Never mind predictions of catastrophic bleaching from global warming, cold is the culprit of this story. With ocean heat content now shown to be dropping slightly since 2005, there is even greater concern.
Excerpts from Physorg.com: Coral in Florida Keys suffers lethal hit from cold
January 30, 2010 By Curtis Morgan
Bitter cold this month may have wiped out many of the shallow water corals in the Keys.
Scientists have only begun assessments, with dive teams looking for “bleaching” that is a telltale indicator of temperature stress in sensitive corals, but initial reports are bleak. The impact could extend from Key Largo through the Dry Tortugas west of Key West, a vast expanse that covers some of the prettiest and healthiest reefs in North America.
Given the depth and duration of frigid weather, Meaghan Johnson, marine science coordinator for The Nature Conservancy, expected to see losses. But she was stunned by what she saw when diving a patch reef 2.5 miles off Harry Harris Park in Key Largo.
Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death. There were also dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish littering the bottom.
“Corals didn’t even have a chance to bleach. They just went straight to dead,” said Johnson, who joined teams of divers last week surveying reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. “It’s really ecosystem-wide mortality.”
The record chill that gripped South Florida for two weeks has taken a heavy toll on wildlife — particularly marine life.
…
Many of the Florida Keys’ signature diving destinations such as Carysfort, Molasses and Sombrero reefs _ as well as deeper reefs off Miami-Dade and Broward — are believed to have escaped heavy losses, thanks to warming effects of the Gulf Stream. But shallower reefs took a serious, perhaps unprecedented hit, said Billy Causey, Southeast regional director of national marine sanctuaries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
…
Cold-water bleaching is unusual, last occurring in 1977, the year it snowed in Miami. It killed hundreds of acres of staghorn and elkhorn corals across the Keys. Neither species has recovered, both becoming the first corals to be federally listed as threatened in 2006.
This big chill, said Causey, shapes up worse.
“They were exposed to temperatures much colder, that went on longer, than what they were exposed to three decades ago,” he said.
Typical winter lows in-shore hover in the mid- to high-60s in the Keys.
At its coldest more than a week ago, a Key Largo reef monitor recorded 52. At Munson Reef, just about a half-mile off the Newfound Harbor Keys near Big Pine Key, it hit 56.
At Munson Reef, said Cory Walter, a biologist for Mote Marine Laboratory in Summerland Key, scientists saw losses similar to what was reported off Key Largo. Dead eels, dead hogfish, dead coral — including big coral head 5- to 6-feet wide, bleached white with only fringes of decaying tissue.
“They were as big, as tall, as me. They were pretty much dead,” said Walter, who coordinates Mote’s BleachWatch program, which monitors reefs.
Read the entire story at physorg.com
h/t to Leif Svalgaard
The Spirit of the Universe definitely has a sense of humor!
Those who would deceive suddenly find that they are perceived as fools.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Sciences
Former NASA PI for Apollo
I posed a question that was rapidly deleted on climateprogress. Joe was on a major ocean acidification rant but as usual offered no actual numbers. I asked how a PH of 8.2 was considered acidic and he just lost it. Trooth must be kept secret if it doesn’t support the dogma.
MattN (11:05:48) :
Take it to the bank. This WILL be used as evidence of global warming
You just said it: “Bank”…”Follow the money”: There were two big banks, one in favor of carbon share business “Al Baby” included, the other to spoil the first one’s business; perhaps out from there it came the hacker. Just guessing. See:
http://english.pravda.ru/business/finance/111958-0/
@ur momisugly Dodgy Geezer (11:05:45) :
“A bit off topic, but surely now is the time for a simple timeline of this scam to be published, for the benefit of all those who are just realising that there is a problem.”
Jo Nova has done something of this sort. Here is the link to the pdf.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/climategate/history/climategate_timeline_banner.pdf
Apologies if this is a repeat – my original post seemed to simply disappear rather than wait for the mods.
The only thing I saw on the nightly news the past week was a horde of sharks in a breeding gathering off the Florida coast. Hammerheads, Lemons, Bulls, Tigers.
