
Some corals regrow after 'fatal' warming - howard941
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-dead-corals-regrow-fatal.html
======
gatestone
Corals naturally suffer from many hazards, and they naturally recover. Climate
change makes it worse. How much worse? I am not qualified to answer that.

"...disturbances such as bleaching, cyclones and crown-of-thorns outbreaks are
­occurring more often, are longer-lasting and more severe.

This means coral reefs have less time to recover..."

[https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-
gre...](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/reports-of-the-great-
barrier-reefs-doom-are-exaggerated/news-
story/500e73695109b027df6f5b4a8a398f80)

~~~
ColanR
> Climate change makes it worse.

You should probably cite that.

~~~
ehnto
Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and
articles. It isn't exactly a controversial opinion amongst people who believe
in climate change.

Here is a great summary from the Australian government, a government that is
doing everything it can to worsen the situation yet at least acknowledges that
it is something real and happening right now:

[http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-
reef/climat...](http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-work/threats-to-the-reef/climate-
change)

~~~
tossAfterUsing
> Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and
> articles.

Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to
judge

One of the arguments that I find compelling, from individuals who would
advocate for a less dramatic reading of the climate news, is that there's A
LOT MORE MONEY available for researchers to find out how bad the situation is
& not a lot of money (or encouragement from peers) available for folks who
consistently find that there's less reason for alarm.

Bit of a confirmation bias, there? Maybe.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
There's a lot more money in climate research than from the fossil fuel and
other companies seeking to maintain the status quo? Colour me unconvinced. I
suspect the Koch funded foundations and think tanks alone could eclipse most
nation's science budgets.

~~~
repolfx
The government is a firehose of money, and only government (academic) research
gets reported on by the media. So yes it's entirely possible for private
sector research to simply disappear, relative to the output of academia, whose
papers utterly dominate the conversation.

How often do you see private sector studies be cited by the media? The sort of
people who become journalists are the sort of people who immediately write off
any study funded by industry without even bothering to read it.

I can't actually remember the last time I saw an industry or thinktank funded
study being cited in US media, other than maybe by Breitbart. These studies do
exist: go read any climate skeptic blog and you'll find quite detailed
surveys, meta-analyses and the sort of content you'd find in a published paper
if these people were the sorts of people who published in academic journals
(they're not). But the press normally just ignores them, and on the rare
occasions they don't, it's only to paint them as science-hating bogeymen.

For instance, I linked in another comment to a study on ocean acidification by
Patrick Moore, who has a PhD in ecology and used to be a regional leader of
Greepeace. This paper has all the same things you'd expect to find in a normal
academic paper: citations, data and it says it was subject to double-blind
peer review prior to publication.

[https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O...](https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf)

And here's the Guardian commenting on Moore's work:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-
oz/2015/apr/1...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-
oz/2015/apr/16/ask-the-real-experts-about-ocean-acidification-not-climate-
science-deniers)

The piece is titled "Ask the real experts" and starts with 9 paragraphs of
hate-filled invective that compares Moore and the scientists who support him
to UFO believers, Elvis spotters, calls them "crazyballs", claims they're
"blinded by beliefs and ideology", states that their views should never be
allowed into national newspapers, falsely claims Moore has not written any
peer reviewed publications (but e.g.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012804...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128045886000136?via%3Dihub)),
and then cites as evidence three "actual experts" who, of course, all work in
universities.

The Guardian is a particularly extreme enclave of hard-left journalists who
think only government-funded academics can understand a scientific topic, but
the rest of the industry has similar biases.

As another example, here's a rather detailed replication and peer review of Al
Gore's famous CO2 in a bottle experiment:

[https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-
doing-...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-
simple-co2-experiment/)

It discovers that the original experiment was fraudulent (this isn't stated to
mean anything beyond Al Gore being a fraud; the author fully accepts that CO2
is a greenhouse gas).

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Well if we're going to talk about people being frauds...

Patrick Moore burnt every last atom of his remaining credibility in his now
famous Canal+ Glyphosate interview. Not that he had much being a paid _PR_
consultant to various logging corporations and the nuclear industry, trying to
leverage his former Greenpeace role for money.

They "falsely" claim Moore has published no papers in a mid 2015 Guardian
article? Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as
proof.

WUWT has _NO_ credibility being one of the most well known deniers on the
planet, putting out endless FUD, and infamously the instigators of the
appalling shitshow that was Climategate.

That was looked into in great detail, and a series of independent
investigations showed that the scientists did no wrong. Note, those
investigations were UK and US, including the Science Select Committee, a
Public Inquiry, the NSF and the EPA among others. _All_ of them cleared the
scientists.

It took _years_ for the damage WUWT did with Climategate to settle.

