Press Release
London, 16 February – In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences scientists have discovered that some corals in the eastern Pacific are adapting to a warmer world by hosting more heat-tolerant algae.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that a 2 degrees C of warming would kill off 99 percent of global corals. However, the new study “shows that there are some unusual reefs that may be able to survive for several decades as a result of their ability to shuffle symbionts,” Andrew Baker, a marine biologist at the University of Miami and coauthor of the research, said in a statement.
“While we don’t think that most reefs will be able to survive in this way, it does suggest that vestiges of our current reefs may persist for longer than we previously thought, although potentially with many fewer species,” Baker said.
A new report recently published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), using official data from all over the world, found that there is no statistically significant reduction in global coral reefs since reliable records began two decades ago. In fact, for the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s biggest reef system, a record breaking high coral cover has been recorded.
Dr Peter Ridd, one of the world’s most eminent coral researchers, said
“Scientists are being suspiciously pessimistic about the future of the worlds reefs, even when they find wonderful news such as this latest study from the Eastern Pacific. Why are they constantly peddling such doom?”
Peter Ridd: Coral in a Warming World: Causes for Optimism (pdf)
That fish triggers me.
This is some underwater footage that I put together late one night a few years ago, for fun. It includes a trigger fish. :-).
Swimming in the water with a camera to view coral is not allowed.
Too dangerous
You could be eaten by a shark or killed by a stonefish, or piranhas
We have safe airplanes to view the coral now.
But why bother with airplanes?
Because we all know there is almost no coral left,
How could there be any left — coral has been dying off since the 1960s. To hide that reality, Australian conservatives have been replacing dead coral with plastic imitation coral, and pretending there is more coral than ever. Then they go swimming to photograph the plastic coral, and claim coral coverage has hit a new record.
Scuba diving is too high a risk to photograph plastic coral
And how do we know the photos were not taken in the 1960s when there were still coral around to be photographed?
Real science requires complex computer models.
That’s new school science.
Not scuba diving and cameras.
Tha’s old school science.
This comment is serious,
not satire.
Very good 🙂
In other news :
Wild bears crap in the woods !
🙂
News tip
https://www.wibw.com/2023/02/17/attorney-general-kobach-joins-lawsuit-aiming-vacate-waters-united-states-rule/
The Pope approves.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1878818122002535
Got any proof?
Yes !
But , its a bunch of crap !
(black bears do live in my Ks county …per Wildlife Fish and Game)
😉
Isn’t that the acme of academic bullying You know it’s true and I know it’s true, but I’m going to demand that you provide academic references to prove it. And by the way, I control the referees that will prevent those papers from being published.
Proof that alarmist experts don’t know coral at all.
Do they know thermometers, has the water actually warmed up
“has the water actually warmed up”
Good question.
And they keep talking about a warming world when it’s cooling at the present time.
I think the alarmists are stuck in “warming mode”. The blinders don’t let them see anything else.
I checked the Southern Sea temperature today (yesterday?) for you, Peta of Newark, and, according to http://www.seatemperature.info it is warmest at 1.7 deg C and coldest at – 1.4 deg C. Looks like those corals that want to be cool have a lot of room to spread out. Go for it.
Speaking of thermometers; how are those brilliant coral reefs doing around Greenland? The ones just north of Antarctica? 🙂 Hey, what of those beautiful corals off the Alaska coast?
Shame, to think they will all go extinct in my lifetime…
Modern corals[edit]The currently ubiquitous stony corals, Scleractinia, appeared in the Middle Triassic to fill the niche vacated by the extinct rugose and tabulate orders, and is not closely related to the earlier forms. Unlike the corals prevalent before the Permian extinction, which formed skeletons of a form of calcium carbonate known as calcite, modern stony corals form skeletons composed of the aragonite.[81] Their fossils are found in small numbers in rocks from the Triassic period, and become common in the Jurassic and later periods.[82] Although they are geologically younger than the tabulate and rugose corals, the aragonite of their skeletons is less readily preserved, and their fossil record is accordingly less complete.
