NOAA is dialing back the alarm a bit with realizations that nature has equipped these organisms with adaptation strategies that have served them over the millennia.
New study suggests coral reefs may be able to adapt to moderate climate change
Coral reefs may be able to adapt to moderate climate warming, improving their chance of surviving through the end of this century, if there are large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, according to a study funded by NOAA and researched by the agency’s scientists and its academic partners. Results further suggest corals have already adapted to part of the warming that has occurred.
“Earlier modeling work suggested that coral reefs would be gone by the middle of this century. Our study shows that if corals can adapt to warming that has occurred over the past 40 to 60 years, some coral reefs may persist through the end of this century,” said study lead author Cheryl Logan, Ph.D., an assistant professor in California State University Monterey Bay’s Division of Science and Environmental Policy. The scientists from the university, and from the University of British Columbia, were NOAA’s partners in the study.
Warm water can contribute to a potentially fatal process known as coral “bleaching,” in which reef-building corals eject algae living inside their tissues. Corals bleach when oceans warm only 1-2°C (2-4°F) above normal summertime temperatures. Because those algae supply the coral with most of its food, prolonged bleaching and associated disease often kills corals.
The study, published online in the journal Global Change Biology, explores a range of possible coral adaptive responses to thermal stress previously identified by the scientific community. It suggests that coral reefs may be more resilient than previously thought due to past studies that did not consider effects of possible adaptation.
The study projected that, through genetic adaptation, the reefs could reduce the currently projected rate of temperature-induced bleaching by 20 to 80 percent of levels expected by the year 2100, if there are large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
“The hope this work brings is only achieved if there is significant reduction of human-related emissions of heat-trapping gases,” said Mark Eakin, Ph.D., who serves as director of the NOAA Coral Reef Watch monitoring program, which tracks bleaching events worldwide. “Adaptation provides no significant slowing in the loss of coral reefs if we continue to increase our rate of fossil fuel use.”
“Not all species will be able to adapt fast enough or to the same extent, so coral communities will look and function differently than they do today,” CalState’s Logan said.
While this paper focuses on ocean warming, many other general threats to coral species have been documented to exist that affect their long-term survival, such as coral disease, acidification, and sedimentation. Other threats to corals are sea-level rise, pollution, storm damage, destructive fishing practices, and direct harvest for ornamental trade.
According to the Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2000 report, coral reefs have been lost around the world in recent decades with almost 20 percent of reefs lost globally to high temperatures during the 1998-1999 El Niño and La Niña and an 80 percent percent loss of coral cover in the Caribbean was documented in a 2003 Science paper. Both rates of decline have subsequently been documented in numerous other studies as an on-going trend.
Tropical coral reef ecosystems are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and provide economic and social stability to many nations in the form of food security, where reef fish provide both food and fishing jobs, and economic revenue from tourism. Mass coral bleaching and reef death has increased around the world over the past three decades, raising questions about the future of coral reef ecosystems.
In the study, researchers used global sea surface temperature output from the NOAA/GFDL Earth System Model-2 for the pre-industrial period though 2100 to project rates of coral bleaching.
Because initial results showed that past temperature increases should have bleached reefs more often than has actually occurred, researchers looked into ways that corals may be able to adapt to warming and delay the bleaching process.
The article calls for further research to test the rate and limit of different adaptive responses for coral species across latitudes and ocean basins to determine if, and how much, corals can actually respond to increasing thermal stress.
In addition to Logan, the other authors of the paper were John Dunne, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch; and Simon Donner, Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program funded the study.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If they say it might be worse, they’re liars. If they say it might not be as bas as we thought, they’re being mendacious, but differently. Seems you can’t trust them. But I imagine if one of their number say that CO2 warming will be barely noticeable, even a twice the rate we’re currently emitting, then that representative of NOAA will be hailed as a righteous soothsayer.
Corals are the pestilence of the oceans. You simply can’t kill them. Corals withstand nukes, extreme variation in sea levels, ice ages, meteor impacts, you name it. And if you sink a ship within a few years it’s turned into an artificial reef.
If I have to make a bet about which species will bite the dust first, Corals or the Alarmists, I say the Alarmists.
As for NOAA, let’s turn NOAA into an artificial reef.
The’ve earned it.
