Looking through press stories from recent years, it is clear that 90% of corals die every year. My estimate from reading the news is that at least 450% of all corals have died during the last five years.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
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We all have to die sometime!
Steve,
Your math skills need touching up . If 90% of corals die every year, that ALWAYS still leaves 10% no matter how many there were at the beginning of the year. (at least until you get below 10 coral organism anyway)
I assume you will be posting an underwater photo from St. Croix taken in 1870 showing coral colonies and challenge anyone to provide a picture from today showing the coral in worse shape now than then.
No, because the total amount of coral hasn’t changed much, so we always start at the same point every year.
You might want to read up on “sarcasm” and thinking the whole problem through.
Steve,
it constantly amazes me that you argue about things where you are so obviously wrong.
In case you have forgotten your post read .”My estimate from reading the news is that at least 450% of all corals have died during the last five years.”
I was correcting THAT math mistake. Ands I learn more and more about sarcasm the more I am on this blog.
And being a scuba diver over the last 20 years. I can pretty much confirm that in almost every area (except maybe bali,) where I have dived over a period of time there has been a marked degradation of coral reefs.
that is of course anecdotal, and certainly some of the problem is from various direct human disturbances, such asdevelopment and suffocation from silt.
So when are you going to post your pictures showing that the reels are actually just as healthy now as at any time in the past?
You are just incredibly slow.
Steve,
are you CAPABLE of actually responding to comments from me, or just content free insults that have no bearing on what I write?
This is actually something I know a bit about, and the math is of a sufficiently low complexity that I can with confidence make sarcastic comments accurately.
So show me ANY , not even peer reviewed, evidence of coral reefs just doing fabulously in the last decade. Show me any research to back up your statement that “coral hasn’t changed much, so we always start at the same point every year.”
Psst.- I will give you a hint, there IS a difference between bleaching and dying.
Llet me make it really simple for you. You just don’t get it.
Do you understand what SARCASM is?
I REVEL in sarcasm.
So Steve where are those pictures?
Huh? Come on? PRETTY please.
And yes SUYTS you and Sunset… are also eligible for this one too. just show me pics or research that indicates coral reefs are actually in better shape now than 10 years ago.
Tony, I’ve never asserted the corals were doing fine. I can, with a fair amount of certainty, say that we don’t lose 90% of the coral world wide annually. We don’t even lose that much per decade.
Now, let me posit this to you. What if, instead of all the hand waving and hand wringing, our scientists actually dedicated some energy, money and effort into finding out what is really going on in the world instead of blaming all of the world’s ills on an imperceptible rise in temps cause by a 0.0001 rise in atmospheric CO2. I’ve posted the list here several times, and it isn’t anywhere close to being a complete list of all the ills (real and imagined) blamed on GW. Can you imagine what could be accomplished if the people actually put 1/2 the energy into finding real causes and real solutions to real problems other than this Quixotic quest we seem hell bent to go on?
SUYTS,
And I have never asserted that all the ills attributed to global warming are accurate.
that is quite some list! I agree just making wild claims is not helping anything.
What I base my concerns on are what is in the peer reviewed literature. and you seem convinced that it is almost all of that is wrong.
CO2 has increased by close to 30% in the last 60 years or so. So I am not sure what your .0001 refers to. And of course most of the predictions of dire effects covering a huge range of issues refer to what might happen in the rest of this century or farther in the future based on a much higher concentration of CO2.
I myself am a strong believer in resilience and adaptability. Coral reefs have been around for a very long time and have certainly gone through pretty extreme changes. Polar bears too, and frogs, and all sorts of species that are on your list.
But I also believe that there are tipping points where changes in relatively small factors can completely change a system in major ways. Certainly we know that is the case with the earth’s climate.
I do not claim to know what that point is in our current situation or even if temps will continue increasing globally because of CO2 to reach that point sometime in the next 100 or so years.
Some consider corals to be one of the”canaries in the coal mine”.
I personally have witnessed severe degradation in almost every place I have scuba dived. I have no reason to doubt the myriad of reports I have read on coral bleaching and the association with increased water temperatures. I haven’t read any reports from scientists that assert a 90% death of corals every year. I am sure it seems like that, but the reality is that there probably is something major going on with corals due to increasing temps. As well as overdevelopment, and other causes. If temps do not rise much more in the next hundred years, corals will likely survive in some form around the globe in spite of the other destructive human caused degradation. If temps do rise 2 or 3 or 4°C during this time period, I think it is not unreasonable to believe that very few corals will survive and that that will cause a major disruption in an important ecosystem with important unknowable consequences.
