Guest post by Bob Fernley-Jones
The 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) was held in Cairns, Queensland, Australia last July. Not a bad venue for embracing subject field trips and the exotic and spectacular hinterland attractions. Yet they had time to reach a grand consensus statement endorsed reportedly by thousands of scientists.
Step 1) Back in June, three eminent scientists including the convener gathered at Stanford and drafted the consensus.
Step 2) They also launched an endorsement form on their websites at COS (Centre for Ocean Solutions) and ICRS which although aimed at scientists could be actioned by the unqualified without any affiliations other than their hometown name. (Click HERE in link in 1).)
Step 3) They also made the following request on the COS and ICRS websites:
“To build a large base of support in preparation for the pubic launch of the statement (during the opening ceremony of the 12thInternational Coral Reef Symposium on July 9, in Cairns, Australia), please click HERE to join other scientists from around the world by adding your name to the list of endorsees.”
Step 4) The ICRS website published a list of almost 2,500 endorsees dated 6/July/2012 that being three days before the five-day symposium started.
Step 5) The consensus statement launched at the opening ceremony and various sympathetic press reports announced that over 2,000; 2,200; 2,400 or 2,500 scientists had endorsed the alarmism, depending on source.
Step 6) Convener announces success of the Symposium and the return home of 2,000 (two thousand) “of us” to 80 countries. Also a plea to continue endorsing the consensus statement….. more than 3,000 signatures so far and we would like to keep the momentum going. [signatures?]
Needless to say there were some rather controversial consensus claims originated at Stanford, but does anyone think it is a bit strange to reach a consensus before the five-day symposium started?
Oh but just for laughs, I would imagine that the loudest cheering of all probably went for this gem from Prof Jeremy Jackson of the Smithsonian:
…”reefs around the world have seen severe declines in coral cover over the last several decades. In the Caribbean, for example, 75-85 percent of the coral cover has been lost in the last 35 years. Even the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the best-protected reef ecosystem on the planet, has witnessed a 50 percent decline in the last 50 years.”
“Martin Clark says:
July 26, 2012 at 1:01 am
———-
The waters around Dobu Island in the Trobriands lie over the ring of fire. There are bubbles of CO2 rising continuously from the sea bed, just like from a glass of Coke. The sea water around there is at saturation. Coral and reef fauna are fine.
———-”
You are a blasphemer, Sir! The cardinals may have a surprise for you.
Actually, that was one of the most decent comments I have read here. Cudos!
Have the coral reefs declined in the percentages stated and the reasons stated? I thought a good portion of reef loss was from human activities such as the content of run off water, fishing, development and the like. Also, I’ve read that the reefs in the Persian Gulf see temperatures up to 38°C. It’s hard to believe these reefs could have survived so long and require a very narrow temperature range.
I wrote the following on my website a day or so ago. Alas, I missed the pubic launch.
‘In early June a UNESCO report expressed concern about port developments in Queensland that might threaten the Reef. That was followed by a conference of scientists in Cairns in mid July which said that the Reef was in great danger from climate change. Oh, and port development, shipping, ocean acidification, tourism, population growth, agriculture — you name it. The threats were dutifully reported in the media, because of the Reef’s status as an Australian ‘icon’ and our standard-bearer on the World Heritage List.
My long memory tells me that it was the Crown of Thorns starfish that was the first of the many ‘threats’ we now hear about, and that was in the early 1960s. We were told then that the reef would die, and both the Queensland and Commonwealth Governments put money into finding out more about the starfish and what to do about it. It is a widespread organism, found across the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, and infestations seem to come and go. The starfish doesn’t in fact kill the coral, and after infestations the infected reef recovers quite quickly.
But more to the point, the way we hear about the Reef is always as a threatened jewel. I doubt that most people have any real conception of what the Great Barrier Reef is, even those, like me, who have visited sites on it many times. It is, first of all, an enormous ‘structure’, 2,000 kilometres long, containing over 3,000 reefs and several hundred islands. Hardly any of it is regularly inspected or even visited. Most of it is well away from the coast, out toward the fringing reef at the edge of the continental shelf, and there is no great population centre anywhere near it.
Wikipedia will tell you that anthropogenic global warming is the Reef’s great enemy, and that coral bleaching caused by elevated sea temperatures will become an annual event. It hasn’t done so yet, and a likely cause is a combination of winds and currents keeping warm water in place. In any case, the coral reefs near Papua New Guinea flourish in water that is a couple of degrees warmer than that in the southern parts of the Reef. And the threat caused by rising sea-levels is the silliest I’ve heard: corals grow, and you can see how much lower the sea-level was if you dive down a little on the edge of any reef. The sea has risen 120 metres since the end of the last ice age, and corals have coped by growing upwards. They would strongly dislike a lowering of the seas!