I have dived the Great Barrier Reef and I’ve seen dead coral first hand. It’s not indestructible. Warming waters are not chiefly responsible for the die-off. It’s a combination of factors working against the reef.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-10-01/national/35499811_1_crown-of-thorns-starfish-individual-reefs-nancy-knowlton
“almost 20 percent of reefs lost globally to high temperatures during the 1998-1999 El Niño and La Niña”
I think the figure is closer to 0%
barry,
When NOAA’s ‘adjustments’ go equally in both directions I will start to take them seriously. But as we know, about 99% of the gov’t’s temperature and other ‘adjustments’ seem to go the the direction intended to cause maximum public alarm.
Reference regarding corals and sea level changes during the Quaternary in the Pacific:
Perrin C., 1990, Genèse de la morphologie des atolls: le cas de Mururoa (Polynésie Française), Comptes Rendus Académie des Sciences Paris, t. 311, ser. II, 671-678.
Let me fix this ““Earlier modeling work suggested that coral reefs would be gone by the middle of this century. Our study shows that if corals can adapt to warming that has occurred over the past 40 to 60 years, some coral reefs may persist through the end of this century,”
It should have been written as:
“Earlier modeling work suggested that coral reefs would be gone by the middle of this century. But, based on observation, it is now known that corals can adapt to warming that has occurred over the past 40 to 60 years. So at this time, there is no evidence that they won’t make it through the end of this century,”
There, I fixed it!
I read ” if there are large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.”
But no follow up to that. What claim are they making about carbon dioxide emissions? That CO2 will do what specifically? They did not close the loop on this thought. They just threw it in there and hoped it would stick, I take it.
Of all of the popular projected outcomes from global warming, coral survival is one of the most troubled. People who work on corals and reefs seem to be affected in an emotional way, which is not surprising, given the beauty that abounds. Perhaps as a consequence, some of the emphasis in the reporting of their science seems also to be overly emotional and not so constrained by hard observation as happens in other hard science.
The main case regarding the Great Barrier Reef has been developed by people who, in the main, tend to go overboard. In reaction, this topic should be studied more intensely than usual by people who are auditing the science. I shall not name names here, but you can form an opinion by reading their papers and press releases.
One of the main arguments about the GBR is alleged potential for damage caused by the development of ports and shipping, particularly to service development of large coal mines and coal export. This topic is ripe for over-imagination and short on actual figures showing clear and present danger (for example, by giving concentrations of alleged pollutants, volumes of affected seas, laboratory and in-situ studies of the toxicity of various pollutants, etc.).
In short, there is a bare-faced attempt to curtail development of coal resources by using emotional outpouring instead of informed science. More so than usual.
Yawn. Whatever will they think of next?
Corals can adapt.
How many mega years have corals been around on this mudball?
How many mega tons of CO2 have they sequestered as a building
block of their reef materail?
Can some one introduce these …umm … people to e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n?
They NEED to know!
Geoff, +1.
I have been hearing about the imminent demise of the GBR for over forty years now, from various imagined causes. The panic coincided with the rise of radical environmental advocacy.
From what I have been able to glean, there are some genuine concerns in small areas regarding run-off from urban centres and agriculture, which can cause sedimentation and possibly toxic effects from agricultural pesticides. But if you look at the size of the reef (thousands of miles long) and its age, and the many natural disasters and climate fluctuations it has survived, I call BS on 99% of the alarmist claims.
Frankly, if you blasted a channel through it to facilitate larger ships getting to a port, your main concern would be that the damn stuff would grow back.
And in other news for coral
‘Nature paper reveals coral animals produce the ‘smell of the ocean’ – influencing cloud formation and protecting themselves against rising seawater temperatures.
Australian marine scientists have found the first evidence that coral itself may play an important role in regulating local climate.
They have discovered that the coral animal—not just its algal symbiont—makes an important sulphur-based molecule with properties to assist it in many ways, ranging from cellular protection in times of heat stress to local climate cooling by encouraging clouds to form.
These findings have been published in the prestigious weekly science journal Nature.
The researchers have shown that the coral animal makes dimethylsulphoniopropionate (DMSP). “The characteristic ‘smell of the ocean’ is actually derived from this compound, indicating how abundant the molecule is in the marine environment. In fact we could smell it in a single baby coral,” says AIMS chemist Cherie Motti, and co-author on the paper.’
read more: http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/marine/coralclimate
Killing the climate beast.
