared to the usual ‘past decades are unprecedented’ scares by alarmists.
For the general population this form of information is far easier to digest than scientific jargon that quickly loses the interest of the average punter, while the MSM is a no go the internet is still a good platform for open dialogue so spread this information far and wide people as its too good not to.
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Yonniestone:
From my readings the temperature shown by Scotese and Berner have tended to be moderated a bit as more knowledge is gained. That was posted when the belief in the warming effect of CO2 was strongest, since then a less genorous effect is allowed for.
Thus the Jurassic is now considered cooler than the Cretaceous, when the rise of sea levels in the latter helped circulation of sea water into polar regions (Mid West Seaway) (Eramanga sea) so transporting heat more effectively to the North Pole in particular. The effect was to reduce the temperature differential, hence the Cretaceous is usually thought to be more like 5 to 6℃ above present. Now all we have to do is get an estimate better than the present 15±1℃ which is based on ignoring the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
Also the variation in CO2 levels is more limited, modern references have the Cretaceous Era with CO2 between 1600 and 1950 ppm less than the cooler Jurassic.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/ go to The Week in Pictures for a collection of humorous political cartoons and clever internet memes from around the world.
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It seems that only the well known coral reefs are under threat.
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And that probably more from the mass touristical interest than from any li’l ol’ climate change.
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The alarmist climate of fear,
Warns of new tipping points every year,
So it’s not a surprise,
They announce the demise,
Of coral, to soon disappear.
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Out to sea from the Brisbane River a new reef has been discovered …
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-21/moreton-bay-mapping-makes-new-coral-discovery/8200142
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Just got back from watching my Nottinghamshire boys winning the T20 , I am so proud of them , I know some consider sport as bread and circus nonsense , but to see people come together in the spirit of sport dressed in fancy dress and sing songs like sweat Caroline , Elvis songs , Beatles songs together is inspirational , I truly do believe that England is the greatest nation that anyone could wish to be born in
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No. Coral cannot survive. Climate Change has killed the entire Australian Great Barrier Reef. It has destroyed Houston. We should have learned from Katrina.
Climate Change is the greatest moral challenge of a generation and it is caused wholly by the industrial revolution, cars and aircraft. Even the Pope agrees. Al Gore says so. Tim Flannery and all learned scientists agree and NASA and the UN. Even Craig and Twotter. Experts all. Consensus proves The Science. The Pause is imaginary, a fantasy made up by deniers. Floods, storms and pestilence and war, the four horsemen of the Ecopolypse are upon us. Hand over your money and dress in sackcloth and ashes and light candles while world leaders and local councillors and ecologists fly in their tens of thousands to Rio or Durban or Paris or Lima to confer on what can be done. The Corals though are doomed. It is too late. Only windmills and solar panels and Elon Musk can save us.
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Light candles??? And release CO2.
Admittedly if that amount was released it would have about the same effect as Australia’s RET scheme on the climate.
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Lighting candles is both therapeutic and necessary, as in South Australia.
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I would be buying up candles in Victoria now, before they run out.
We can look forward to major outages in summer while Premier Weatherill spends hundreds of millions of other people’s money on every form of non coal power to pretend he has not crippled South Australia. For some reason beyond logic diesel electricity is Green in SA and Tasmania and coal electricity is not. Consensus chemistry.
Labor Green Prime Minister Turnbull is chipping in more hundreds of millions to help Weatherill keep his job in the coming SA election. Meanwhile Turnbull is planning his giant renewable battery in the sky, his Very Fast Train, his second airport and his very comfortable retirement, maybe before Christmas when Joyce loses his seat. He is the most popular Labor Green leader in history, loved by his ABC.
Why not change sides and Malcolm can lead Labor at the next election?
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Why would Labor want a proven loser?
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Why break with tradition?
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Say corals can’t survive the heat in Cairns. Wouldn’t it take thousands of years before the stuff on the NSW border found it unbearably warm? And wouldn’t they then grow southwards towards Coffs Harbour and then Hobart?
