And the answer is, Yes. In fact, they’ve already survived millions of years of climate change.
Age of corals since they first appeared on Earth:
Corals are 500 million years old, and date back to the late Cambrian period, during the Paleozoic era – Source: the Global Reef Project
Climate change since then:
What is really hilarious is that right next to the ‘ARC Centre for Excellence’ release, is this one in the Eurekalert feed:
PUBLIC RELEASE: 1-SEP-2017
Can corals survive climate change?
Coral reef experts deliver urgent recommendations for future research
A group of international scientists, including scientists from Australia, have issued advice that more research is urgently required to determine whether corals can acclimatise* and adapt to the rapid pace of climate change.
The team of coral experts, led by Dr. Gergely Torda from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), have delivered recommendations for future research.
As the Great Barrier Reef faces unprecedented coral mortality from back-to-back mass bleaching in 2016 & 2017, rising carbon dioxide and other natural and human-induced pressures, scientists advise more research is urgently needed into the poorly-understood mechanisms that corals might use to survive in a rapidly warming world.
“There is still a lot to understand about corals,” says Dr. Torda. “While our only real chance for their survival is to reverse climate change, a nugget of hope exists – that the corals may be able to adapt to their changing environment,” he says.
“However, there are major knowledge gaps around how fast corals can adapt or acclimatise to changes in their environment, and by what mechanisms they might use to achieve this,” adds co-author Professor Philip Munday of Coral CoE.
“For example,” explains Dr Jenni Donelson, co-author at Coral CoE,”recent studies show that fish can acclimatise to higher water temperatures when several generations are exposed to the same increased temperature, but whether corals can do the same, and how they might achieve this, is largely unknown.”
Eight research recommendations are published today in the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change and arise from a workshop with a team of experts composed of 22 biologists from 11 institutions in five different countries.
The team agrees that further research identifying how corals respond to climate change is critical, as the Earth undergoes an unprecedented rate of environmental change.
AIMS Climate Change Scientist, Dr. Line Bay says, “There is sufficient inertia in the climate system that we will not be able to prevent further climate-related disturbances affecting the reef in the immediate future.”
“Solutions are required to help corals adapt and acclimate to near-term future climate pressures while we figure out how to reduce emissions and halt and reverse longer-term climate change.”
Co-authors Prof. Timothy Ravasi and Dr. Manuel Aranda from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) warn that the clock is ticking. “The Great Barrier Reef has suffered substantial losses of coral over the past two years. Understanding the mechanisms that could enable corals to cope with ocean warming is becoming increasingly important if we want to help these ecosystems,” they say.
The paper is focused on stony, reef-building corals, which are the ‘ecosystem engineers’ of tropical coral reefs. These corals build the frameworks that provide shelter, food and habitat for an entire ecosystem. When corals are lost, the diversity and abundance of other reef organisms declines, until ultimately the ecosystem collapses.
“Predicting the fate of coral reefs under climate change is subject to our understanding of the ability of corals to mount adaptive responses to environmental change,” says Dr. Torda. “Our paper sets out key research objectives and approaches to address this goal.”
“The time to act is now, as the window of opportunity to save coral reefs is rapidly closing,” he concludes.
###
The paper titled: “Rapid adaptive responses to climate change in corals” is published today in Nature Climate Change: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3374
* “Acclimatisation” is the response of organisms to environmental change through non-genetic processes. It is different to adaptation, which involves inheritance of a genetic change.
The Oz BoM offers month-average SST anomalies that are based on NOAA data. From their menu offerings, here is the typically hottest month of February. The underlying warming trend is 0.0088 C/year (per download in Excel).
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=sst&area=GBR&season=02&ave_yr=T
The annual volatility is massive relative to the underlying annual rate of change (which has persisted centennially). There are also a host of biology papers that indicate that corals are not threatened by that modest rate of change. For more than a year I’ve repeatedly advised some ten scientists* at the ARC-COE, AIMS, GBRMPA, and Melbourne University of this, but they remain in denial.
Trends for January and March are 0.0082 and 0.0085/year (2nd and 3rd hottest…..other months are significantly cooler)
Other data shows that the high annual volatility correlates primarily with poorly understood ocean circulation changes, including ENSO and also with interactive “weather”, both of which are unpredictable.
All the “experts” remain in denial of that too…..oh, and that includes the the Head of Science at Melbourne University and the Dean (a biologist).
*Including profs Terry Hughes, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and David Karoly.
Bob Fernley-Jones
Or was it just one weather-related El-Nino bleaching event that straddled 2016-2017 and they took measurements in both years? That gives them a two-for-the-price-of-one. It’s a trivial point, or should be, but they rarely miss a trick when it comes to attempted deception. I’d like to say my distrust is unprecedented, but then it would probably just be merelymistrust.
From the article: “A group of international scientists, including scientists from Australia, have issued advice that more research is urgently required to determine whether corals can acclimatise* and adapt to the rapid pace of climate change.”