Inadvertently I'm sure, with Moore you provide anecdotal evidence for my
point. :)

~~~
repolfx
Actually, I think you're the one illustrating my point, inadvertently I'm
sure.

 _Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof._

The book is a journal published by Elsevier, a major academic publisher. You
know, academic papers are frequently published in books.

You're right about the date though, I hadn't noticed that. The claim may have
been true at the time, but no longer is. The rest still stands. The journalist
in question was never going to take anything written by a non-academic
seriously.

Now, the core point you've missed yet are making for me is very important: you
have to understand that most climate change skeptics (which I am not, btw)
aren't really skeptical about climate change _per se_. They're really better
described as _science skeptics_ or more accurately still, _academia skeptics_.

If you really engage with their arguments, which I get the feeling most people
here never have done, you'll notice that what they're actually talking about
is the problems of the scientific establishment. A lot of their arguments
could transfer just as well to e.g. the healthcare industry, or academic
psychology. And often what they're reacting to is not lobbyists or PR spending
but what they see as over-credulous belief in the moral and intellectual
purity of academics.

Your post is an excellent illustration of this:

• Shoot the messenger, ignoring his arguments because he isn't paid by the
government.

• Shoot another messenger, because they're "well known deniers". This is a
circular argument. You're saying "anyone who disagrees with what I believe has
no credibility" which is a vacuous statement.

• Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists
investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded
it's all legit.

The latter part is really highlighting the underlying understanding gaps here.
If you truly understand _why_ Climategate created a whole lot of newly minted
skeptics, then you'll understand that it was due to apparent duplicity and
collusion in the scientific establishment, the possibility/likelihood of which
is a major plank of climate skepticism. Thus saying those scientists were
cleared by other scientists just like them won't convince anyone of anything,
as it misses the point by a mile.

And BTW the Climategate guys weren't exactly cleared. For instance the Muir
Russel review, in the words of the Guardian, concluded:

 _" It found the scientists had not fudged their results or silenced critics.
But it found serious shortcomings in the openness with which they worked,
posing a risk to the credibility of UK climate science and indicating a
transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century."_

And it was apparent that the scientists in question had been deliberately and
illegally frustrating attempts to check their work via FOIA requests:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-
of-information-hacked-emails)

The dust from that never really settled, and it wasn't some random blog
causing trouble. The behaviour exposed by Climategate was covered in all the
major newspapers at the time. It _did_ rather strengthen the basic skeptics
case but only in the same way that the replication crisis in psychology and
medicine strengthened the case of other kinds of "expert skeptics".

~~~
NeedMoreTea
It should not matter whether research is done in academia or industry. What
matters is the conflicts of interest and funding sources.

It makes no odds if a study comes from work done at Oxford Uni or Exxon if
it's funded by fossil fuel interests. I, along with most others, am going to
be naturally suspicious of claims without independent verification. Likewise a
study of the health impacts of red meat funded by some US cattle interests (as
randomly cropped up on HN a while back) carries far less weight than the same
study from an independently funded source.

I don't know _anyone_ who has an over-credulous belief in the moral purity of
academics. That's absurd. There's probably more likelihood of moral purity
than in an industry lab, thanks to fewer overt conflicts or agendas to push,
but there's no reason to blindly believe without peer review, replication and
analysis, as appropriate.

On climategate:

Yes, they were cleared of wrongdoing, Russel's investigations criticised the
openness, but concluded:

 _The "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit
were found not to be in doubt. However, the panel also concluded the
scientists were insufficiently open about their work_

That sounds like cleared to me. I did not claim they were found to be perfect.
No human (or scientist) has yet achieved that.

It's too long ago to remember exactly what was covered by the various FoI
requests, but it seems entirely _inappropriate_ to release data under FoI for
work in progress before publication with analysis and conclusions. After that,
requests for both raw and processed data should be honoured. So openness will
always come with limits. That would apply to work in any field, whether in
academia or industry.

Science isn't, and can't be perfect. Mistakes will be made, techniques will be
sloppy, occasionally there will be outright fraud etc. There are processes to
catch, correct and withdraw.

Meanwhile the CATO Institute's Michaels and WUWT were pouring lies and oil
onto the fire, trying to stoke maximum damage. They managed to come out of the
episode with pretty much no credibility at all. Of course there were no
independent studies into _their_ behaviour, or honesty, or any consequence for
their lies. In fact they appear to be held to no standards at all. How
convenient.

WUWT is not a peer review journal. They are not a messenger, they are a blog
with an agenda. If Watts or any of his colleagues want to put out papers into
the corpus in a reputable source, their results can stand or fall on their
accuracy. The few times papers proposing alternatives to AGW have come out
they have not, so far, stood scrutiny. I rather hope they do, as it would be
nice to discover it was all a big misunderstanding and everything will be fine
really.

At this point it's difficult to conclude WUWT are acting in good faith on any
level. It appears to be an intentional attempt to distract, confuse and muddy
whilst taking time and energy from anyone who is trying to actually advance
(or disprove) the science. It's the tobacco and asbestos playbook. When they
make a credible case it'll be in Nature or some such. I won't hold my breath.

As a last point:

> Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists
> investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and
> concluded it's all legit.

OK, so now what? Science apparently has no checks or balances acceptable to
you, or is it all a global conspiracy? It doesn't matter that the Climate
Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the
Nuffield Foundation and Shell. How very strange their results have gone
against the interests of their sponsors. It makes it damn awkward to build a
convincing chain of corruption and conspiracy though.

