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
A very preliminary search at http://scholar.google.de revealed revealed that 100% of the literature dealt with the combination of “coral bleach” and “higher temperatures”, none with the combination with “coral bleach” and “lower temperatures”. Is there a consensus because of negligence?
If this would be true, there would be another scandal in science. Does anybody know more?
Pretty soon we will be told that the increased CO2 sollution in the oceans has lead to thicker shells rendering clam shells uncrackable by poor otters… thereby endangering them at some future date.
On second thought, I CALL IT!!! Where’s my grant to start my study?
OT but worth a mention as it might affect this sort of web site
/Quote/
Enemies Of Free Speech Call For Internet Licensing
Calls to introduce a licensing system to police the Internet on behalf of a powerful UN agency represent the latest salvo in a long-running battle to kill free speech on the web and bring an end to the powerful digital democracy that has devastated the carbon tax agenda of the UN by exposing the Climategate scandal.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/enemies-of-free-speech-call-for-internet-licensing.html
/Unquote/
Cold January kills record number of Florida manatees – NatGeo News Watch
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2010/01/cold-weather-kills-manatees.html
A two-week cold snap earlier this month caused a record number of deaths of endangered manatees in Florida, the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) said this week.
“Biologists with the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute documented more than 100 manatee carcasses in state waters from the beginning of the year through January 23,” the FWC said in a news release…
FWC News – FWC records unprecedented number of cold-related manatee deaths
http://myfwc.com/NEWSROOM/10/statewide/News_10_X_ManateeCold1.htm
Previously:
FWC releases preliminary 2009 manatee mortality data January 6, 2010
http://myfwc.com/NEWSROOM/10/statewide/News_10_X_ManateeDeaths09.htm
Fish and Wildlife Research Institute
http://research.myfwc.com/features/view_article.asp?id=33589
More on other Florida fish and wildlife at…
FWC Newsroom – Index
http://myfwc.com/NEWSROOM/Index.htm
Piers Corbyn
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No8.pdf
QUESTION OF THE WEEK Now that Solar Cycle 24 has got going does that mean that the increasing solar activity will make the world generally milder?
A: NO! The correlation of solar activity and world temperature applies for ODD cycles – which dominate the relationship between earth temperature & solar activity. World temps are generally lower in even numbered cycles even when they are very active.
2010’s Historic Cold Spell in Florida and Southeast, Powerful Storms in California, Monstrous Snows in Arizona Mountain
By Joe D’Aleo Monday, February 1, 2010 Florida – Worst Freeze since 1989
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=219
Has many details on these events.
“some of the prettiest and healthiest reefs in North America.”
That made me actually laugh out loud, then get pizzed off.
According to every thing they have said for the past decade, our reefs are everything but healthy.
It really does depend on how they want to spin it.
We are at the top limit of their range.
What do they expect?
Oh yeah, I forget, they expect the climate to be static, that little
“normal” line in the middle.
If there was no CO2 in the water, maybe the pH would be too high.
Did you know there were 3 ways to remove the CO2 from sea water?
1. Heat it.
2. Add more salts.
3. Freeze it.
If you consider that 87%ish of all CO2 is in the ocean (comapared to about 4%ish for the air) in times of global cooling and glaciation, 2 and 3 will become dominant and will release major quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. By freezing, the concentration in minerals in sea water will increase leading to CO2 degasification of both pure water and sea water.
Florida sits right on the edge of the temperate zone. It sticks out into the ocean but it’s connected to the continent. A lot of the time, most every thing from south of Gainesville or Orlando, looks pretty tropical. Through many seasons citrus can be grown almost to the Georgia line. Other years the freezes kill most of the citrus all the way south to Lake Wales.
People from up north come down and plant Coco Plumosa trees all over the state because they look more like Coconut Palms than Cabbage Palms do. Northerners think that Florida should look like some tropical island down in the caribbean. Then, when it freezes, they all die. I was in Deland and the Ocala Forest this past weekend and there are dead Coco Plumosas all over the place.
Then there are the manatees. Manatees have been maintained north of their normal migration areas for decades by power plant warm water outflows.