What “rapid pace” of climate change? If you are referring to temperatures, they have been in a flat-line for 15 years.
Rapid pace! These people are not describing reality. You would think they could figure this out. I guess the money is too good, or the delusion too strong.
So the research has already been done and the results are presented right heer. Considering the past climate change that corals have survived, today’s climate change is trivial. On a much shorter time scale, corals survived the previous interglacial period, the Eemian, just fine even though it was warmer than today with higher sea levels and more ice cap melting. They also survived the last ice age and all of the Holocene that has been warmer than today. I would think that chemical polution might be more of a problem for corals than climate change. Anyway the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which Mankind has no control.
Notice the use of their latest weasel phrase “environmental change”. Great way to conflate any kind of manmade effect including actual pollution, with the fake “carbon pollution”, and its mythical effects on climate.
I gave up on headlines and began looking up and reading the actual research papers themselves not too long ago. Now I am not a climate scientist but I do have a scientific degree so I do understand how the scientific method works and any terms or phrases which I do not happen to understand I simply use something called a dictionary to help me out. I seem to recall that several of these corral reefs’s bleaching had been attributed to changing water levels and additionally that most if not all had already begun to recover on their own. I would gladly site multiple references but while updating my iphone with Apple’s latest version all of the papers and books which I had saved on my ebook app were wiped out. Did these fools simply ignore all of these papers which I have read or have they just been living in a cave somewhere and are just not aware of them?
Maybe their memorties are subjected to wiping with each IPCC AR-N upgrade?
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/anomnight.current.gif
I would say with the entire SH oceans very cool, particularly around Oz, cold water might be the problem
From the department of meaningless statements:
OTOH there’s a lot of inertia in the climate science community – they can’t move beyond the idea that CO2 causes irreversible warming; it’s all our fault; it can only get worse; sixth mass extinction blah blah blah
… is the wrong question. It should be: “Can corals survive climate science?”.
Oxybenzone, an increasingly common ingredient in modern sunscreens, seems
to be just a little genocidal where marine filter-feeders are concerned.
How much damage has been, and is being, caused to coral reefs by humans
researching reefs while using sunscreens at the same time?
If so, they haven’t learned anything from the golden toad debacle.
Not forgetting other pollutants such as plastic micro particles and petroleum run-off from coastal conurbations and marine vessels.
According to the greentards we have to stop mining coal on the Great Barrier Reef .
Extinction or survival is a low bar approach to wildlife management and living life. Ecosystem services, opportunities and flourishing are the gold standard. Better questions are how much less valuable will reefs be under rapid climate change, apex predator decline, algae grazer decline, siltation and toxic releases from flooding unprotected human sources in extreme weather events and how many coral species will survive this multi dimensional rapid onslaught? Another good question is how will humans be impacted in a world of rapidly degraded ecosystem.
Read any or all of Jim Steele’s coral reef posts here or mine on The Great Barrier Reef Wars.
The ARC Center is the major player in the Great Barrier Reef Wars on the “all is lost — give us more money” side. The opposing forces are the Australian Government scientists working for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
The alarmists get a lot of support from the generalized CAGW funders internationally — calamity is a surefire way of raising research dollars.
The ARC Center on coral reefs has already declared the GBR dead several times onl be be called out and debunked by the GBRMRA — repeatedly.
It is an ongoing joke in some parts of Aussie academia.
I remember going to visit the ARC centre to view its display tank in Townsville a few years back … walked away very disillusioned, my 500G coral display was far superior at the time.
I stopped reading at this in para.4:
“Our only real chance for their survival is to reverse climate change”
To when, precisely?
Have done Kip,thanks. In Kip and Jim we trust.
The antidote to the ARC Centre of Bullshit is real Aussie scientists Jennifer Marohasy and Peter Ridd.
Ridd talks about the Great Barrier Reef starting 23 minutes
Let’s try to be a little more honest. As usually, activists have oversimplified the nature and current extent of the threat. Coral thrived long ago when CO2 levels were much higher than today. Chemical and biochemical mechanisms exists that permit coral and other CaCO3 dependent organisms to thrive under these conditions. However, the coral species that exists today have adapted over the last several million years to suit recent environmental conditions, which were mostly ice ages with half of today’s level of CO2. The fact that earlier coral species did survive even higher CO2 is not proof that the majority of today’s species will do so.
They are more concerned with ocean warming than CO2. See Peter Ridd’s talk in the video
Dr. S: Thanks for the link to the interesting video. As best I can tell, however, it didn’t contradict anything I said. There is a temperature threat to coral and a “CO2 threat” (ocean acidification). Given that coral grows under a range of temperature conditions, it should survive GW and move poleward. However, there is no where to escape from higher CO2.
Frank, we have data on the range of CO2 encountered and tolerated by modern corals. At all levels, there is no problem for corals likely that they have not demonstrated prior ability to handle. One way or another. They are not in fact receiving optimum CO2 overall. This blog is a good place to start for those who wish to understand….
The ‘excellence’ mob are just full of ‘it’.