Wikipedia
So when Temperature and CO2 was much higher modern corals appeared.
And from http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N7/EDIT.php
And in reporting the results of a study of a large brain coral that lived throughout the 17th century on the shallow seafloor off the island of Bermuda, Cohen and Madin (2007) say that although seawater temperatures at that time and location were about 1.5°C colder than it is there today, “the coral grew faster than the corals there now.”
Other studies have shown earth’s corals to be able to cope with climate-induced warmings as well as coolings. In a study of patch reefs of the Florida Keys, for example, Greenstein et al. (1998) found that Acropora cervicornis corals exhibited “long-term persistence” during both “Pleistocene and Holocene time,” the former of which periods exhibited climatic changes of large magnitude, some with significantly greater warmth than currently prevails on earth; and these climate changes had almost no effect on this long-term dominant of Caribbean coral reefs. Hence, there is good reason to not be too concerned about long-term changes in climate possibly harming earth’s corals. They apparently have the ability to handle whatever nature may throw at them in this regard.
They do, but they can’t publish that they do. Otherwise they’ll never publish again. They have to toe the alarmist line if they want to get paid as “scientists”.
I can’t believe these scientists studied coral for so long with no idea how coral functions. Surprised by coral shuffling symbionts? What the heck are they teaching them in school?
I thought the Argo floats showed negligible warming of the oceans
They’re boiling, don’tcha know.
Al Gore says the oceans are boiling.
Al thinks the temperatures at the Earth’s core are in the millions of degress. I guess that’s why he thinks the oceans are boiling.
Correcting Ocean Cooling
Thanks for that good article.
Thanks
Corals evolved in warmer water. They love warmer water. Global warming will expand corals’ range – we know that because corals now don’t grow in the cooler areas that they used to colonise in warmer times.
The Flower Garden Reef off of Galveston a ways is reportedly healthy and spectacular.
Yes. Are there corals in the arctic?
Yes
Sorry, I posted before reading yours.
Not strictly true.
Unlike tropical reef-building corals, cold-water corals can grow in the dark, in deep, cold water, catching their own food. Lophelia pertusa is the only reef-forming coral in British waters.
Around Scotland, reefs form mainly on continental slopes off the west coast, at a depth of 200 to 400m. But L. pertusa has also been found in shallower water above 150m in several places, notably near Barra and Mingulay. The complex of reefs here covers about 100 sq km and is more than 4,000 years old. Some coral colonies appear to be relatively young (less than five years old), which suggests recruitment is still occurring.
https://www.nature.scot/landscapes-and-habitats/habitat-types/coast-and-seas/marine-habitats/cold-water-coral
Yes. Brent Spar came up with about 20 tons. (Much to Greenpeace’s surprise).
Mike. Beware of what types of coral you’re talking about. I have dredged up Lophelia pertusa from 700 m depth west of Ireland, growing, we think, on oil seeps. I hear also similar species are found in the Arctic ocean (and probably the Antarctic as well).
Why?
What it has ALWAYS has been about:
Fame (of a sort)
Money
Power
I described how coral would adapt and thrive 7 years ago in my post “The Coral Bleaching Debate: Is Bleaching the Legacy of a Marvelous Adaptation Mechanism or A Prelude to Extirpation?”
It got some attention in Australia’s conservative newspaper, so the ABC tried to cancel me as just an ignorant bird watcher
Read it at https://perhapsallnatural.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-coral-bleaching-debate-is-bleaching.html
This is the first of up to 24 climate science and energy articles I will recommend today, at: Honest Climate Science and Energy
Why a study?
Just ask anyone who owns a salt water aquarium about growing coral.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the optimal range for coral to thrive is between 73 and 84 degrees F.
So it is probably best to keep your aquarium well within this range to start.
25 Celsius or 77 Fahrenheit is a good middle-of-the-road temperature to aim for in a reef tank.
Some corals and fishes, having come from warm tropical waters, do much better at temperatures of about 80-85 degrees, or higher.
How long should lights be on for coral growth?
Between 9 and 12 hours
What causes coral bleaching?