But apple trees, sugar maple trees, etc won’t grow here. It’s normally too warm.
Like citrus, palms and manatees, the corals will continue to come and go in Florida based on decadal weather fluctuations. People grow up and they think that everything in their backyard is going to stay exactly the same for centuries. Maybe that happens in Maine or South Dakota (I don’t know) but it sure doesn’t happen in Florida. Change is here to stay. It’s been that way for a long time.
The carbon units infesting planet Earth go crazy in cycles that approximate the many and various solar cycles. When they begin to blame or attribute all their little problems to some natural process you can pretty much bet that something’s up or down (remember we’re speaking of “cycles”). These cycles have traditionally been resolved by wars. Wars that have killed off the younger generation and left the older units to fend for themselves and rebuild. No doubt the crazy carbon units of the 21st Century will soon get it into their little heads that another war is called for and when it is over they’ll have more practical things to worry about.
Shear the sheep before they freeze to death, so we can make woolen sweaters and keep warm
On the general topic of AGW. How many politicians and ‘pundits’ seem to believe that somewhere there is an Alladin’s cave packed to the ceiling with glittering “irrefutable evidence for AGW – beyond all doubt.” and these minor blips are merely trivial? It’s just that they can’t quite remember the password!
Steve Oregon (10:35:32) :
“…As the oceans become more acidic, it’s harder for corals, oysters, clams, crabs, mussels, lobsters to make their shells…”
Crabs first appeared on Earth (Gaia) during Paleozoic era,
http://tinyurl.com/yf2bxtn
when CO2 levels were 100 times higher than today.
http://tinyurl.com/cmq2a4
Damn it! This global warming has got to stop!
Cold kills AGW trolls. When was the last time you’ve seen one here? Are they all doing Scream-Ins outside?
Steve Oregon (10:35:32),
Ocean pH has been all over the map in the past: click
I used to raise tropical fish in tanks up to 125 gallons, and I can tell you from experience that pH is not nearly as important as other factors in a healthy fish population. I had clams and shrimp in the tank, too, and they didn’t seem to care about the pH, which varied over a wide range, from 6.5 to 8.5.
The trumped up ‘ocean acidification’ story is just the latest in a long list of Y2K-type scares that will amount to absolutely nothing. Read up on ocean buffering capacity.
Richard Sharpe (11:14:52) :
However, what is the pH of the freshwater environments where freshwater snails live and grow etc?
I can’t answer your question directly. However, there are rivers in Scotland which are famous (locally at least) for fresh water pearls which are found in fresh water mussels. These rivers must, I think, be heading towards acidic due the the environment in Scotland, large amounts of peat for instance. It’s hard to get facts, as a lot of the acidity is blamed on acid rain. I am not a biologist but there are a number of other creatures commonly found in these rivers as well as the snails, freshwater shrimp, caddis grubs mayflys and so on.
Freshwater Pearls have been known and valued in Scotland since human habitation began.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honours_of_Scotland
http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Crown_of_Scotland
Just a heads up that there is a breaking story in the UK Guardian newspaper who claim an exclusive showing that Jones and the CRU covered up problems with temperature data from China.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/leaked-emails-climate-jones-chinese
“Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.
The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN’s embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.
Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates widespread concern about the affair among scientists.
In particular, it emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.”
@Caroline Kettle (11:50:58) :
“Jo Nova has a timeline on her blog …..”
An impressive graphic, but a bit too detailed and hard to easily follow for the sort of thing I had in mind. It majors on the ClimateGate data (though it mentions earlier politics).
I had thought of a background paper covering all the history suitable for a journalist who had never read any science before, let alone climate science. It would be simple, fairly linear, and would have to point out every so often; “This is wrong because…”. Possibly written like a newspaper item, so the journalist can simply copy chunks out verbatim (which is what they seem to do anyway). Still, I’m sure that if the journalists really need it they will ask for it and someone will write one…
Dodgy Geezer
RichieP
I think you and Jo Nova have missed the obvious
March 1979 3 Mile Island Nuclear accident makes future power station build unlikely unless other energy sources are proved just as risky
Juy 1979 Office of Science and Technology hold conference to discuss risk of CO2 emissions.