It is much the same with the other scares. All of them are possible, but none of them is as yet real. ‘Ocean acidification’, for example, is a scary way of saying that the seas may have become, on average, a little more alkaline over the past couple of decades. But we really don’t know, and the ph levels of the sea vary horizontally and vertically. Yes, ships come to grief in the Reef (forgive the rhyme), and more than 1500 have done so since Europeans began sailing there. Yes, oil has spilled (not much of it). But as we saw in the Caribbean, oil is seen as a food by other organisms, and they break it down quickly. It may or may not be true that the seas are becoming appreciably warmer — at the moment I think it is an open question.
Yes, nutrients wash down the rivers, and so do pesticides, and so does soil and debris after floods. The Reef seems to take it all in its stride. Storms damage bit of it, as does bleaching, as do the starfish. But it is a giant system, and nothing yet seems to have occurred on a system-wide basis.
Let u by all means keep a watchful eye on it, but it would be pleasant if we heard bit less of ’imminent threats’ and more about the unspoiled and pristine nature of what is still an extraordinary structure.
I wrote the following a day or so ago on my website (www.donaitkin.com), before I learned of the public launch.
‘
In early June a UNESCO report expressed concern about port developments in Queensland that might threaten the Reef. That was followed by a conference of scientists in Cairns in mid July which said that the Reef was in great danger from climate change. Oh, and port development, shipping, ocean acidification, tourism, population growth, agriculture — you name it. The threats were dutifully reported in the media, because of the Reef’s status as an Australian ‘icon’ and our standard-bearer on the World Heritage List.
My long memory tells me that it was the Crown of Thorns starfish that was the first of the many ‘threats’ we now hear about, and that was in the early 1960s. We were told then that the reef would die, and both the Queensland and Commonwealth Governments put money into finding out more about the starfish and what to do about it. It is a widespread organism, found across the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, and infestations seem to come and go. The starfish doesn’t in fact kill the coral, and after infestations the infected reef recovers quite quickly.
But more to the point, the way we hear about the Reef is always as a threatened jewel. I doubt that most people have any real conception of what the Great Barrier Reef is, even those, like me, who have visited sites on it many times. It is, first of all, an enormous ‘structure’, 2,000 kilometres long, containing over 3,000 reefs and several hundred islands. Hardly any of it is regularly inspected or even visited. Most of it is well away from the coast, out toward the fringing reef at the edge of the continental shelf, and there is no great population centre anywhere near it.
Wikipedia will tell you that anthropogenic global warming is the Reef’s great enemy, and that coral bleaching caused by elevated sea temperatures will become an annual event. It hasn’t done so yet, and a likely cause is a combination of winds and currents keeping warm water in place. In any case, the coral reefs near Papua New Guinea flourish in water that is a couple of degrees warmer than that in the southern parts of the Reef. And the threat caused by rising sea-levels is the silliest I’ve heard: corals grow, and you can see how much lower the sea-level was if you dive down a little on the edge of any reef. The sea has risen 120 metres since the end of the last ice age, and corals have coped by growing upwards. They would strongly dislike a lowering of the seas!
It is much the same with the other scares. All of them are possible, but none of them is as yet real. ‘Ocean acidification’, for example, is a scary way of saying that the seas may have become, on average, a little more alkaline over the past couple of decades. But we really don’t know, and the ph levels of the sea vary horizontally and vertically. Yes, ships come to grief in the Reef (forgive the rhyme), and more than 1500 have done so since Europeans began sailing there. Yes, oil has spilled (not much of it). But as we saw in the Caribbean, oil is seen as a food by other organisms, and they break it down quickly. It may or may not be true that the seas are becoming appreciably warmer — at the moment I think it is an open question.
Yes, nutrients wash down the rivers, and so do pesticides, and so does soil and debris after floods. The Reef seems to take it all in its stride. Storms damage bit of it, as does bleaching, as do the starfish. But it is a giant system, and nothing yet seems to have occurred on a system-wide basis.
Let u by all means keep a watchful eye on it, but it would be pleasant if we heard bit less of ’imminent threats’, and a bit more of what is pristine and unspoiled in the Great Barrier Reef.There is a lot of that.
The people of the Caribbean will be surprised to learn their coral reefs are 75% or more declined. This sounds no less deceptive than the hype regarding the periodic melting of Greenland’s surface ice.
It seems ‘deception’ and ‘climate consensus’ are becoming synonymous.