When they all finally die, wouldn’t we just throw blocks of concrete, or scrap metal in the water to make artificial reefs? Pretty much any old crap including old tyres seems to work.
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Andrew:
When it comes to Climate Change© “Pretty much any old crap including old tyres seems to work” although I am not sure that the alarmist piece actually mentioned recycling old tyres, just the same old tired crap.
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JoNova, excellent write up!
Keep up the great work!
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JoNova, excellent write up!
Keep up the great work!
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According to these Scientists it’s happening now .
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-19/researchers-shocked-by-coral-bleaching-in-pacific/8822126
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‘Mr De La Brosse said nowhere was immune to the effects of global warming.’
“It doesn’t matter where you are in the Pacific, coral is starting to bleach.”
Technically he is wrong, the bleaching took place in the western Pacific because of a strong El Nino, which produced sea level fall in that part of the world.
This has been happening over eons of time and has nothing to do with industrial CO2.
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It seems to me that none of the people involved in “climate change” “research” understand the history of the planet in which climate has always changed. They and their socialist supporters think that climate is static. Another failure of the “education” system. I learned about natural climate change in primary school.
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“international scientists” are like atoms — they make up everything.
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Priceless! Thank you John.
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Climate catastrophists often say corals grow incredibly slowly but they actually grow surprisingly quickly.
QUOTE
Different species of coral grow at different rates depending on water temperature, salinity, turbulence, and the availability of food. The massive corals are the slowest growing species, adding between 5 and 25 millimeters (0.2–1 inch) per year to their length. Branching and staghorn corals can grow much faster, adding as much as 20 centimeters (8 inches) to their branches each year.
END QUOTE
http://coral.org/coral-reefs-101/coral-reef-ecology/how-coral-reefs-grow/
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Another thing to notice is when corals first appeared?
The answer is when the CO2 levels were the highest seen in Berner’s data on the Scotese and Berner chart above.
I would conclude that corals really like high levels of CO2.
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Now wait a minute. President elect Obama told us in Nov. 2008 that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2pZSvq9bto
I really don’t know who to believe anymore..
😉
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Just watched the Kingsmen , could just see Mann playing the villain .
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Come! Come! folks.
I am devastated at the levels of cynicism being displayed here by the commenters and denizens of Jo’s site for one of the the truly worthy environmental causes, that of the Great Barrier Reef research group at Townsville’s James Cook University
The score or so researchers here who have made a desperate plea on behalf of the GBR deserve every bit of help they can get, particularly further very significant and substantial financial assistance and grants to further their research on the Reef.
These worthy scientists, a score or so in all have taken it upon themselves to be the main and central spokespeople on behalf of the Great Barrier Reef.
As scientists, they have taken upon themselves without any prompting from tourism industry or the fishing industry or coal shipping industry or marine science centers elesewhere, the sole scientific responsibility of overseeing all of the GBR’s science and further, to be the responsible spokespeople on behalf of the potential future of the GBR’s 2300 kms length of the reef which includes 2900 individual reefs and some 900 islands and all of its 344,400 square kilometrers of reef area.
This has entailed them in making some very considerable personal sacrifices such as living and working in Townsville’s James Cook University, over 1100 kms distance north of the Queensland’s capital city and its university intellectual centre and fleshpots of Brisbane.
They have had to put up with the warm semitropical temperatures which and sometimes humidity and the occassional cyclone which requires extensive air conditioning in their academic quarters so that they can concentrate on the modelling of the bleaching and die back of the reefs with out exposing themselves to the tropical conditions and minimising their exposure to the warm to hot semitropical outdoors.
They have to work in the very warm waters of the sub tropics when researching the corals immediately off shore of Townsville
Waters so warm in fact that many of their undergraduates are forced to wear bikinis to keep the heat down or was that up, whilst snorkelling and doing research into the corals.
Of course this type of research entails considerable expense which has to be drawn from the research budget.
They have to have a rudimentary knowledge on how to program a model of the reef bleaching and dieback so the possible extent of the reef bleaching and die back can be modelled to give an approximation and a probability of a deadly major bleaching event and its Reef destroying effects plus its time line from onset of only a decade or so ahead , over the whole of the entire reef area’s 344,400 square kilometres, an area one and quarter times the State of Victoria’s area.
