Global warming dud predictions on the Great Barrier Reef

You forget that, besides all his other achievements, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg also employs John Cook.

He as found a good way to make easy money and get personal glory , by playing on the lazy and uninformed nature of journalists, why should he stop when it still works.

I prefer that nature proves them wrong even if they are robbing us blind than nature proving them right and game over for the planet. Strange choices we are left with.

KNR says: March 10, 2014 at 12:45 am

…the lazy and uninformed nature of journalists…

I’m afraid that you woefully understate the nature of this grotesque problem common to all warm-mongers…it fills their personal rice bowls. No alarm, no rice.
“Journalists” are as complicit in this wretched funding scam as are the “climate scientists” and politicians that instigated it.

Is this the same O Hoegh-Guldberg mentioned above? [paywalled]
“Coral Reefs
September 2004, Volume 23, Issue 3, p 444
“Low temperatures cause coral bleaching”
O. Hoegh-Guldberg, M. Fine ”
Wake me up when corals can’t recover.

Abstract – 2009
Doom and Boom on a Resilient Reef: Climate Change, Algal Overgrowth and Coral Recovery
……….Methodology/Principal Findings
In 2006, mass bleaching of corals on inshore reefs of the Great Barrier Reef caused high coral mortality. Here we show that this coral mortality was followed by an unprecedented bloom of a single species of unpalatable seaweed (Lobophora variegata), colonizing dead coral skeletons, but that corals on these reefs recovered dramatically, in less than a year. Unexpectedly, this rapid reversal did not involve reestablishment of corals by recruitment of coral larvae, as often assumed, but depended on several ecological mechanisms previously underestimated.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005239#pone-0005239-g006
——————————
Abstract – 2008
Bikini Atoll coral biodiversity resilience five decades after nuclear testing
Five decades after a series of nuclear tests began, we provide evidence that 70% of the Bikini Atoll zooxanthellate coral assemblage is resilient to large-scale anthropogenic disturbance……

And what’s this?

Abstract – 1983
A dead Central American coral reef tract: Possible link with the Little Ice Age
…..Coral growth in the Gulf of Papagayo consisted mainly of dead reefs that died from 150–300 years B.P. The 18O records revealed that most of the dead reefs were exposed to relatively cool water immediately preceding death. We propose that during the latter part of the Little Ice Age there was probably an equatorward shift of the Northern Trade Wind system, which caused an intensification of upwelling at lower latitudes. This increased upwelling was the likely cause of the demise of coral reefs in the Gulf of Papagayo.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jmr/jmr/1983/00000041/00000003/art00010

I have read that a major hazard for a coral reef ecosystem is a rapid local relative fall of sea-level of >10 metres or so in a matter of years. This can leave the whole ecosystem high and dry. However reef organisms can generally recolonise from elsewhere at the new lower sea level. Aharon and Chappell, 1986, Palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology vol 56, p 337.

Hoegh-Guldberg tells us about the resilience or corals. He must have been surprised.

Phase Shifts, Herbivory, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs to Climate Change
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2006.12.049

Jan 03, 2013
“Deep-sea corals discovered at Great Barrier Reef”
“What’s really cool is that these corals still have photosynthetic symibionts that supposedly still harvest the light,” Hoegh-Guldberg told AFP.
“It’s interesting to know how they can handle such low light conditions—it’s very deep dusk, you can barely make out much at the bottom.”
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-deep-sea-corals-great-barrier-reef.html

No doubt nature will continue to surprise him as he continues to predict doooooom

Got to say I’m uneasy about accusing them of “crying wolf”. The moral of that story was that nobody listened when the wolf did arrive.
Given that it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the wolf of AGW doesn’t exist, using that phrase lends the doom-mongers unwarranted legitimacy and a basis to continue their claims of “ahh, but one day soon….”

Surprise!

“Coral reef thriving in sediment-laden waters”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120731201251.htm
——-
“Evidence of very rapid reef accretion and reef growth under high turbidity and terrigenous” sedimentation. Geology, 2012
http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G33261.1

Surprise, surprise!

Abstract –
Coral bleaching — capacity for acclimatization and adaptation
…. There is information that corals and their symbionts may be capable of acclimatization and selective adaptation to elevated temperatures that have already resulted in bleaching resistant coral populations, both locally and regionally, in various areas of the world. There are possible mechanisms that might provide resistance and protection to increased temperature and light. These include inducible heat shock proteins that act in refolding denatured cellular and structural proteins, production of oxidative enzymes that inactivate harmful oxygen radicals, fluorescent coral pigments that both reflect and dissipate light energy, and phenotypic adaptations of zooxanthellae and adaptive shifts in their populations at higher temperatures…..
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2881(03)46004-5
—————
Brief Communications
Coral reefs: Corals’ adaptive response to climate change
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v430/n7001/abs/430741a.html
—————
Abstract
The role of zooxanthellae in the thermal tolerance of corals: a ‘nugget of hope’ for coral reefs in an era of climate change
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/273/1599/2305.short