http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/07/j-e-n-veron-coral-reefs-bleaching/
Never mind that corals evolved during the Cambrian with temperatures 10C higher and CO2 levels 20X higher. Romm apparently has not heard of the new concepts – migration and adaptation.
sheesh, ignorance
corals evolved when temps and CO2 were a whole lot higher.
You never hear a word about cold killing corals. Not bleaching, which is a perfectly normal thing for corals to do, but cold. Cold flat out kills them.
We had the biggest coral “kill” ever recorded on American reefs this year, because of the cold.
0.7 c WARMING?
Where I am, the temperature is +15C. If I look up into the sky and focus 40,000 ft above me, I will realise that at that level, temperature would be around minus 40C to minus 60C . If I were to travel the same distance horizontally, north or south, I would not even notice a change in temperature.
Where I live, we get temperature variations between 40 C and zero C within a year (maximum in summer during the day and minimum on a wintry night. A difference of 40C.
We even get 10 C variation on the same day.
But Romm is worried about 0.7 C over a century. I think he is more worried about the grants he is going to lose once the scam is over.
I don’t pay attention to a lot of this stuff, it makes me crazy.
Do any of you guys know what pH they are predicting for ocean acidification?
Here’s some ammo for you.
We grow corals in water with a pH from 7.2 – 8.0
I don’t think there’s enough CO2 to get the ocean down to pH 7.2.
The Waikiki aquarium uses well water to grow corals, their well water comes out somewhere between 7.4 and 7.8 just like ours does.
Tans has calculated a .1 to .3 drop in ocean pH if ALL economically available fossil fuels deposits are burned [see figure 5], so we go from approximately 8.5 – 8.3 to 8.2 – 8.1 sometime in the next 150 years or so. Meanwhile, diurnal, geographic and seasonal pH changes exceed this projection by a considerable degree, rofl. Potential oceanic acidification is a bad joke looking for the incredulous.
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/22_4/22-4_tans.pdf
Veron explains that “the science is clear: Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes.”
Surely Vernon is aware that earth’s climate has varied over millions of years without any help from mankind… varying temperatures… varying Co2 levels. Surely he understands that changes of such nature happen over millenia, not ‘within our children’s lifetimes’. He’s just being pathetically unrealistic!
And haven’t coral reefs been around way before humans appeared… and survived wide ranging climatic conditions? Why, then, does Vernon think that, this time round, coral reefs won’t survive? What’s so different now, considering that there is nothing unprecedented about earth’s climate?
While corals were present by the end of the Cambrian (~500 mya) they did not become the major builder of ocean reefs until some time in the Silurian (440-416 mya) or Early Devonian (416-359 mya). Ancient corals were all but wiped out by the Permo-Triassic Extinction (251 mya), making way for the development of modern corals during the Jurassic. You are correct in stating that corals have flourished under much warmer conditions and when CO2 levels have been much, much higher. On top of that, corals have been found in profusion in deep, cold water where they would remain mostly untouched by any projected warming. For more information see The Case For Doing Nothing About Global Warming.