Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Dr. Ruth Gates has a plan to protect coral from global warming – a selective breeding program to produce “super” coral – stronger, better, tougher, more resilient than natural coral.
According to HuffPost;
Because of rising water temperatures we’re now looking at the third global coral bleaching, which could be the biggest coral die off in history.
…
One scientist in Hawaii, Dr Ruth Gates, has come up with a way to mitigate the effects of climate change on our coral reefs.
By looking at the comparative strength of surveying corals, Dr Gates is breeding the strongest organisms to withstand even hotter temperatures and then breeding them into what she calls “super coral”.
But it’s been rebuffed by some scientists as human assisted evolution. Something Dr Gates firmly rejects.
“I wish we didn’t have to do this project… but we are here, we are at a place where there are very prominent coral reef scientists saying that reefs will be fundamentally altered and massively degraded by 2050, said Dr Gates.
Read more: Huffington Post
Let us hope Dr. Gates succeeds – because its obvious that an organism which over its 500 million year history has survived dinosaur killing asteroids, huge natural climate fluctuations, enormous volcanic eruptions which poisoned the air and water on a global scale, even natural CO2 levels many times higher than today, will be utterly helpless in the face of a few PPM of anthropogenic CO2.
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Overall, it sounds like she is in a “no lose” situation.
If she does anything and coral continues to thrive, which it most likely will, she can claim that her efforts “saved the coral”.
Brilliant!
I thought the left were against this sort of thing. Where are the cries of the anti-genetic-modification crowd?
Franken-coral – we’re DOOOOOMED!!!
Actually Bill Nye is now being taken to task for his endorsement of GMOs. Perhaps it will instruct him in the insanity of the warmists/ anti GMO/ anti vaxer/ anti nuke greens who have promoted the world view he has decided to help along. Maybe not but it sure would be fun if he could be taken aside by a Judith Curry and discover you can be a scientist and still disagree with ideologues in lab coats.
@fossilage===> It would be terribly uplifting if a TV friend & “champion of science” from my childhood (well, my kids’ childhood anyway) could be saved from the blithering illogic he has lately championed.
It’s one thing to have a different opinion; it’s another to shout at an ever-louder volume in an attempt to win the argument, when most of the words being used have long been factually invalidated.
I’m hoping having his feet dipped in the anti science cesspool of environmental activists will wake him up
Unintended consequences? Nah. These are all “remedies” to get in front of non-threatened nature. The hysteria to get mitigation idiocy going at a quick pace is so that they can take credit for what nature is already doing – cooling. The coral have recently been reported to be doing fine. With GMO coral they will be able to say they save this non-threatened family from being wiped out. The proof? In 2050 they’ll be able to say the coral is fine, it worked. I worry about unintended consequences – also, I’m beginning to realize that although I am a geologist and engineer, I’m probably a better biologist than the current crop of PhD’s just from my high school and paleontology studies
Some people just can’t resist the urge to meddle. I suggest we release a butterfly in the Brazilian rain forest. If chaos theory has taught me anything, that will change the climate in only 6 months.
Dr. Ruth will surely become known to future generations as the Typhoid Mary of corals and will be singularly reviled as a mad scientist who put science aside to carry out a bad idea. This doesn’t even rate a “what could go wrong?” post. This is madness.
Isn’t this Genetic Modification?
Ahh, the mortal illusion of control…
Somewhere in the seas, coral is beginning colonization of a presently benevolent microcosm while elsewhere, a change in paradigm ends their cycle of proliferation and another type of life profits from that change in the ecosystem.
We assume that we are somehow the omnipresent and omnipotent owners of all the least explored and understood aspects of this planet and the heliosphere in which it orbits.
Mankind is still in a youthful stage of impetuous arrogance, thinking we have seen and done all that there is and have learned enough to manipulate everything we survey. The intensity of this self-illusion has invoked guilt in our collective conscience through the observation of small-scale affectations of unintended consequence, which bolster the mirage of human omnipotence.
Even if humans had a thousand year lifespan, we would still “only see a few frames of the whole movie”.