“But if you look at the size of the reef (thousands of miles long) and its age, and the many natural disasters and climate fluctuations it has survived”
The odd thing is that there is no such thing as an old coral reef anywhere in the World. Not one of today’s coral reefs existed 20,000 or even 15,000 years ago. Sealevels were much lower during the ice-age and the coral reefs of those days are now drowned by 50 or 100 meters of water.
ALL living coral reefs have grown during the present c. 11,700 years old interglacial. True, they have often grown on top, or on the flanks of reefs from previous interglacials, but those reefs have been just dead limestone ridges for periods of c. 100,000 years between each 10,000 year reef episode.
Even more oddly, none of the large reef-systems that have been drilled (e. g. the Great Barrier Reef) seems to be older than c. 700,000 – 1,000,000 years old. Before that the glacial/interglacial cycles lasted for only 40,000 years, and the interglacials with a reasonably stable sea level were just too short for really large reef systems to grow.
That we have reefs like the Great Barrier Reef is due to the fact that we have had five fairly long interglacials in a row with more or less the same, fairly stable, sea level (MIS 1, 5e, 7, 9 and 11).
Agree, tty.
The point is that the reef has steadily grown and increased in size, over thousands of years, as the climate steadily warmed, and through countless major weather events in the form of cyclones – as we call them.
It’s not remotely “fragile” in terms of surviving trauma or warming. The earlier versions of the GBR (and of others around the world) survived higher CO2 levels than we have, or are likely to have even under the worst alarmist scenarios.
Coral is tough stuff. Cooling or dramatic sea level declines are the things it can’t tolerate (apart from wanton destruction of very small reefs by overfishing, blasting and poisoning). There is no human activity either taking place or proposed that is a threat to the GBR as a whole.
A bit of blasting to let ships through a narrow channel – meh. A louse on an elephant. Pollution from runoff – more serious because it inhibits regrowth. Worth addressing, IMO.
But the standard greenie propaganda, i.e. that it is doomed if evil humans don’t treat the whole thing like an untouchable sacred site, and also stop emitting CO2, is rubbish.
johanna,
Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals since 1985, new study says
Warming waters are only responsible for 10% of bleaching, according to that study. But that warming is on top of other factors, and not included is the changing PH balance of the water.
tty wrote,
Most living, near-surface coral reefs were formed after the last interglacial, and are no older than 10,000 years. There are exceptions.
As always, the concern (re climate change) is not that the climate is changing – it always has and it always will – it is the rate of change that stresses ecosystems. The fossil record shows coral reefs forming polewards as the Earth warms, and equatorwards as it cools. The processes involved here are on the order of thousands of years.
barry – that “study” is nonsense. It was (readers will be shocked) based on modelling – they didn’t actually go and measure the amount of coral. There are thousands of “sub-reefs” on the GBR, and nobody has ever measured them all, or even a substantial number of them.What’s more, there are several different types of “sub-reefs”, formed in different ways and inhabited by different species.
These people, (who by the way are cited in a paper by full blown alarmists) said:
“Recently, De’ath et al. [9] reported a loss of over 50% coral cover along the Great Barrier Reef from 1985 to 2012 based on surveys of 214 reefs, attributing the decline to cyclones (48%), Crown-of Thorns starfish (42%), and bleaching (10%).”
From this paper:
http://www.hindawi.com/isrn/oceanography/2013/739034/
The news that 50% of the reef is gone is news to fishermen, tourist operators, local residents, boaties and everyone else who lives, works or regularly travels there. Honestly, how do they expect to maintain any credibility at all? It’s like saying that half of the Grand Canyon could disappear without anyone noticing until some scientist came along. Except that the Reef is many times larger than the Grand Canyon.
And 25% went due to cyclones in less than 30 years? The number and intensity of cyclones has not been dramatically different over that time compared to the rest of the C20th. On that basis, it should have been wiped out completely before any of us were born.