Utter garbage. Even if the seas did rise, the coral would grow “higher,” following the increased sea level. Is there a Grant-Writer in the house?
Martin Clark says:
July 26, 2012 at 1:01 am
Thought I’d drop a line on this one, as its on my patch.
________________________
Thank you for the sane analysis backed by evidence.
Anthony. Mods? This should be elevated to the top of the page with the post so it does not get lost in all the comments.
So, is there no discussion in these circles of the possible virus cause for some of the bleaching? As a diver (historically, not in the past few years), I know there was bleaching evident in the Caribbean and off the Atlantic coast of Florida in the early 90’s.
Having just returned from a week of diving in Cozumel, I can tell you the threat to Caribbean reefs everyone was talking about is lionfish — specifically Pterois Volitans ;, which are crowding out native reef fish all over (see Wiki here).
People who have been very active divers over the past 10 years report that lionfish have largely taken over the reefs in Bermuda and the Florida Keys and are a serious problem just about everywhere in the Caribbean.
The authorities in charge of the marine park in Cozumel prohibit any taking of native species but they allow and even encourage killing lionfish. They are also teaching native predator species (mostly grouper and eels) how to eat them (grouper normally eat prey tail first, which is a bad mistake with lionfish). These results have apparently been successful as the lionfish sightings this year were much lower than past several years.
Eventually, the Caribbean reef populations will stabilize and lionfish will have a place, just as they do in their native Indian and Pacific habitats. Life adapts. Over a time period of centuries, reef populations will adapt to temperature, salinity and pH fluctuations, as well as introduction of new species.
Can we just accept that as the consensus position?
Personally, I’m alarmed about the invasion of the Florida Everglades by Burmese Pythons (see Wiki here ). The native Everglades raccoon population is threatened with extinction, and raccoons are almost as cute as polar bears. Why don’t they get a special Coke(tm) can?
Corals like warm water. There was a peer reviewed paper published just last year in GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, which said that corals were expanding their range due to warmer oceans.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2011/02/18/coral-reefs-expand-as-the-oceans-warm/
As for the Great Barrier Reef in particular, the Australian Institute of Marine Science states “Monitoring data collected annually from fixed sites at 47 reefs across 1300 km of the GBR indicate that overall regional coral cover was stable …..with no net decline between 1995 and 2009….”
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/latest_research_no_the_reef_isnt_being_killed_by_warming/
So, catastrophe denied.
Since the rate of reef degradation is so severe, these folks will soon not be necessary.
There is always a silver lining in every Eco hysteric doomsday fearmongering convention.
Martin Clark says:
July 26, 2012 at 1:01 am
Thought I’d drop a line on this one, as its on my patch.
Did those 2,000 conventioneers contribute anything to the local economy?
BTW, agree with Gail’s comment of July 26, 2012 at 5:05 am that Martin’s comments deserve an “Update” status in the post.
Perhaps this is where the 75% started, according to the World Resources Institute:
http://pdf.wri.org/reefs_caribbean_full.pdf
“When these four threats are integrated into the Reefs at Risk Threat Index, nearly two-thirds of the region’s coral reefs are threatened by human activities (about 20 percent
at medium threat, one-third at high threat, and 10 percent at very high threat)”
And what were the four integrated risks? The risks evaluated were coastal development, watershed-based sediment and pollution, marine based threats (such as cruise ships), and overfishing.
The “report” does have a lengthy rant on climate change, but didn’t assign an at risk % value.
David Ross says:
July 26, 2012 at 12:43 am
Maybe someone better qualified will correct my understanding of the science. But I’ve long had my doubts about the catastrophic claims about coral. If you compare a map of ocean temperatures with a map of coral distribution, one thing is clear: corals like it hot.
=====
Pretty much. Tropical reef building corals like it warm. There are minimum water temperatures that seem to limit the poleward expansion of tropical coral reefs. There are also said to be upper water temperature limits beyond which the corals do not do well. There are non-tropical corals that tolerate colder temps. Some build poorly studied deep water reefs outside the tropics. Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s main article on corals which has links to other articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral
Anyway, I, like you, do not find the hysterical assertions that the corals are all gonna die if we don’t give up our sinful ways to be especially credible. At the very worst, we may lose some tropical reefs, and find we have some new reefs poleward of the existing coral range as the earth’s waters warm … maybe … but I wouldn’t bet money on the oceans warming enough any time soon for either of those things to happen.
Lying really is becoming the default for the faithful, although it is good they held this in Australia as you can now purchase indulgences there since July 1st so all your sins are fogiven.