TonyD:
Sport diving along with commercial diving for harvest is a leading factor in the destruction of the worlds coral. It was found that the ECO tourists were harming the environments they were claiming they wanted to save by overwhelming the region and over taxing the environment with their presence. Wherever I walk through my forest I destroy plants on the ground so I have paths I follow to minimize my effect on my forest. and vehicle travel is restricted to established driving paths. The same thing happens in the oceans with a growing interest in scuba diving more environment destruction happens. I am certain you are aware of the conditions of the coral reefs but probably are not aware of the detrimental results of your hobby.
I am advising you to not attempt to blame every one else for what you might have caused!
Mike,
you are quite correct about some eco-tourism being destructive. I have seen it many many times, and the quality of diving instruction is in many places atrocious and even where it isn’t many recreational divers don’t give a crap. Although this apparently contradicts you previous statement saying that it is island inhabitants that are to blame.
I appreciate you trying to make me feel guilty for my destructive behavior. Unfortunately I was trained by some VERY strict divers in Jamaica. That initial training was an order of magnitude harder than the subsequent advanced trainings I received. They would rip me a new one if I touched a coral or even waved water too close to them with my flippers. the oil from your fingers can kill a polyp, or so they told me. As I said coral are finicky. The biologists at the research station in Bermuda were also extremely carful about coral as they were involved in transplanting experiments to see if corals could be saved from runoff by being relocated. A fools errand in my view but noble nonetheless.
I daresay if 90% of divers I have seen were as careful as I am, there would be significantly less damage to corals from diving.
that said after 25 years, I have on occasion made mistakes and also been on boats that used anchors in coral reefs that were responsible for some disturbance or death.
But at least we both agree that one needs to be careful and am glad that you take the stewardship of your land.
Tony, I think the problem you’re running into is that you’ve put too much faith in the supposed experts. You seem to be an intelligent, well read, person. Yet, you defer your judgments to peoples opinions that may not have your experience or knowledge or ability to reason.
As you probably already know, when referring to SST’s of both the Atlantic and Pacific, one must consider a couple of well-known oscillating events; The PDO and AMO.
Let’s look at a couple of graphical representations. Typically I don’t use wiki, but NOAA actually links to their graph, so I assume it reflects NOAA’s opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg and then http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/ for both the Atlantic and Pacific, respectively.
What can we learn from these graphs? One thing is, the corals have survived as large of temps swings in the past, for both oceans. I find the word “unprecedented” is over and misused when talking about climatology. In both oceans, we see that it has been both warmer and cooler than in the last 20 years.
I’m glad you asked about my 0.0001 number.
Atmospheric CO2 is typically expressed in parts per million. Today, we’re told atmospheric CO2 is ~380 ppm, up from somewhere around 280 ppm. That makes an approximate increase of 100 ppm(somewhere around your 30%). So let’s express this literally. 100 ppm = 100/1,000,000 = 1/10000 = 0.0001.
You’re correct, some do consider the corals to be “canaries”, although I can’t really see how or why they’ve come to such a conclusion. They’ve no historical precedent to base such an opinion.
There may or may not be “tipping points”, but in relation to such feared “tipping points” being expressed lately, it has been surmised that atmospheric CO2 has been much more than it is today in the distant past. Closer to today’s time frame, we’ve been give a great amount of anecdotal evidence that the Arctic has had much less ice than today.(Farms in Greenland and the like) and yet no tipping point was achieved then. In fact, we went directly into a LIA right after such occurrences.
The 90% number came directly from the story. “The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.”
Tony, I’m not sure what’s going on with the corals. But, I do know a couple of things about assessing the health of biological mechanisms in peril. When one hears hoof beats, don’t look for Zebras.
Can we get back to the sarcasm now?
SUYTS,
no need to return to sarcasm, your explanation is thoroughly consistent.