It is precisely this absurd, lying scaremongering that is sinking the CAGW movement before our eyes. And not a moment too soon.
barry says:
October 30, 2013 at 6:03 am
“As always, the concern (re climate change) is not that the climate is changing – it always has and it always will – it is the rate of change that stresses ecosystems. The fossil record shows coral reefs forming polewards as the Earth warms, and equatorwards as it cools. The processes involved here are on the order of thousands of years.”
a) You say that coral adapted to slow changes. But you do not show that coral is incapable of adapting to faster changes. BTW, how fast is a change of zero over the last 17 years.
b) Last I heard is that evolutionists believe in adaptability through hereditary factors they call genes. Now, the rate of creation of new gene combinations – whether by mutation, genetic changes through viral vectors, introns or crossovers – must be proportional to the number of individuals in the population, as it is proportional to the procreations happening.
You say that the surface reefs only exist for 10,000 years – I guess we can agree that they must have expanded over these 10,000 years and have achieved their highest population in the present.
Therefore, they have, as a population, never been more capable of adapting than now.
DirkH says at October 30, 2013 at 4:09 pm…
Interesting idea but it ignores that importance of genetic diversity.
If coral reefs are in close contact then a monoculture of genetic material may be expected to dominate. This is relatively more vulnerable to change.
If they are separated then they would be more capable of adapting.
I would suggest that the transport of water on ships’ bilge and the breaking of reefs by trawling are beneficial to the genetic diversity of coral.
But, on the other hand, the recent decline in hurricanes and tropical storms is bad for genetic diversity of reefs.
You win some and you lose some.
johanna,
Perhaps you read a different paper.
There are few studies that have surveyed as extensively, and some come up with different results for different periods. Eg,
This study believes that previous reports were overestimated (predates the study I first mentioned): it’s a lower estimate than most others
Do you live near the reef? I visit occasionally to go diving (I live in Sydney), and the tour operators I speak to have noticed wide scale bleaching in some areas. Maybe I’ve been unlucky enough to only speak with ‘alarmists’. Typically, tour operators operate in small areas – part of a compact to lessen human influence on the reef.
Bleaching happens periodically from various natural events, like storm activity. I do not know if storm intensity has increased around the Reef (probably not), but I have read that it is the combination of emerging factors,like warmer waters, sea level rise and ocean acidification, that exacerbate the impact of natural, periodic influences, and also effect reilience.
It’s not just the GBR, this is happening at other reefs, too. The Carribean has also undergone widespread deteriorarttion.
There are many reports assessing resilience and showing coral recovery in some areas, but narrowing focus to only this aspect ignores the bigger picture. Rather like pointing to the 15% of glaciers worldwide that are not declining and saying that nothing is happening. Seems a bit pollyannaish to me.
It is estimated that there are around 3,000 individual reefs in the GBR, spread over an enormous area, including more than 900 islands.
Of course they used modelling. How else could they have extrapolated the results of a couple of hundred reefs to 3,000, over such a vast area?
And you still haven’t answered my question. If 50% of it disappeared in less than 30 years, how come no-one but a bunch of warmie alarmist scientists noticed?
barry says:
October 29, 2013 at 7:02 pm
“Corals are the pestilence of the oceans. You simply can’t kill them.
I have dived the Great Barrier Reef and I’ve seen dead coral first hand. It’s not indestructible. Warming waters are not chiefly responsible for the die-off. It’s a combination of factors working against the reef.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-10-01/national/35499811_1_crown-of-thorns-starfish-individual-reefs-nancy-knowlton”
Well barry, I made my remark from the view of corals as a species:
We have nuked entire reefs several times (Bikini remember) and 25 years later everything looks fine.
I have flown over the Great Barrier reef and it looks fantastic.
We had much higher water temps but also much colder over the past millions of years. We had enormous changes in ocean levels. Corals as a species survived.
Whatever happens to corals, just let them alone, maybe the corals are allergic to divers so do your diving somewhere else.
And please refrain me from any Washington Post article because the nonsense they have written about the environment over the past two decades is mind boggling and eventually will fry your brain
To be really honest, I’m totally fed up with all the “humans are responsible” BS and all the alarmist crap.
Sick an tired of it.
R. de Haan, +1.
Of course there is dead coral, just like there are dead trees in a forest. So what? Apart from things like urban and agricultural runoff, there is precious little real data about the effects of human activity on the Reef. And I support action to minimise the effects of known significantly detrimental human activity. That doesn’t mean banning humans from being there, or catching a few fish.
The specious claims that have been trotted out for decades – culminating in the almost surreal suggestion that half of it has gone under our noses – are propaganda masquerading as “research.”