Ove Hoegh-Guldberg wants us to consider putting sun shades over the Great Barrier Reef, but it begs the question — how much is the reef heating up, and how sure are we that it’s man-made and not natural?
John McLean digs into the data and finds that temperature variations on the reef appear to be closely tied to the ENSO cycle, and that there is little reason to think our SUVs and coal fired plants have anything to do with the rises and falls.
We wonder, as usual, why those paid by taxpayers can’t do the same basic calculations and graphs that the volunteers do online.
Great Barrier Reef sea temperatures – What the data says
John McLean
Inspired by the absurdity of putting shades on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), I studied the observational data.
We can extract data for the grid cells that cover the reef from NOAA’s “Optimal Interpolation” sea surface temperature data (see here). When that data is averaged across the entire reef we find that the average sea surface temperature along the Great Barrier Reef has an annual cycle very similar to that of Willis Island, a Bureau of Meteorology observation […]
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