That's unanswerable.

~~~
repolfx
Sure, the funding source is what matters. So why do people assume that
academics have neutral or independent funding sources?

The basic argument that climate scientists wouldn't get funding to do their
jobs if it weren't for their predictions of global catastrophe, is a sound
one. If climate scientists were reporting "our models suggest the climate is
sorta like it used to be, there's probably not much going on", it'd be a
backwater with almost no funding and absolutely no media interest. If
economists took a stance of, "the economy is too complex to model or predict,
but we'll collect a lot of data for you" then how many economists would be
employed, or have newspaper columns?

There's a structural incentive to be very confident in your ability to predict
the future, if you're in certain areas of academia, as there are effectively
no other employers. It's not just a climate issue.

I'd feel a lot happier and more confident in the narrative if I felt sure this
structural problem was at least recognised, ideally dealt with. But I don't
see it:

\- The media present academics as neutral 'experts' whose word is beyond
question.

\- Academics themselves encourage this and never talk about their own
conflicts of interest.

\- Famous journals are run by academics with the same set of incentives.

This is how you get stuff like
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-
rev...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/)
happening, where 450 different studies over multiple decades investigated an
effect that in the end didn't exist.

We're told "science" self corrects and will always yield the right answer in
the end. That may well be true if you use a wide definition of science that
includes analysis done by random bloggers and anyone else who wants to
contribute. But it's not at all clear that's true for the government funded
academic apparatus, on at the scales needed, or on any reasonable timescale.
It's entirely possible to believe in the scientific method whilst still
retaining skepticism about the output of particular groups of people who do
scientific work within particular social structures.

Note: The CRU shenanigans were revealed through email hacking, not any kind of
formal scientific process. In fact the researchers were deliberately evading
laws put in place to try and stop that kind of thing. And even though we know
ordinary science can self-correct because major faults like 5-HTTLPR are
caught, it took decades. Psychology is riven with entire sub-fields that were
studied since the 60s and are now known to be totally wrong. How many similar
bodies of knowledge are waiting to collapse? There are plenty of examples of
things thought to be "science" that evaporated when examined closely, often
with scientists involved simply denying that anything had collapsed at all!

It looks especially bad when climate scientists start adjusting old datasets
to make their predictions come true, as has been happening recently with the
new versions of the global temperature datasets. For many years the
temperature data showed that global warming had stopped: average temperates
were stable. This violated all prior models predicting what would happen and
was a major problem for climate science as an endeavour. Now there are new
'versions' of old temperature readings that mysteriously disappear the plateau
from the public record.

There might be solid, scientific reasons for this. It _might_ be that for many
decades global temperature readings were fundamentally wrong and nobody
detected it. But if something like that happens, climate scientists need to be
very publicly _screaming_ about what went wrong, and why, and what lessons
they learned from it, because otherwise it looks suspicious as hell. It
_looks_ very much like they're adjusting the data to fit the models in order
to preserve their own jobs.

 _It doesn 't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded.
Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell._

In the 1970s yes, before it was researching global warming. Currently it's a
part of a university and gets its funding from governments (including the US
Dept of Energy).

~~~
NeedMoreTea
People _don 't_ assume that academics have neutral funding sources. That's why
many will always look at the potential for conflict of interest, and look more
carefully into the why. An academic in a university research body will get
loads of funding from private foundations and industry. Even when it's not
helpfully labelled as the Microsoft Campus, Oxford University. Who knows, I
might be suspicious of some work coming out of there that is reporting a
result that happens to be in Microsoft's interests.

Given they supposedly have to find change to keep their jobs, how is it that
all the research around the world is pointing to similar changes? If they're
just making shit up, I'd expect predictions all over the map.

The days of constraint free government funding for Blue Skies research are
_long_ gone. The world is far worse off as a result. That doesn't mean every
single project, from every source is now corrupt. It does mean that some
projects and studies do indeed have an agenda.

Offer some evidence that academia is entirely corrupt. Or worse than industry.

The CRU's current About Us includes:

 _" sponsored by contracts and grants from academic funding councils,
government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations,
non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry"_

To me that is _not_ proof of "gets its funding from governments". It's one of
multiple sources of funding. Regardless of how much you want to paint them as
some government funded state puppet.

Yet even then I fail to see how that helps your cause célèbre, the British
government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with
policies distinctly in favour of fossil. If the CRU were as corrupt as you
keep claiming, the climate unit would surely be busy proving how harmless
petrol and gas are, to get more of that filthy Conservative government lucre.