Not the place to go for a global warming expose photo-op dive right now.
@P Gosselin
“..Your endeavour is a noble one, but the scandal is well documented in various books already…”
Yes – in too much detail! That’s no use for journalists, or anyone else who wants to understand the whole scam in 5 minutes. And it needs to be on the net…
I don’t think it’s MY endeavour – I don’t know enough about it – but I think SOMEONE will need to do it, otherwise the journalists will simply think this is a leadership issue which will go away when Pachauri resigns. Certainly I expect that MSM coverage will cease when that happens (as it will shortly)…
Steve Oregon (10:35:32)
I was hoping for soft shell lobsters.
http://tinyurl.com/yb3xs6w
“Jane Lubchecno
“… As the oceans become more acidic, it’s harder for corals, oysters, clams, crabs, mussels, lobsters to make their shells or their hard parts, and they dissolve faster.”
Oh Jane, don’t you ever read Wattsupwiththat? http://tinyurl.com/ylxz2sm
to Dodgy Geezer 11.05.45:
Jo Nova has a timeline on her blog http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/finally-the-new-revised-and-edited-climategate-timeline/
David (10:56:18) :
Steve Oregon – where does that woman get her ‘information’ from..?
She’s the distinguished head of NOAA with a resume packed with academia awards and recognition for her lengthy career as an OSU professor and researcher.
Somehow that also makes her a climate expert?
So she can just make it up as she goes.
Lubchenco has been as bad as any Team Member, WWF or Greenpeace in the fabrication department. Along with spending millions on research with little to show for it.
When her OSU (NAS $9 million grant) Ocean Dead Zone research found no cause she began suggesting there was link to AGW.
Here deliberate and baseless fabrication has since traveled the globe and miraculously morphed into “established science” according to the RC clowns.
Now as the head of NOAA she is busy expanding her efforts to “educate” the public.
http://climatecentral.org/
Founding Board
Jane Lubchenco
http://climatecentral.org/about/people/
So how cold was the water ?
And why weren’t these ‘sensitive’ species wiped out during the last half-dozen ice ages ?
Depressing to think we’ve still got at least 20 more years of chilliness before we get back into the beneficial warming climate phase.
Which would you rather live in:
MWP or LIA? Holocene Climate Optimum or Younger Dryas?
If you know anything about natural history or the history of human civilization, you will pick the warm periods instead of the cold periods. Overall, warmer is better for not only human life but life in general.
Carrot Eater:
Do you think that evolution by natural selection is a valid scientific theory? If so, what does it matter if “a single season’s extreme weather fluctuation can be enough to cause major and lasting changes to an ecosystem someplace”? One of the most fundamental oxymorons (or perhaps hypocrasies) of environmentalism is that the primarily left-wing, materialist supporters of the new environmentalist religions, who most likely claim adherence to science and to Darwinism, posit that any human interference with nature is a sin, and worry frantically about damage to ecosystems, which must be kept pristine and unchanging.
Tell that to “Mother” Nature, which remorselessly changes and destroys, sometimes in a flash event (such as the recent Haitian earthquake). Although Darwin realized that environmental change is not required for evolution to happen, he recognized that it had a very dramatic effect in promoting natural selection. Environmentalists by their actions and teachings fundamentally oppose evolution – very curious.
Finally, I strongly doubt that in this instance – the prolonged cold weather in Florida – there will be lasting changes to Floridean ecosystems. Most marine animals are highly mobile, and no doubt these corals will be growing as well as ever after a few months of recovery, once they are colonized by new coral polyps. Lasting changes will only result if the last few years of cooling presage a more sinister event such as a return to ice-age conditions.
So climate change IS killing coral…since we all know the record cold was due to CO2 emissions 😉
Or at least that’s how it will be spun.
As Bruce Springsteen said .. “And you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above if you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love”
On the term ocean acidification…
Basic chemistry states that moving towards a pH of 7.0, from any direction, is called neutralizing the solution. Not once during all of my years of biochem studies in college did I hear the word “acidification”. I could understand people making up a word for “becoming less basic” if a word didn’t already exist, but the term neutralizing has been around for a long time. Maybe “global warming is neutralizing the oceans” carries too many other connotations.