My usual bored brain at work would be interested to know how many of the attendees grants are reliant on the CAGW hoax?
Keep China from building cities on them http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2012/0725/Why-China-is-founding-a-new-city-on-a-coral-reef
If we have to attribute coral reef “loss” to temperature changes, then a 0.4C rise in global sea temperatures since 1972 is responsible for a 50% loss in the Great Barrier Reef and 30% loss in the Carribean coral cover. Hmmm. So a 2C rise, as, say during the Holocene maximum, would have eliminated all coral growth on the planet. And the Ordovician, Devonian, Mississippian never had any coral or coral-like corals, because those times were warmer on a planetary scale than any period for millions of years. Or if they did, De-volution has taken robust species and replaced them with a bunch of nancys. Darwin be damnned: the meek, weak and stupid actually inherit the world.
The conference is said to be made up of scientists. According to Penn State, they must be the best in the world, as they have generated enough money to send them there and keep them housed, fed and watered. They are our betters, so God help us: the planet is beset with mostly non-scientists! How we get out of bed and make it through breakfast is a miracle of fortuine, for clearly we haven’t the thinking processes to do it ourselves.
@don aitkin
I think you meant to say
But there isn’t even any concrete evidence for this, as there are no consistent pH measurements over that period from anywhere in the world that I can find.
@Martin clark
I’d never heard of the Dobu Island phenomenon before, Is there anywhere it is fully documented? And I’d love to know the measured pH and temperature while you were there 🙂
http://81.8.63.74/Downloads/3BSCConf/Presentations/5%20Has%20been%20observing%20the%20acidification%20of%20the%20Black%20Sea%20waters%20in%20XX%20century.pdf
Check this out! The last slide has it all: the principal reason for the change in pH in the Black Sea is the upward movement of deeper waters which have a lower pH. As a result of the AMO.
Oh, I get it: the GLOBAL ocean acidification is different from the local, Black Sea acidification. As is the acidification of all zones near the upwelling zones, like along California and Chile. Or other places where you can show it is not atmospheric CO2. In other words, globally except where it isn’t.
Alan Watt, CD (Certified Denialist), Level 7 says:
July 26, 2012 at 5:42 am
Sometimes the alligators eat the pythons. Sometimes the pythons swallow big alligators:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1006_051006_pythoneatsgator.html
I don’t know about the rotten forensics but I prefer a different interpretation: the python constricts the alligator and swallows it thinking it’s dead, but being a reptile the gator can hold its breath better than a mammal, or even be swallowed while sleeping. It wakes up, can’t breath, kicks violently and kills the python, then suffocates. Later another gator bites off the python’s head.
–AGF
The recent IHT Op Ed declaring the reefs unsaveable by Bradbury was a salvo in this new science war – The Reef Wars. The current battle is between Bradbury’s “All Is Lost!” and the Consensus’ “Its Really Bad”. (see a string of Dot.Earth postings in the NY Times).
@Doug proctor
So the idea from the work on the Black Sea is that the deeper water has the lower pH by about 0.7 units (a large amount).
But the deeper water is surely further away from the carbon dioxide filled atmosphere. And CO2 supposedly causes pH to drop.
So we have a conundrum. The water with less access to CO2 has a lower pH than that which has more. And yet the CO2 is the cause of the lower pH. Its like deep ocean heat. How does it get there if we don’t see it at the surface?
Can anybody reconcile these two apparently irreconcilable ideas?
And as a one-time experimental scientist (chemist) it’d be ever so nice if somebody could not only come up with a theory but an outline of some experiments to prove/disprove it.
PS Climatologits will, I am sure be at outraged at my introducing such a heretical and dangerously scientific concept without due warning, A nice lie down and a cup of tea should help the palpitations die down……if the excitement is still too much a nice read of the last IPCC report should get over any unwanted wakefulness.
“Needless to say there were some rather controversial consensus claims originated at Stanford, but does anyone think it is a bit strange to reach a consensus before the five-day symposium started?”
Not new. Reminds me of the statement in Mike Royko’s book “Boss” when he said; “Chicago is the place where the votes are counted before the polls open”.
I bet this gray paper ends up in the next IPCC report. Lots to debunk here. Where to start.
@Bob Fernley-Jones & Adam Nottage
Dang! They are clever. Who wouldn’t want to attend a “pubic launch?”
They could be talking rotted fish guts for all most people would care just so long as the pubic launch lived up to its hype. Is this a new tactic to get people to give CAGW a second look?
(BTW, what’s the diplomatic protocal for a pubic launch? Do you stuff dollar bills in their g-strings or would that be a major gaffe? I’m off to the Wiki to find out.)