We're not going to reach agreement, thanks for the conversation. :)

~~~
repolfx
No problem, I find this conversation enjoyable and useful.

I went looking for info on the funding of CRU. The best I could find was this:

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-
ch...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-
confe/6735846/Climategate-professor-Phil-Jones-awarded-13-million-in-research-
grants.html)

The Climategate docs had a spreadsheet with funding sources. So that's quite
old now, but back then it was about £13 million from various sources, all of
which were the government. I suppose they probably do get a bit of funding
from non-government sources, but it seems it isn't likely to be much.

 _It shows Professor Jones, along with other academics at the university,
received more than 50 separate grants with a value of £13.7 million from a
number of funding bodies including the European Union, Nato, and the US
department of energy. Several British bodies also gave substantial sums
including the Met Office, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers
Authority and the Department for the Environment._

Perhaps this article doesn't list any private sector grantees, but there are
plenty of government bodies to go around.

Re: everyone getting the same results, is academia corrupt.

The research around the world doesn't agree _entirely_ , but it's pretty
close. However, it's all based on the same datasets. There are only a few
temperature datasets available, really only two major datasets and one is
maintained by the CRU. It's really an incredibly influential organisation,
which is presumably why someone hacked it and why it was such a splash.

Now, if the temperature record is unreliable all climate research based on
that record is also unreliable. You can't argue the world is getting warmer
unless you can reliably measure temperatures, that's pretty basic.

Unfortunately we know for sure the temperature record must be unreliable,
because the historical temperature dataset scientists use (which goes back to
about 1850) keeps being revised. If you use the dataset that was current in
the 1990s, then compare the dataset to the ones being provided today, you can
see that the historical temperatures have been changed.

This isn't done entirely secretly; the idea is that thermometer readings have
to be adjusted to take into effect various confounding factors and that's
perfectly legitimate. But there are practical problems:

1\. People have been measuring temperatures with thermometers for over a
century, yet scientists are _still_ changing how they adjust the raw data
today, with the result that the official temperatures seen back in the 30s and
40s, or even earlier, are still changing. The results of the adjustments are
massive and fundamentally change the conclusions of the science. But by
logical implication, if modern scientists are actually correct to do these
adjustments then all previous analyses of the climate made until now must have
been wrong. Why is nobody alerting the world to the prior wrongness of climate
datasets?

2\. Temperature dataset creators like the CRU have a nasty habit of claiming
they destroyed or "lost" the raw, unadjusted data. They have also fought very
strongly to block the release of raw datasets, and engaged in other sorts of
behaviour that scientists aren't meant to engage in. That is, the only
datasets available are those that have been "retouched" by people who get
multi-million pound budgets because of predictions of warming.

This large conflict of interest requires enormous trust in the climate
scientists. It is thus unfortunate that revisions of historical data _always_
create warming effects where previously none existed. The apparent pause in
rising temperatures was discussed by scientists for many years - the latest
temperature datasets from CRU rewrite history and erase it entirely.

So you have to understand that climate skeptics are entirely understandable.
Their positions aren't weird or crazy. Climate scientists are asking the world
for staggeringly huge amounts of trust: to trust them about their
understanding of climate trends although they're simultaneously claiming that
_all recorded temperature data_ , even as recently as 10 years ago, _was
wrong_.

This graphic illustrates the kind of thing that happens:

[https://realclimatescience.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/Re...](https://realclimatescience.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/10/Reykjavik2012-2013-1.gif)

Last thing:

 _the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the
last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil_

Hmm, did you notice Theresa May's last act before she resigned? She committed
the UK to massive climate change spending:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/11/may-
defe...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/11/may-defends-
inspiring-green-plan-as-critics-call-for-immediate-action)

That's not the act of a government that's anti-AGW.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I'll not go too far into CRU, as I have no definitive proof of their funding
beyond what is publicly known.

I can't imagine why the Met Office or NRA would have any interest in promoting
research with an agenda. They want to forecast the weather accurately, and
manage UK rivers respectively. Their interests are served by accuracy, not
agenda and incorrect data. DOE was _abolished_ by the Tories which you might
well think reveals their stance.

Talking of, the Telegraph piece you link is after they stopped being a
reputable newspaper with a rightwing but honest perspective, but were well
along their journey to rightwing bullshit comic of today (ie after the Barclay
brothers bought them). Which is a damn shame as I once used to buy Telegraph,
FT and Guardian to get the spread of perspective. There isn't much available
for honesty on the right from UK newspapers now. Which is not to discredit
your link, I simply do not know. They still hadn't quite ditched all pretence
to honesty around then. :)

> did you notice Theresa May's last act

lol. OK, I'll bite. The last act of a leader, as a "fuck you" to whoever might
follow, after presiding over a famously weak government, coming shortly after
the cross-party Select Committee's detailed plan to decarbonise. Greenwashing
that was entirely empty words and the sound of kicking the can down the road.
As significant as Boris Johnson's "I will lie in front of Heathrow bulldozers"
speech. What legislation was brought to require movement towards her very
distant targets?

What have the Conservative government done towards meeting that target since?
What policy have they? Hint: nowt beyond the vague "so far in the future we
don't care at all" target.

On other climate, renewables and efficiency related bills, the Conservatives
have very consistently voted them down. They ended onshore wind completely,
they removed feed tariffs for home solar - initially with no plan for
replacement causing a 90%+ reduction in installations and decimating the
industry, approved the Heathrow expansion, approved and promoted fracking -
though even their own party membership objected to this so they wound it back
somewhat, voted down the climate targets (two or three times), voted down the
vehicle emission limits. It goes on, and on. You found one speech with nice
words.

Also note that it was Parliament, _not_ the Conservative Government that
declared a climate emergency.

Coincidentally just today the Grauniad put up a very nice summary of how MPs
have voted on recent climate issues, with an overall summary graphic:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-
interactive/2019/...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-
interactive/2019/oct/11/guardian-climate-score-how-did-your-mp-do)

The actual voting patterns reveal everything. The data allows me to stand 100%
by my claim of UK government's actual stance.

------
ummonk
I've always wondered how coral reefs stuck around for hundreds of millions of
years if they're so fragile and prone to death without recovery.

~~~
lazyjones
Perhaps they like warmth and will spread towards the poles from where they are
now - the hottest waters.

[https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralwaters.html](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coralwaters.html)

The IPCC doom predictions simply make no sense to me given that large parts of
the oceans are currently too cold for corals (by 10+ K).

~~~
masklinn
> The IPCC doom predictions simply make no sense to me given that large parts
> of the oceans are currently too cold for corals (by 10+ K).

Coral reefs don't get built over two weeks, or even two centuries. Furthermore
warm-water corals need sunlight, and proper depths.

~~~
kls
You are right it takes about 50 years given the only data we have on how fast
they regenerate. The Bikini Atolls being the only data point we have.

------
MichaelApproved
> _But the researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the
> polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly
> abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several
> years, growing back and starting a new skeleton._

Is it that 38% use this method or they all try to use this method and only 38%
are successful?

~~~
dev_dull
Also, who’s to say they “developed” that? That makes it sound like they’re
dealing with something completely new (fits into man-made climate change
narrative). Is it possible that through millions of years of evolution the
earth had many such warming experiences and they developed this technique well
before we arrived on the scene?

~~~
sterkekoffie
If you'd RTA you'd have answered your question. We've long had evidence for
this type of recovery happening. The problem is that the evidence is from the
Paleozoic fossil record. It's vanishingly unlikely that /no/ corals ever
undertook this process in the past 300 million years but it's not typical
behavior and it's extremely significant that it's been observed in modern
corals.

