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Given hundreds of thousands of years, life finds a way. If you would happen to examine the paleo-sedimentary record, particularly reef history records, they are wonderful recorders of climate variability, because they are so sensitive. Scientists who actually know something about the subject use various corals, as well as other calcareous fauna, to define era, period, and epoch horizons. These are frequently (but not always) correlatable with other indicators, particularly sea level. Note that the appearance or disappearance of aragonite and calcite in deeper sediments is an indicator of what’s happening topside, atmospheric CO2-wise.
So it’s very plausible and well-known that reefs can be destroyed almost entirely and rebuilt by entirely new fauna. So — yes, the climate change we humans are creating could entirely destroy most of the current coral reef formations currently existing on this Earth. And were it possible for us to wait around to see what happens, in a few thousand years or so when our carbon pulse has been reabsorbed by the bio- and geosphere, new reefs with new coral species, including hardy survivors of our destruction, probably will regenerate coral reefs in the tropics.
But what we’re doing currently: climate change, pollution, overfishing — is dooming most current reef flora and fauna to a nasty end.
In case you want to know that, Goddard — now you know. This picture ain’t pretty. Congratulations for being featured on Climate Depot with this glad-handing rose-colored, totally nonscientific drivel.
It would be nice f you could provide evidence for why Coral survived a recent period of drastic cooling and warming called the Younger Dryas or even the transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene that we live in now. If coral was as fragile as you claim, It would not be here now!
What you are pushing is a poor attempt at a fairy tale but not science.
And the answer is: all of the above. Coral reefs are stressed just about worldwide, due to a compendium of causes. One of these stressors is water temperature: top plot of the link below shows what happened in 1998. There have been numerous studies observing coral bleaching under high temperature stress; corals also bleach if the temperature goes too low. If temperatures return to more normal, then the algal symbionts can recolonize.
Abrupt climate change and the dulling of spectacular coral reefs
Regarding the Younger Dryas; this must be a standard rejoinder. So I found it answered elsewhere:
More on the IPCC and the Younger Dryas event
The lovely answer given here addresses both ocean acidification and increasing temperature — and please pay attention, Mr. Goddard, you might want to read the citation.
Regarding the YD itself: “My comments on the Younger Dryas Event were as follows: (1) the Paleoclimate people tell us that there was a sudden change in temperature of about 5°C (2) based on the evidence from today, it was properly a catastrophic yet short lived event from which ecosystems and early human societies probably bounced back from (after 100 years or so), and (3) the precision of the paleoecology record is too blunt to see any impact. That is, any ecological event (mass mortality etc) that lasts for a period shorter than 500 years generally cannot be seen within the fossil record. So we will never know what happened etc.”
I have a further comment on this: It has to be shown that the Younger Dryas event caused water temperatures in tropical zones to have sufficient excursion to affect coral health. The Younger Dryas event, due to its nature as a cessation of deepwater formation, was primarily a cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, hence it is most dramatically observed in NH records, such as Greenland ice cores. That’s where the 5 degree C temperature drop gets quoted from. The tropics are somewhat isolated from high latitude excursions, which can be pretty large and barely nudge the tropics a tick mark. So if the YD didn’t substantially reduce tropical SSTs for its duration, when the YD ended and there was an abrupt warming, this warming may not have been manifested as a very large increased in tropical SSTs.
The current situation appears different, due to the observations of prolonged bleaching under warm events. It appears that the current coral temperature adaptation range is at its high end, and thus — yes, Mr. Goddard sir — a 0.7 C global warming (emphasis on the global) could indeed have a profound effect on stressed coral reef structures.
Regarding the CO2 increase: it’s 30% over pre-industrial levels. That’s not insignificant, much as you might want it to seem so.
Mexicans are concerned about this: Mexicans fear climate change threat to massive reef
It was globally warmer in the Mediaeval, Roman and Minoan warm periods, it has also been much warmer than today in various periods in history yet coral survived. Also CO2 levels were 11 times what they are today when coral first began to proliferate in the Ordovician.
The bottom line is coral has survived much worse than anything approaching today’s temperatures therefore there is no problem.
oh jeez, its one of those autophobes! And, Steve, WTG! Climate Depot. ahahahahhahaha
Oak, which is it? Are the reefs dying because of the 0.7 degree heat wave or all of the other evil things humans are doing to the reefs. You want to know what scientific drivel is? Making sweeping hyperbolic statements without using your God given ability to reason. As Steve asserted, its been much warmer than now, CO2 has been much higher than now. What lends you to believe that an increase of .0001 in atmospheric CO2 is effecting the corals at all?
Wrong.
There is zero evidence of significant Anthropogenic climate change. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
All the evidence supports the skeptics in that regard.
As far as coral goes, it was globally warmer in the Mediaeval, Roman and Minoan warm periods, it has also been much warmer than today in various periods in history yet coral survived. Also CO2 levels were 11 times what they are today when coral first began to proliferate in the Ordovician.
The bottom line is coral has survived much worse than anything approaching today’s temperatures therefore there is no problem.
1. It hasn’t warmed globally for 18 years despite rising CO2.
2. The Mediaeval, Roman and Minoan Warm Periods were as hot or hotter globally than today with much less CO2
3. The Ordovician Period involved an ice age with CO2 levels 11 times that of today.
4. No mid tropospheric hotspot disproves the warmists’ positive feedback hypothesis and proves the models wrong.
5. No sea level rise increase.
6. No sea temperature increase to account for the supposed ‘missing heat’ (ARGO buoy data) nor any explanation as to how heat would decide to jump into the ocean or violate the laws of thermodynamics and not warm the top layers on the way down.