Why do liberals believe they are God ???? I’m an Agnostic person, but I’m pretty sure I’m still a mere Human !!!
. . Funny, I’ve never heard about that on the MSM !!! Must have been before FOX NEWS !!!!
Coral bleaching. Oh no!!!! The ocean is becoming bleachified:
“The pH of bleach is around 12 depending on manufacturer. All bleaches are highly basic or alkaline, hence the reason for their high pH values. The most common brand of bleach, Clorox, is 6% sodium hypochlorite and has a pH of 12.6.”
Wait a minute – I thought…
Wouldn’t this coral simply die off at the next bout of cooling? GK
Then we will need to work on a better GMO coral … what could possibly go wrong, rong, ong, ng, g …
so let me get this straight,these environmentalists have falsely accused “man” of altering our naturally occurring Climate to justify their plans to alter nature. Brilliant!
California’s most productive fisheries? Offshore oil rigs
A survey of the fish life shows that they vastly outperform natural reefs.
One of the more unusual recent developments in ocean conservation has been the use of artificial reefs. Old ships and even old subway cars have been used to create environments for fish to congregate in areas of the seafloor that are otherwise featureless. But it’s not clear whether these habitats provide a place for fish to gather or actually boost the fish populations in the area.
A new study looked at the productivity of a different sort of artificial reef: the oil and natural gas rigs that dot the state’s coastline. The report finds that the oil rigs are the most productive fisheries ever measured—not only in California but in the entire world. The report notes that many of these platforms will be obsolete over the coming decades, and we might want to think about what we do when we’re done using them for their original purpose.
There are different ways of measuring an ecosystem’s productivity. One is primary productivity, or how much carbon dioxide is converted into useful organic molecules by plants and other photosynthetic organisms. Then there’s secondary productivity, defined as how much of that finds its way to herbivores and predators. In this case, the authors were interested in fish, so they focused on secondary productivity.
To measure the productivity, they relied on an annual survey performed with a remotely operated vehicle. Different sites were visited for at least five years, some as many as 15, with fish abundance and species assessed visually. Total biomass was also estimated from this data, and the change in biomass between years was then normalized to the area of seafloor covered by the survey.
“Because of rising water temperatures we’re now looking at the third global coral bleaching, which could be the biggest coral die off in history.”
This is the 3rd? So then the history appears to be quite short. Suppose that your weather history is so short that it shows only three episodes of rain in your area – and this third one might just turn out to be the biggest downpour in history!
Might there be a natural cycle of bleaching? With a very short history (and what kind of “global” coverage?) how could you rule out that it’s not CAGW. Oh, I forgot; the lunatics just assume that it IS CAGW.
Coral likes warmer waters. Coral grows better in warm water. There are corals in the Persian Gulf, north Queensland, the Caribbean, off the coast of Belize in Central America, in Hawaii, and the Red Sea. Coral does not need special warm water training, it is already very happy with that.
This is just more nonsense in search of grants or funding.
Oh yeah! That’s gonna save Mother Earth and all of humanity!
Let alone the sheer hubris that someone could breed a better coral than nature did or could. One would expect such an expert would know absolutely everything about all coral… In today’s anti science climate science world?
Lead on Dr. Ruth; you need to find ‘private’ funding from those deep eco pockets!
“Coral calcium is composed primarily of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), with small amounts of magnesium and other trace minerals.”
In others words more CO2 will be good for reefs.
Bleaching is temporary “Vacancy” signage, awaiting the next wave of tenants.
Ruth Gates can be educated by the thousands of us amatuer marine reef aquarists who have been propagating resistant coral species in glass box captivity for more years than the number on her common sense score.
We already have super coral. It survived the Ordovocian and other periods with much higher CO2
‘Ordovician’
In fact they proliferated then…from Wikipedia:
“Although corals first appeared in the Cambrian period,[27] some 542 million years ago, fossils are extremely rare until the Ordovician period, 100 million years later, when rugose and tabulate corals became widespread”