We know that catastrophic climate change has occurred in the past. Climate
scientists are not proposing this is new on a geological time scale. But it's
new to us and to most extant species. We don't all have these tricks up our
sleeves.

~~~
TearsInTheRain
It's not new to us and most extant species. There were several rapid ~10 C
temperature changes at the end of the pleistocene period 10-15k years ago:
[https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-
proble...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-
the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/)

------
pvaldes
Of course they do, but this is not the real question here.

Zooxanthellae in temperate reef corals like C. Caespitosa are relativelly
tolerant to temperature change. Tropical reef corals are machines infinitely
more complicated. Having a lot of Acropora growing really fast is not
necessarily a good symptom, for example.

~~~
boomlinde
You say "of course they do" as though it's not a novel finding and "this is
not the real question" as though this is the answer to a question and not a
scientific finding.

Neither is the case.

~~~
pvaldes
1) Bleaching in corals is not one disease. They are (at least) five different
types associated to four different genuses of bacteria. All of them could be
symptoms of another problem instead the real causes, as seen in research done
in Oculina, the other ubiquitous species from Mediterranean Sea with Cladocora
(see Ainsworth et al 2008).

And there are other kinds of necrosis caused by viruses, echinoderms and
polychaetes.

That some species of corals at least can recover relatively fast after
bleaching is know since... dunno, but probably since 80's at least. A
bibliographic search should find early documents about it. Other species never
bleach and other just die (Levas et al 2018)

2) The real juicy question to answer there, is not if corals bleach and
recover, we knew that they do it since decades even if was not reported for
Cladocora. The question is _what_ corals bleach and _what_ corals recover, in
my not so humble opinion.

~~~
boomlinde
1) OK, but I'm not sure how it pertains to your point that there are multiple
causes of bleaching.

2) In this case, Cladocora caespitosa

~~~
pvaldes
Corals can recover from "bleaching" and can overgrow skeletonised areas (at
some extent), but neither all bleaching cases are equal, nor all of the around
3500 species, if I remember correctly) of extant hard corals are equally
resilient.

The real cause of bleaching is unknown. Vibrio can invade the area and
accelerate the killing of coral tissue, but is unclear if they are a cause of
the disease or a secondary effect of the disease.

~~~
boomlinde
The real cause of bleaching isn't in question. The article has little to do
with the cause of bleaching. It doesn't suppose that the 3500 species extant
hard corals are equally resilient. You are telling me things that, while
certainly interesting and appreciated as such, don't really address any
problems with the article or its assumptions.

~~~
pvaldes
Sorry, but I'm not interested in peer reviewing the article here if this is
what you expected. I was not asked to do so in any case by the editors, and
this is not the place for it.

The article is great, but the problem is more complex than that, for several
reasons that as you pointed, are out of the scope of the article (so I will
not discuss them here). Feel welcomed to talk about the article, and only
about the article, if this is what you want. I will listen carefully.

------
vangourd
Global Warming politics aside as easily as a catastrophe can be pushed aside.

Is anyone more informed able to explain how the KT Extinction event affected
corals?

How were they able to survive the mass extinction event of the dinosaurs if
they're so sensitive to temperature changes?

~~~
kls
They are not that sensitive to temperature change, the article is bad science,
the reefs are being bleached and killed by titanium and zinc much of which
comes from sun screen. That is why the only reefs that are surviving are in
remote areas that do not see the population density to elevate the water to
the ppm that its needed to bleach the coral, I live less than 3 miles from
Mote marine and run into and talk to many of their researchers not one of them
has ever told me that they have data that warming alone is bleaching the reefs
but they know for a fact titanium and zinc are, they are one of the foremost
research centers on reef science and reef restoration:

[https://www.icriforum.org/sites/default/files/ICRI_Sunscreen...](https://www.icriforum.org/sites/default/files/ICRI_Sunscreen_0.pdf)

[https://time.com/4080985/sunscreen-coral-
reefs/](https://time.com/4080985/sunscreen-coral-reefs/)

IIRC Hawaii has already banned sunscreens that contain those products and we
have banned it in the Florida Keys. It is what is causing bleaching, we know
it for a fact. My daughter while not a marine biologist yet, is well on her
way, she does a lot of work on reef restoration and focuses her studies on
Coral as it is what she wants to do. The entire focus on reef restoration is
in the areas of agricultural run off, micro-plastics and suspended micro
metals elimination as well as reforesting. Ocean temperatures are not killing
the reefs if it was it would be as simple as troughing deep water and using
tidal flow to up flow cooler water over the reef. I actually had this
conversation with one of the researches once, as I interact with them from
time to time due to my daughters interests.

Coastal mainland Florida has lost all of it's reefs, they where alive when I
was a kid but where dying. It was also the time when Florida saw a huge
tourism and population boom. The reefs in the keys where fine at that time,
but by the early 90's the lower keys from the 7 mile bridge to Key west
started to see signs of bleaching, meanwhile there was no evidence of it in
the upper Keys which sits right in between the dead reefs of mainland Florida
and the dying reefs of Key West. The difference was Key West became a larger
tourist destination in that time due to the formation of the tourist
development council in the years preceding. For the most part Key Largo still
does not have the same problem (it is happening though, due to agricultural
run off) because it sees less tourism than Key West and the tourism it does
see is more SCUBA based tourism who generally do not wear sunscreen.