The primary cause of coral bleaching is high water temperature. Temperature increases of only 1.5 –2°C lasting for six to eight weeks are enough to trigger bleaching.
What do corals need to survive in a tank?
From the article: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that a 2 degrees C of warming would kill off 99 percent of global corals.”
The corals didn’t get killed off during the Medieval Warm Period or the Roman Warm Period, or any of the warm periods before those times, so this claim by the IPCC is false.
Nuclear weapons can’t kill off the corals. A warmer ocean won’t either.
Then there’s the question of do we have a warmer ocean? The warmth in the oceans moves around, and cool water takes its place. So how warm are the oceans and are they really warming or are they cooling?
Some of the best new coral growth I have seen has been in lagoons where the water is much warmer and the temperature variation much greater.
I believe most of the warming from 1975 to 2015 was over land rather than over water, as measured by satellites. Also, the most warming was in colder nations in their winters (also TMIN) except for Antarctica.
The warming of the tropics and warmer waters where coral could live was below the global average. That means a +2 degree C. global average will be higher than the temperature change in areas where coral grow, Probably a lot higher.
Tom,
The fact that corals survived the hotter-than-now Holocene Climate Optimum [~6-10K yrs ago] and the Paleo-Eocene Climate Optimum [~56M yrs ago] proves 2 degrees C will not kill
off the corals.
The Great Barrier Reef is ~2000km long, running roughly North to South meaning the water temperature.difference from end to end is 4-5 degrees.
Ron Long [above] kindly supplied a sea temp site [seatemperatures.info]. From it the sea temps today were ~North end [Port Moresby] 79F/30C and ~South end [Brisbane] 86F/26C.
IIRC sea surface temps rarely get >30 C [unless very shallow: Red Sea]. So, the GBR corals
will likely just expel their symbionts for more warm-loving varieties if the seas warm significantly. Per Dr Ridd, most [90%] of bleaching events will have recovered within 5-15 yrs.
Just as natural selection would expect.
btw: the Wikipedia entry for the GBR has mentioned the new (2022) assessment:
“The Australian Institute of Marine Science conducts annual surveys of the status and the 2022 report showed the greatest recovery of the Great Barrier Reef in 36 years. It is mainly due to the regrowth of 2/3 of the reef by the fast growing Acropora coral which is the dominant coral on the reef.”
But only after 2 long paragraphs of gloom & doom concerning bleaching. As expected.
From the article: “Dr Peter Ridd, one of the world’s most eminent coral researchers, said
“Scientists are being suspiciously pessimistic about the future of the worlds reefs, even when they find wonderful news such as this latest study from the Eastern Pacific. Why are they constantly peddling such doom?””
We know why. There are various reasons why, and we know those reasons. None of the reasons are based on facts. There is no evidence that CO2 is the control knob of the Earth’s atmosphere or ocean.
False Flag: the water temp hasn’t actually changed.
So these “experts” claim the corals will disappear with 2.0 deg C warming? Obviously these doofuses are not paleontologists or geologists who know full well that corals have populated the world’s seas since long before the recent (2.6 MYA) cooling of the Quaternary. Coral fossils have been widely found dated from hundreds of MYA, at least 480 MYA (it is very hard to find rocks greater than that age that have not been crushed/broken/melted/reformed), throughout much warmer periods when the polar regions had no ice and were lushly vegetated.
The most prolific coral reefs are found in the hottest parts of the ocean and researchers such as (I believe) Peter Ridd have documented the changes in coral symbionts in response to temperature. Not something the IPCC want to know about as it destroys their propagandist narrative.
Quote: scientists have discovered that some corals in the eastern Pacific are adapting to a warmer world by hosting more heat-tolerant algae
The problem with the discovery is that it seems to imply that this is something new and different. Corals will grow best where the conditions are most favourable. They will tend not to grow in areas which are less favourable.
And of course conditions can change. Coral which expands into area during a series of higher tides will retreat after a series of years of low tides.
Evolution should not surprise any scientist either. Life is always finding a way.