!986 Chernobyl puts another nail in the nuclear coffin
1988 Hansen presents to Congress and the real bandwagon starts
I am not suggesting that this is all a scam by the Nuclear industry. I just believe that they must have had a strategy to counter the bad press that they were receiving at this time. Funding researchers who were casting doubt on their competitors MUST have been part of that strategy. After the band wagon was rolling everyone jumped on WWF, Greenpeace, Animal Rights, Anti-Capitalists etc all had a reason to fan the flames. The climate scientists themselves could not believe their luck. From a back water they had become the centre of the Universe. All they had to do was make sure their research came to the right conclusions. What would you do?
From carbon unit to carbon unit: There are among us some very greedy units who always want the resources from the rest, these are the units who provoke all the troubles…
Yes, I can already hear the AGW alarmists saying it’s the fault of global warming. Next we’ll hear them saying the next ice age will be caused by global warming. Is there anyone more dumb than an AGW alarmist these days?
Oceans losing their heat content…due to lack of sunspots and low magnetic flux.
I’ve already expressed my opinion supporting this proposition on a recent thread.
But here is an interesting complimentary view: Oceans can possibly be heated from below by volcanic action. So, should oceans temperature raise, CO2 can’t be the knee-jerk conclusion from the Man-made warmists.
This article was extracted from New Zealand Climate Truth no. 225, 23 October, 2009)
“The “globe” is cooling. The sea level is not rising. The ice is advancing. What is left? The Ocean is heating [This proposition has been contradicted as a recent Watts Up With That? post showed].
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/31/nodc-revises-ocean-heat-content-data/
The last two IPCC Reports made a big thing of ocean heating. The methods used showed considerable variability. The average showed periodicity, with troughs in 1965 and 1986 and peaks in 1980 and 2005. But the temperature increase from the 1965 trough to the later peak of 2005 was confidently attributed to “global warming” caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
At least, that was the story in the first two drafts of the 2007 Report. Then the people measuring temperature provided the disturbing news that the 2005 figure actually showed a fall in temperature, and they had to put that into their final Report.
Then there was overwhelming pressure on the scientists to backtrack on such a disturbing observation, and, loyally, they discovered a “rogue” unreliable sensor which restored the IPCC “confidence” that the ocean temperature is rising.
So they increased their coverage with a new sophisticated system called ARGO which has 3,000 probes. The results are disastrous, and they have yet to admit it. They are given in the following paper.
K. von Schukmann, F. Galliland, and P.Y. Le Traon, 2009. “Global hydrographic variability patterns during 2003-2008”. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 11124.09007. doi:1029/2008JC005237
To start with, the average temperature is falling. But what is worse. The variability is so great that it could not possibly be heated from the atmosphere. So it must be heated from below, from all the underwater volcanoesetc. that have so far been neglected. I attach the record for the Pacific basin which includes the variability ofsalinity and temperature (see figure on the next page).
This all comes on top of the paper by Douglass and Knox at:
Douglass, D.H. and R. Knox, 2009. “Changes in Net Flow of Ocean Heat Correlate with Past Climate Anomalies”. Physics Letters A., v. 373, Issue 36, 31 August 2009, p. 3296-3300.
The abstract reads:
“Earth’s radiation imbalance is determined from ocean heat content data and compared with results of direct measurements. Distinct time intervals of alternating positive and negative values are found: 1960– mid 1970s (-0.15), mid-1970s–2000 (+0.15), 2001–present (-0.2 W/m2), and are consistent with prior reports. These climate shifts limit climate predictability.”
The summary reads:
“We determine Earth’s radiation imbalance by analyzing three recent independent observational ocean heat content determinations for the period 1950 to 2008 and compare the results with direct measurements by satellites. A large annual term is found in both the implied radiation imbalance and the direct measurements. Its magnitude and phase confirm earlier observations that delivery of the energy to the ocean is rapid, thus eliminating the possibility of long time constants associated with the bulk of the heat transferred.