Another culprit is agricultural run off, while I am not a fan of the article
below because it states it's global warming out of the gate, then offers no
fact to back up said statement and omits the fact that the study they cite
noted in the study that there where no increases in average water temperature
in the Keys during the study, or the fact that the Keys has seen a Keys wide
drop in average water temps for the past decade. There where several spikes in
temperature above the threshold and die off where only observed when massive
runoffs where in place. When the temps exceeded the threshold and runoff
nitrogen and phosphorus where observed to be in low PPM there where no
recorded die-offs. That being said it does do a good job of explaining what
said runoff is doing to the reefs. Basically when the water hits a certain N:P
ration in the presence of of warmer water, it kills the reef. Without the N:P
ration the reefs thrive in the warmer spikes so, water temp is second to the
fact that the presence of agricultural run off creates the chemical
environment that is toxic to the reef. The heat is only the catalyst when
those chemicals are presence.

[https://www.hwhfoundation.org/news/nutrient-runoff-
starves-c...](https://www.hwhfoundation.org/news/nutrient-runoff-starves-
corals-in-the-florida-keys/)

[https://www.npr.org/2019/07/16/742050975/floridas-corals-
are...](https://www.npr.org/2019/07/16/742050975/floridas-corals-are-dying-
off-but-it-s-not-all-due-to-climate-change-study-says)

In the Keys we have banned fertilizers for lawn maintenance and we have moved
the population centers to sewage whereas just a decade ago every house outside
of Key West and Marathon has septic systems. But we still have a huge issue
with Big sugar dumping water into the everglades which runs out of the gulf
and over our reefs.

I am very concerned about our reefs and it is important that people know
exactly what is killing them. Fixing global warming is not going to save our
reefs. It gives people a false sense of security and needs to be rebuked as
bad science.

~~~
mhandley
The first article you cite says:

 _" The chemical UV filter oxybenzone has been studied most intensively and
the following effects have been described: Bleaching of coral fragments and
coral cells from various species of hard coral. This effect is more pronounced
at higher water temperatures."_

Sounds like, as with many things, the story isn't simple. Multiple
environmental changes simultaneously can have consequences where each, by
itself, would have much less effect. In general, we need to tackle all the
causes to some degree to have much hope of success.

~~~
kls
It is fairly simple, they do not die in the same temps when the PPM of these
chemicals are low, the temps are secondary and are allowing the chemicals to
make certain bonds that are toxic to the reef. Absent the chemicals the reefs
tolerate the temperatures just fine. They are only sensitive to temperature
when the chemicals are present thus the chemicals are the primary source of
death and thus their elimination is paramount to the survival of reefs. The
chemical are what kill the coral not the temperature as if you heated the
water to threshold, then cooled it, then poured it on coral it will kill it as
the water has reached threshold, thus the bonds have been made. This study was
actually done here in the keys, I will see if I can find the paper.

Both agricultural run off and sunscreen follow a similar pattern.

------
MikeGale
Very interesting.

Read a 2012 study a few days ago on what kills coral. Have not found a more
recent follow up yet. (I was snorkelling on the reef a few days ago, the parts
I saw looked pretty good, so wanted to find out more.)

They studied a fair number of reefs, on the Great Barrier / Coral Sea area. My
quick summary, from memory, about half of reef coral "cover" damaged at that
time. Only 10% from bleaching, the rest split between cyclone damage and crown
of thorns. Their conclusion, if crown of thorns are eliminated the reefs will
recover naturally.

Fortunately in my 3 days of snorkelling I didn't see a single crown of thorns.
The crown killing operation is hopefully that effective on most of the reef.

------
underbluewaters
I'm seeing a lot of comments speculating on how coral reefs got along for
hundreds of millions of years. While coral species have existed for this long,
that is _not_ how long these ecosystems have existed. What we think of as
coral reefs have only been around for ~24 million years. This tweet has a nice
diagram and pointers to resources:

[https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512](https://twitter.com/RemoteReefs/status/1141255435200192512)

~~~
peter303
Then they would have missed the Eocene hyperthermal 55.2 million years ago a
rapid 5 to 8 C warmup due to a huge influx of carbon into the atmosphere (8 to
20 times all human activity). Its not known where all this carbon came from
yet.

------
iagovar
Honestly this tastes like nothing. With phytoplankton, acidification and the
threat of the methane trigger

~~~
topmonk
Methane is a nothing burger. It breaks down so quickly it doesn't affect much.

~~~
throwaway5752
Methane has a residence of a decade in the atmosphere. "Methane trigger" is
short for the clathrate gun hypothesis, which is the rapid release of methane
sequestered in methane hyudrate deposits at the poles. Those are very large
deposits of methane hosted in water ice, currently estimated at roughly ten
times conventional methane reserves. If ambient temperatures exceed the
melting point, the methane is released.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)
is a much more detailed summary. It is strongly correlated with mass
extinction events. It is also appears to be beginning:
[https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered-
sibe...](https://www.newsweek.com/methane-boiling-sea-discovered-
siberia-1463766)

~~~
topmonk
From the very same wikipedia article you referenced, under "Current Outlook":

 _Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond
rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should
remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[28] Clathrate
deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is
typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea
temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the
shallowest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will
typically take on the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature
signal to get through._

~~~
throwaway5752
I hope so, I don't know what the cause of the Siberian seep is. I hope that
it's submerged permafrost. Appreciate your pointing that out.

~~~
topmonk
Right, and youay ne thinking, let's play the odds. But there is only once
chance, so what do odds mean anyway in that scenario? Will you wall away a
failure and still take solace in the fact that by the odds you were _supposed_
to be correct?