My one quibble is the quote from the article. it is a quote of someone saying there have been recent die offs of 90% in some areas of the indian ocean and pacific. That is just a general statement and could be accurate or not. It could easily be referring to .5% of the coral in those areas having a 90% die off.
in the context of the article that is not alarmist if true, though one could take it as such.
Living coral is usually very colorful, the colors being the living organisms that produce the coral formations. The formations are extremely abrasive and can slice your skin easily, but is also brittle and fairly easily fractured.
The snow-white coral beaches are produced by the continual crumbling of the dead coral, crushed upon themselves by wave action.
Many toothed fish literally eat the coral, and their excrement also contributes to the snow-white beaches. No joke!
In spite of this, the coral just keeps growing, year after year…
parrot fish especially eat coral. That is why they are called parrot fish because their beaks are designed to break through the coral skeleton.You can actually sometimes hear them chomping as a steady background noise. as well as eating coral they also keep algae and sea weed from overwhelming corals, and form much of the sand that creates special habitats for part of the diversity of the coral reef systems. Interestingly the overfishing of parrot fish might be more damaging to the reefs than the parrot fish themselves.
So, any follow-ups on this story? It came out in 2005
There are 90% coral die off stories every year now.
Huh, it is kinda dated, but its nice to see the hyperbole hasn’t slowed any.
“On Sunday, Hernandez-Delgado found a colony of 800-year-old star coral — more than 13 feet high — that had just died in the waters off Puerto Rico.”
So how do you know the instant a coral dies?
Other gems from the report….
“The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.”
So we’re what? Down to 1% of what we had in 2000? I gotta call bs on that one. (sorry Steve, I’d try that sarcasm thingy but it doesn’t seem to track very well with some here.)
“If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won’t survive in their current state.”(biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London.)
Well, that was 4 years ago, so I’m pretty sure we don’t have any left. Maybe 1% was too optimistic. Oh well, live and learn.
“For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.”
Uhm, no really, they said that. It got hot in Panama in the spring and early summer.
“What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time, Eakin said.”
Oh, Geez……. Yeh, probably would be the same as that.
“The big problem for coral is the question of whether they can adapt sufficiently quickly to cope with climate change,” Crabbe said. “I think the evidence we have at the moment is: No, they can’t.”
I had no idea that coral was that sensitive to a 0.2 degree rise in see surface temps. How did they ever manage before? Oh yeh, I forgot, the climate never changed before.
lol, Steve that was a beaut!
Tony getting silly:
“And yes SUYTS you and Sunset… are also eligible for this one too. just show me pics or research that indicates coral reefs are actually in better shape now than 10 years ago.”
I did not claim anything.
This is all I wrote:
“Do you understand what SARCASM is?”
LOL
Sunset…
I have to get a macro for this sentence.
please read what I write and not what you want it to think.
I did not claim you claimed anything. I was just giving you permission to be in on the fun!
I will get in on the fun. Coral is one of the oldest types of organisms that still live on this planet. That would mean they survived temperatures FAR higher than today and temperatures FAR lower than today. They survived changes in temperature faster than what is happening or has happened in the last hundred years.
TonyD:
Take your Fantasies and Myths and try to spread them somewhere else.
The greatest threat to coral reefs is the inhabitants of the islands where the corals are growing.
Mike,
you are absolutely right about corals surviving far higher and far lower temps than today.
However there is a difference between surviving and flourishing. I am not so sure about them surviving temperature changes faster than what is happening now or what will happen int he next 100 years. If mean temps increase by 3° in 130 years, I think it quite possible that the worlds coral reefs systems could be dramatically reduced. As you state temperatures are regional and a 3° mean temp increase would surely result in local water temps going far higher on occasion. That would not mean corals would become extinct, but their range could be severely limited in a fairly short period of time.
Certainly degradation caused by direct human interaction has damaged significant amounts of corals. I doubt there are many corals still alive in the area I dove in Singapore 15 years ago as the ones there were covered with silt.
Corals propagate prolifically. If the environment in one region becomes unsuitable, they move.
TonyD:
You seem to be unaware of the preferred temperature range for corals. It seems the cold does more damage to corals than a bit of warming. Like all other living things I would think that coral habitats are limited by cold temperatures rather than warm temperatures.
There is a world of evidence that we are experiencing some of the mildest climate changes that have been experienced throughout the history of the globe. The only time the temperatures were steadier were when the temperatures were MUCH higher than those the globe now experiences.