As James Brown said…”it is what it is”.
Brain coral to pinky coral: “Pinky, are you pondering what i’m pondering?”
This is very dark black humour: How history repeats itself:
19th.century: Cap&trade of slaves from the Black Continent,
21th.century: Cap&trade of black emissions for turning whites into slaves.
Steve Oregon (10:35:32) :
David (10:56:18) :
Richard Sharpe (11:14:52) :
@Steve Oregon,
…re: As the oceans become more acidic…
For the oceans to become acidic at all,
they have at first to become neutral (ph = 7.0)
Currently, the oceans are, depending on location
somewhere between ph=7.4 and ph=8.1, so
they are a little bit alcalic, not acidic at all.
Finally, the oceans are a buffer-solution (I’m
not sure if that’s the proper translation.
If not, somebody should correct me on that)
There is quite some Na, K, Mg in that solution
which hasn’t got it’s acidic counterpart already.
(speaking of Cl, F, SO, SO2, CO2, NO, NO2). So before
Na, K, Mg and o´thers are not ‘satisfied’, there won’t be
any – easily recognizable – decrease of ph)
@David (10:56:18) :
where did you see 8.2´? I’m just curious.
Never heard about anything above 8.1 in oceans, but
may be lack of knowledge/data, last time I really measured
this stuff was about ’79.
@richard Sharpe (11:14:52) :
Richard, it’s only ‘hearsay/saw it there’, from somebody here who does
have a bunch of small seawater aquariums – expensive hobby –
it’s not the ph which may cause trouble. Plus or minus
0.1/0.2 is manageable. What really does count, is the
amount of metals still in solution, measured in
milligramm/microgramm per liter. He does not have problems
with – too few – shells or snails.
More to that, could you imagine a seawater aquarium under
the glass-plated table of your living room? Looking from
the pizza, you are currently working on, over the plate
onto a small nautilus? Amazing, really amazing and I was it.
vigilantfish:
I only said ‘lasting’ damage because the article above says some corals have not yet recovered from a cold snap in 1977. There could be more to that story; all I know about it is that one sentence. But taking it at face value, I’m a bit surprised that a single cold snap has effects that persist that long.
As for evolution, yes, life adapts to its environment. Change the environment over time, and some species will die, some will flourish, some will eventually change over time through natural selection, some will migrate elsewhere, some will migrate in. The question is, if the climate changes over the next couple centuries, how will all that play out and how will it affect us, our living patterns and our agriculture? There’s no opposition to evolution there; that’s just a strange idea. It’s merely self-concern. Life will of course go on, but in some different way.
When we had a very active Sun and positive phases of the oceans:
CO2 caused global warming.
When we have a very low activity Sun and negative phases of the oceans:
C02 causes global cooling.
Where’s the unifying theory? How did C02 global warming cause C02 global cooling?
Never mind that the Earth has experienced far warmer and cooler times in the past. Anthropogenic usage of stored green energy releases C02 that has mystical powers.
Modern coral evolved 245 million years ago. It’s hard for me to believe that this winter’s cold was worse than anything the coral have had to endure for a quarter of a billion years.
I think it’s much more likely that environmental scientists can’t tell live coral from dead coral.
John Galt (11:58:44) :
We don’t get to choose the type of climactic period we get.
But if I had my druthers…I’d take any of those warming periods.
In the meantime, I am happy to have known 30+ years of most excellent warming. It was truly grand.
David (10:56:18) :
“The business about crabs etc not being able to form shells is also rubbish – never heard of freshwater snails, etc..? Rain water is slightly acidic (pH about 5.5) – so according to Jane they’d all be dissolving…”
Fresh water isn’t only rain, it’s also from springs fed up through minerals. The typical P.H. of a freshwater lake/river is 7.0 and up, and in Africa the cichlid lakes have a P.H. around 8.3, like seawater.