But if there is only one chance, how can you know what the odds of anything?
You have the past, and you have the future and you may prescribe a certain
significance to that past for what reason you don't really know. How could
you, it just feels right, doesn't it? Your memory, regard8this as truth, it
just feels right. But consider.. one point in time and space, in however many
dimensions there may be, and the only reason you believe in a certain outcome
is feeling that your so called memory is representitive of reality..Wnat
evidence do.you have it.is.right? I.claime none.at all. None.ag.all.none.sfall

------
godshatter
Taking a step back, coral reefs have been around in some form or other for at
least 500 million years. I would be greatly surprised if they weren't
resilient enough to survive a lot of things. That's not to say we shouldn't
work to protect them, but it does make me skeptical that they could be lost as
easily as we seem to be assuming.

~~~
kls
They can and it truly is a huge risk at the moment, the problem is the AGW
camp is trying to subvert the research for their gain which is a detriment to
what we need to accomplish the fact is agricultural run off, and sunscreen
micro metals are a creating toxins which the reefs are unprepared for, Which
has caused massive deforestation of reefs in areas close to population
centers. as well as more remote areas where said population or agricultural
centers, waters off-spring over their reefs. These toxins are a new threat to
coral and one that they have not seen before, time will tell if they can adapt
but it is known that all of the mainland Florida reefs are now dead due to
these toxins and have not regenerated since the 1980's when the last of them
died off.

------
jboggan
I've always wondered about this because corals have been around during much
warmer and much more acidic periods in the ocean.

------
ping_pong
We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual,
cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature
is a lot more resilient than expected.

Put me firmly in the camp of "we need to protect the environment at all costs"
(ex. I believe that companies that pollute our waters should get shut down, I
believe boats that produce massive amounts of pollution should be sunk by our
navy, etc), but I also tend to no longer believe the click-bait headlines that
our entire society is rife with. These headlines produced by journalists, not
scientists, are the information that gets propagated and that is poisoning our
society with misinformation.

~~~
throwaway5752
_" We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual,
cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature
is a lot more resilient than expected._"

Yet again, someone falsely ascribes views to scientists that they never had. I
keep track of this stuff, and I don't know what forecasts you are talking
about.

Actual forecasts (ipcc reports), if anything have been overly conservative.
And they are grim. There is active research as to why they are overly
conservative and reality is proceeding worse than the already grim forecasts.

~~~
cagenut
this is how the reactionary mind works. the problem isn't the problem. the
problem is how THOSE PEOPLE _reacted_ to the problem such that now I, THE
REASONABLE AND INFORMED ADULT MODERATE, must now devils-advocate (aka
advocate) for the problem.

~~~
tdb7893
As I've gotten older I've realized that "moderates" who generally agree with
you but advocate for less action (and often inaction) are generally the
biggest stumbling block to getting things done.

MLK's letter from Birmingham jail is still really true to me today (you can
just search for "moderate" to find the part I'm talking about)
[https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)

~~~
Loughla
I've found in my personal life (so maybe this doesn't hold true on the
internet, but maybe it does when there is something at stake, like karma
points) that moderates who advocate for lesser actions, but 'agree' with me
are really just people who don't agree with me at all but don't want to take
an action (disagreement) they perceive as possibly being damaging to a
relationship.

One Person's Source: All of the people who say 'I'm fiscally conservative but
socially liberal' in my life have turned out to be veeerrrryyyy socially
conservative.

~~~
kls
You ever though that maybe they have seen this bullshit before and realize it
is not the end of the world, That we need to do something just like we did for
Acid rain and the Ozone layer but that all of the bullshit predictions that
where made where nothing but bullshit. They where real and valid issues, we
dealt with them and we did so in measured and moderate courses. But the
radicals had us all dead multiple times over while we dealt with them with
moderate action.

~~~
cagenut
If you think the greenhouse gas problem is comparable to the acid rain or
ozone problems then you fundamentally do not understand the science, and you
as an engineer fundamentally do not understand what "orders of magnitude" are.

It is only from a position of wholesale ignorance of the scientific reality
that you can make such a facile equation.

To put it in a simple analogy, you just said "those alarmists told me it was
going to rain last week and it didn't, therefore this hurricane warning is
bullshit i'm not evacuating".

~~~
kls
I do understand what orders of magnitude is, I also understand that none of
the orders of magnitude predictions have come to pass. If you cannot make
accurate predictions, it's not science plain and simple. In less than a week
there have been two articles on this site attributing their phenomena to
global warming. Both subjects I am extremely knowledgeable on, the first being
a claim that the climate exodus has begun in the the Florida Keys due to
global warming. The article was a lie on it's face, I live there, people are
leaving because there is an economic crisis in the Keys. I cited very specific
evidence in that discussion as I literally hear people every day talking about
it and why they are leaving. I talked to the guy this morning that owns the
auto-shop 1 island down from me, he told me he had a contract on his
commercial property and is getting out, he is in his 70's works alone and is
getting too old for it. He cannot get help due to the affordable housing
crisis and can sell his property and retire so he figures it's time. This is
the reason and a reporter could have spent 5 minutes in the Keys and came to
that conclusion, but the headline for the story was written and then the facts
where put together to fit the foregone conclusion.

The second was this one which is also bad science. I drink with some of the
worlds top scientist in the coral research area, I live on the same island, my
daughter volunteers at their facility and I help with reforestation efforts in
this area, when they do reforestation dives. in my other posts I clearly
articulate the facts as to what is causing reef die off. I did not say global
warming is not a problem, I said radicals are lying and trying to co-opt every
bad thing that happens in nature to AGW, because they "want" it to be orders
of magnitude. They did the same thing with acid rain and the ozone layer both
where fixed by addressing and banning products (lead in gas, CFC's,
refrigerants) not by silly proposals like cap and trade. Or suggesting that we
are all going to have to just reduce our standard of living to save the world
in 10 days.