7. Outgoing Longwave radiation increases with surface warming cooling the planet (ERBE satellite)
8. Low level cloud from water evaporation creates an albedo effect reflecting short wave radiation cooling the planet.
9. Arctic ice has recovered from the 2007 minimum somewhat and had much less ice almost 1000 years ago enabling the Vikings to easily navigate the Arctic, with much less CO2!
10. Antarctic sea ice is at record levels.
11. CO2 lags 800 years behind temperature rise in the climate record showing temperature drives CO2 not the other way round. (Vostok ice cores). The falling temperatures in these records accelerates much faster than the CO2 showing that CO2 is not a primary driver and has little effect on climate.
12. GCMs (Global Circulation Models) are consistently producing results at least 3 times that of the observed temperatures, showing the models have their climate sensitivity parameter drastically wrong. In other words there are zero to negative feedbacks in the climate system, not positive as the models assume.
13. CO2 heat absorption and emission is logarithmic which means that after a certain point an extra CO2 added absorbs less and less heat.
This being a legitimate concern,being overshadowed by his growing absurd fears of a tiny warming trend of 150 years.
Legitimate concern:
“In the 1980s and ’90s, although these starfish still reared their thorny heads from time to time, the principal threats had moved on — to sediment runoff, nutrients, overfishing, and general habitat destruction.”
To this silliness:
“bla,bla,bla….. Zzzzz”
He blathers on and on about coral bleaching as if that was a definitive evidence of global warming being the cause.
Is it a contagious disease circulating around the Universities when the virus named Global Warming enters their eyes,ears and nose? Too many scientists seems to suddenly abandon the scientific method and embrace a cult life behavior.When the phrase Global Warming is sensed.
Life’s pretty tough, it can pretty much do anything to survive. 90% of the biomass on earth actually is underground, we are really just the freaks
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/World-Vignettes/721808
‘Given hundreds of thousands of years’…..
Actually, they’ve had hundreds of millions of years, and all the adversities mentioned in Mr. Goddard’s article have long since been worked out in their evolution. If they could handle CO2 levels 7 times higher than now, temperatures far, Far above the .7 degrees change being experienced now… they are just going to Sneer at what we’re doing. It doesn’t even compare to such massive swings in climate.
They survived many asteroid and volcanic catastrophes. Coral will still be around when man is gone ….
I no longer have a link to the NY Times article I am referencing:
Back a few years ago, the NY Times ran a story about ocean acidification. The claim that coral was going to die was from experiments where carbonic acid was dumped into a tank with a simulated coral reef. Result: pH went down and the coral died.
Well, the experiment was redone. This time, CO2 was bubbled in to simulate the natural absorption that would happen in the real world. Results were very different. Algae reacted to the increased CO2 by having increased growth. The algae in turn produced by-products that the coral needed for health growth. Result: slightly lower pH but healthier coral with the higher CO2 concentration.
I found the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/science/earth/18acid.html?_r=3
In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, however, scientists led by M. Debora Iglesias-Rodríguez of the National Oceanography Center at the University of Southampton in England and Paul Halloran, a graduate student at the University of Oxford, report that they found the exact opposite. The algae grew bigger in the more acidic water.
Dr. Iglesias-Rodríguez said the conflicting findings probably arose from differences between how the experiments were conducted. In the earlier work, the researchers lowered the pH by directly adding acid to the water.
In the work reported in Science, the scientists added the acid indirectly by bubbling carbon dioxide into the water, which more closely mimicked the chemical reactions that are occurring in the oceans. As a consequence, in addition to the lowered pH, levels of carbon dioxide in the water also rose — speeding up the algae’s photosynthesis machinery — as did the levels of bicarbonate ions, the building material for the carbonate disks.
This is the new pet project of AGW. This is pretty simple. It’s nothing more than a solubility equation and understanding the relationship between pH and carbonate/bicarbonate alkalinity. The pH adjustment from additional CO2 absorption is very had for me (being a chemist) to buy, given the volumes we are talking about. When you break it down even further and try to attribute only the CO2 mankind is emitting, it becomes even more trivial. Also, I’ve always wondered how this can be a major problem, at least in warmer waters, where more CO2 is outgassed than absorbed. Perhaps I should study more on the issue, but I find it hard to believe.
I had the enjoyable opportunity to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef off Airlie Beach, AU in March. Coral was beautiful, more colorful than that on the MesoAmerican Reef off Belieze (in my opinion). The spot they took us to had an 80% living coral population, much higher than the 57% required to classify as a “healthy” reef!
We know that coral is very sensitive to sea level and think it is sensitive to pH. There are reefs throughout the world in places where the pH of the local waters varies by .1 to .3 from the norm. Has anyone compiled the relative health of these reefs against sea level and/or local pH? Seems that should be of first importance before claiming a slightly less basic ocean will kill reefs around the world. Beside, the oceans actually outgas CO2 when they warm. Shouldn’t that make them more basic, not less?
Bill
If you want to know what is truly devastating to the marine environment, just ask fishing guides in Florida about last winter’s cold snap. The marine creatures were not given the opportunity to “adapt”, unless you think fertizer is a form of adaptation.