Longer-term averages of the observed imbalance are not only many-fold smaller than theoretically derived values, but also oscillate in sign. These facts are not found among the theoretical predictions.
Three distinct time intervals of alternating positive and negative imbalance are found: 1960 to the mid 1970s, the mid 1970s to 2000 and 2001 to present. The respective mean values of radiation imbalance are -0.15, +0.15, and -0.2 to -0.3. These observations are consistent with the occurrence of climate shifts at 1960, the mid-1970s, and early 2001 identified by Swanson and Tsonis.
Knowledge of the complex atmospheric-ocean physical processes is not involved or required in making these findings. Global surface temperatures as a function of time are also not required to be known.”
The periodicity found coincides with the behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and as the heating is from below, this heating is related to the PDO must also behave in a periodic fashion.
The finding that the Earth’s energy is not balanced shows that the fundamental assumption of all the computer climate models that it IS balanced is incorrect, and means that all the models are wrong.
The global warmers and “climate change” enthusiasts have no excuses left.”
It looks like every where the AGW fiasco turns, the “door” is being shut in their faces.
May a thousand doors shut in their faces and this swindle by exposed as the hoax it is, once, and for all.
SandyInDerby (13:36:58) said:
Richard Sharpe (11:14:52) :
However, what is the pH of the freshwater environments where freshwater snails live and grow etc?
I can’t answer your question directly. However, there are rivers in Scotland which are famous (locally at least) for fresh water pearls which are found in fresh water mussels. These rivers must, I think, be heading towards acidic due the the environment in Scotland, large amounts of peat for instance. It’s hard to get facts, as a lot of the acidity is blamed on acid rain. I am not a biologist but there are a number of other creatures commonly found in these rivers as well as the snails, freshwater shrimp, caddis grubs mayflys and so on.
Freshwater Pearls have been known and valued in Scotland since human habitation began.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honours_of_Scotland
http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/Crown_of_Scotland
Thank you. Another step towards refuting the alarmists who claim the world as we know it will end if the pH of the oceans changes from 8.2 to 8.1.
JB Williamson (12:48:08) :
“OT but worth a mention as it might affect this sort of web site
/Quote/
Enemies Of Free Speech Call For Internet Licensing
Calls to introduce a licensing system to police the Internet….
http://www.prisonplanet.com/enemies-of-free-speech-call-for-internet-licensing.html“
I would suggest using the orginal story instead of Prison Planet, with its unfortunate “tin foil hat” image.
origin of the story:
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/agency-calls-global-cyberwarfare-treaty-drivers-license-web-users/
UN agency calls for global cyberwarfare treaty, ‘driver’s license’ for Web users:
“The world needs a treaty to prevent cyber attacks becoming an all-out war, the head of the main UN communications and technology agency warned Saturday.
International Telcommunications Union secretary general Hamadoun Toure gave his warning at a World Economic Forum debate where experts said nations must now consider when a cyber attack becomes a declaration of war….”
This probably ties in with the Fox news story declaring the Climategate whistleblower leak the attack of spies/hackers. They want to twist Climategate to their advantage to fleece the masses (license fee to the UN) and insure they can continue to feed bullpoo instead of the truth to people.
I really am getting tired of the spin.
OT but I’ve just found this on the BBC Scotland web page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/8492333.stm
Coldest December/January in Scotland since records began in 1914. Only weather of course, but …
Larry Geiger (13:04:47) :
“….Like citrus, palms and manatees, the corals will continue to come and go in Florida based on decadal weather fluctuations. People grow up and they think that everything in their backyard is going to stay exactly the same for centuries. Maybe that happens in Maine or South Dakota (I don’t know) but it sure doesn’t happen in Florida. Change is here to stay. It’s been that way for a long time.”
In upper New England, northern New Hamphsire, Maine, Vermont… it is poison ivy that is in the northern most reaches of its range. Gee it is so sad to see the really cold weather kill off the poison ivy. I just hope the four inches of snow and 19 F we had this week in mid North Carolina kills off the blasted fire ants. They crept north onto my farm in the last few years.