A measured approach to migrating to Solar, Wind, Tidal and electric vehicles
is how we will address global warming. Not creating a stock market for carbon.
It's literally the stupidest idea ever and is advocated because it's a great
way to skim money off the top by the elites and to limit entry into industry
via regulations.

When they attribute these things to AGW, make predictions and they don't come
true then they are engaging is agenda and advocacy and not science and it
causes real issues. When these lies get exposed as they have, like with the
CRU and the pause-buster papers, it gives ammo to the likes of Trump and the
Koch Brothers to gut the EPA and roll back hard won environmental changes that
where back by real science that made accurate predictions. the radicals
insistence that AGW be tied to everything, gave us opening of public land to
drilling and fracking. The radicals directly defeated the hard won battles
fought by the moderates that won them. So you will forgive me when I see a
statement that we the moderates enable the opposition, when it has been the
radicals and their willingness to bend the facts that has enabled the deniers
to throw the baby out with the bath water. People that mask advocacy and
agendas as science, have no right to, they are stealing hard work and research
to further their agenda. Which is unfair to the people that did the real work.
AS their disinformation allows the properly done work to be discredited by
showing the agenda, and then pandering to it, to discredit the real data.

------
schnevets
I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions
almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of
supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other
world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to
something lush and diverse in a few millennia.

I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from
"Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a
humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.

~~~
DeusExMachina
I find it sad that the only two perspective seem to be the extreme ones:
humans are either destroyers or saviors.

How about the middle ground? We are part of nature and like any other animal
we are trying to survive and make our life better. And it's not that other
animals are perfectly respectful of nature either. Remove predators and
herbivores will graze everything to the point of creating a wasteland and
dying of starvation.

Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize
their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only
conscious of what we are doing.

It's not that nature is not tough on us. Everything out there is trying to
kill us. Nature provides our sustaining, but it's also harsh, something we
don't seem to appreciate from our lives in safer-than-normal cities, with
always available food, heating, transportation, medicine.

I think the best perspective is aknowledging that we can have an adverse
impact on the environment, and try to address it, istead of hating our own
species as if it was a disease.

~~~
mikestew
_Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to
maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are
only conscious of what we are doing._

Someone fucking up the environment to garner an extra $100K or two on that
annual bonus isn't doing it for survival. Wolves aren't taking down entire
herds of deer they'll never eat so that they can say they have more rotting
deer meat than the other wolf packs. Domestic house cats are the only animals
that I can think of that demonstrate such behavior, with the modifier
"domestic" being emphasised; i. e., we made them like us. (Yeah, that last bit
is a stretch.)

I'm sure there exist other species that hoard, just because...well, we can't
be the only ones. But we're the ones with the mechanized means to do at
destructive scale.

~~~
kipchak
Squirrels and birds seem to have a selected desire to horde nuts in a similar
way to people hoarding extra resources for lean times. Cache Spacing or having
various hordes of food spaced around in hidden locations seems like a rough
analogy for having various Swiss bank accounts and the like. Ravens in
particular are clever and will deceive potential raiders by moving caches, and
raiders will try and appear disinterested.

As an aside cats are slightly odd for domestic animals as they're arguably
semi-domesticated versus dogs or farm animals. African Wildcats look and act a
lot like house cats in videos and are genetically similar, which I think is
part of what makes them fun as pets.

[https://www.livescience.com/53571-suspicious-ravens-
detect-t...](https://www.livescience.com/53571-suspicious-ravens-detect-
thieves.html)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260561/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4260561/)

~~~
gerbilly
Most squirrels are scatter hoarders: almost everyone's seen a squirrel bury a
nut in a lawn. They bury their nuts all over their territory and remember the
locations and retrieve them later.

What you might not know, is that in old growth oak forests, most trees were
accidentally planted by squirrels.

The acorns that they forgot and didn't retrieve, sprouted and grew into oak
trees.

So the analogy of a squirrel as ruthless acquisitor is not quite apt, because
their manner of caching their hoard actually helps to plant the next
generation of trees.

(Acorns do not sprout as well when the just fall to the ground.)

------
panpanna
> I am not qualified to answer that.

God I wish more people could admit that. Things would be much more sane then.
For one, anti-vaxers would be far fewer

Back to the subject, note that this was limited to some colonies and even
there it will not be able to grow to any significant size.

~~~
ip26
But what if I'm not qualified to admit that?

~~~
bigwavedave
Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to answer that.

------
Razengan
The planet is going to be fine. It will still be here a billion years from
now.

We will be gone just as the dinosaurs before us.

The universe cares about our fate just as much as we care about some random
star in the night sky, and frankly, if we're collectively going to remain as
self-defeating as we are, I don't care about our fate either.

I just hope I get to respawn somewhere else.

~~~
mikeatlas
No, in a few billion years, the planet will be engulfed by the enlarged, dying
sun. [https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-
giant.ht...](https://phys.org/news/2016-05-earth-survive-sun-red-giant.html)

~~~
Razengan
"This will last for another 4.5 – 5.5 billion years" right in TFA..and I did
mean A billion :)

------
sillydinosaur
Buy this book: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JHIDON6/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

~~~
Vaslo
Looks like typical far left “replace religion with climate science” and then
attack things like Capitalism while we’re at it.

------
usebunsby
Hmm. That's interesting.