They have to have a rudimentary knowledge of statistics so as to be able to adjust any data and facts to fit the narrative they are now drawing of the destructive dangers now arising for the Reef as a major oceanic and living biological organism, dangers for the future of the Reef that will be entirely due to a modelled increase in global temperatures and a model created inference of an increase in the Reef’s waters of a degree or so of temperature over the next century or two.
So folks a little less cynicism perhaps about the aims of the Townsville James Cooks University Great Barrier Reef researchers and their deep worries over the now increasingly recognised demise of the Reef within the next decade or so due to the lack of money for further immediate and critical research and possibly increasing water tempertures over the next few hundred centuries.
.
Oh well, I had better put this in so there is no misreading of my intentions [ sarc/]
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It’s a horrible place to live Townsville, and the drive to Cairns to the north takes half a day each way, or several other resort areas that draw tourists from all around the world.
And then there are all those ADF personnel at the Army and Air Force bases adding to the economy there and the massive infrastructure projects taking place now and for a decade past at least.
It would be hard being a GBR employee.
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ONLY 40 years of observed and poorly documented evidence is evidence of a coral doomsday?
Mar 15, 2017, Terry Hughes:
In 2015-2016, record temperatures triggered a massive pan-tropical episode of coral bleaching, the third such global-scale event since mass bleaching was first documented in the 1980s.
Meanwhile …
On the west coast of Australia, CSIRO marine ecologist Dr Russ Babcock has spent years monitoring the extensive area of reefs along the Pilbara coast, including the World Heritage listed Ningaloo Coast.
“Our records don’t go back as far as those of the Great Barrier Reef but there have been previous bleachings of corals in the west and, with the two recent bleachings in 2011 and 2013, it seems we are on a similar trajectory.”
From the CSIRO blog: Coral reefs need cooler water.
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Were there any geologists among this lot?
It doesn’t seem so.
“The only good is knowledge,
and the only evil is ignorance.”
Herodotus
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Coral reefs evolved in seas much warmer than today. Coral survived
the Cretaceous-Tertiary event that wiped out most of the dinosaurs.
When it’s hot, hot, hot, corals adapt by a bleaching acclimatation
process of expelling and exchanging the species of symbiotic zooxanthus
that live within coral tissues.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/18/the-coral-bleaching-debate-is-bleaching-the-legacy-of-a-marvelous-adaptation-mechanism-or-a-prelude-to-extirpation/comment-page-1/
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Serf spellcheck, ‘zooxanthellae.’
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Death of the polar bear as a “climate change” icon.
https://youtu.be/XCzwFalI8OQ
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Chilly water corals discovered off south east Australia.
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-reef-discovered-off-australia-s-southern-coast-rivals-the-great-barrier-reef
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On a general theme of believing what you are told. Science by consensus.
National Geographic used to be a great group, until they discovered Climate. Now it is the entire topic. Anyway they produced an Almanac of World History and while somethings are very left, there is the Age of Enlightenment 1700-1800.
“The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt” wrote Rene Descartes in his Discourse on Method, 1637. Descartes’s skeptical philosophy helped to usher in the 18th-century era known as the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. (Plus algebra, formulae, Cartesian coordinates and Rational science)
So the first rule of a scientist is this. All scientists are intractable skeptics until something is proven beyond a doubt. This was the start of real science. Absolute truth built on absolute truths and the greatest of these was mathematics.
There is no reason at all to believe the Great Barrier Reef is doomed and every scientist should take that view until proven otherwise.
According to Descartes, every scientist needs to be convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt. Clearly all deniers then.
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Their ABC this Tuesday has an episode of Catalyst devoted to global ecological catastrophe… but focused on dinosaurs 65Mya rather than the corals of today.
In the absence of any solid new evidence it is certain to feature a 97% consensus of experts that the ancient birds and crocodiles only survived because they received a government bailout package…
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