Steve,
that they do, but there are limits.
I worked with some biologists in Bermuda who were doing research on coral and actually collected water samples from around the island for some of their tests.
Corals are finicky fascinating creatures. Sturdy and fragile at the same time.
the reports of bleaching are real, and the resurgence of corals in areas where conditions resume being favorable is quite dramatic. But under repeated stress they do die.
As I said, I can’t imagine that corals will become extinct, but their range could be severely restricted, and that could cause unknown consequences. I will tell you that places where I have dived that used to have living coral, and then didn’t, seemed a lot less diverse that living coral areas.
But since you don’t think temps will rise much more due to CO2 then there shouldn’t be too much to worry about, and the stories about bleaching and dying corals will go away eventually.
Sixty years ago we blew up a 15 megaton bomb at Bikini Island and now the corals there are growing prolifically. Water temperatures were several hundred thousand degrees that day.
Steve,
I am just guessing, but I bet that the temperatures plummeted by hundreds of thousands of degrees shortly after the explosions.
I am also pretty sure that the corals in the vicinity of the hundreds of thousands of degrees suffered at least some bleaching if they did not die outright
They all died, and they have come back prolifically.
They ALL died? Every single coral polyp in the vicinity of the atoll? Now spending government money to find THAT out was surely a waste of tax payer money.
Has anyone checked to see whether temps returned to levels far below thermonuclear range? Because if corals are flourishing there now and temps are even in the low thousands, that TOTALLY beats the crap out of this idea that corals are sensitive to temperature. I will gladly admit defeat.
Hmm, what is it we are arguing about now? I forget where I said that corals weren’t resilient.
Do you have any concept of what a 15 megaton bomb is?
I would say I have a concept. I doubt that I can really imagine it.
So you are absolutely sure that a 15 megaton bomb would increase water temps enough around the entire 22osq mile atoll sufficiently to kill every coral? I don’t know.
that’s a lot of bomb, but it is also a lot of water.
Following the end of World War II, Bikini came under the control of the United States as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands until the independence of the Marshall Islands in 1986.
Operation Crossroads Event Baker explosion
Between 1946 and 1958, twenty-three nuclear devices were detonated at Bikini Atoll, beginning with the Operation Crossroads series in the summer of 1946. Preceding the nuclear tests, the indigenous population was relocated to Rongerik Atoll, though during the Castle Bravo detonation in particular some members of the population were exposed to nuclear fallout (see Project 4.1 for a discussion of the health effects). For examination of the fallout, several sounding rockets of the types Loki and Asp were launched at 11°35?N 165°20?E? / ?11.583°N 165.333°E? / 11.583; 165.333.
The March 1, 1954 detonation codenamed Castle Bravo, was the first test of a practical hydrogen bomb. The largest nuclear explosion ever set off by the United States, it was much more powerful than predicted, and created widespread radioactive contamination.[5][6][7]
From here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll
The waters in the immediate area was turned to flash steam each time.
Yet Corals are still there and growing mere decades later.
LOL
There were actually “Between 1946 and 1958, twenty-three nuclear devices were detonated at Bikini Atoll,…”
From here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll
Yet Corals are still there.
LOL
Cold stress will kill off more coral due to extremes with regional cooling that has been going on for some time. That regional cooling has been dismissed by claims of Global warming. Global warming does not mean the entire globe is warming. It just means that statistics can be produced to show an overall warming!
Properly adjusted temperature records that account for imagined discrepancies show more warming than cooling.
The bleaching is probably because of cooler water temperatures.
Mike,
that is a testable assertion.
I do not doubt that cold temps beyond a certain range cause stress that leads to bleaching. And I have read some reports of this. Do you have any documentation showing that the majority of recent bleaching has been caused by cooler water temps.? Almost every report I have seen associates bleaching directly with higher water temps.
TonyD:
The problem is with their testing methods and the depth of testing. There are and have been “Warm” pools of water that travel throughout the oceans and there is something called a Gulf Stream. There is not enough accurate evidence to determine what the temperatures were at the time of bleaching and ocean surface temperature records are little better than a joke. Of course corals do not grow on the surface but a respectable distance below.
MIKE,
Again that is a testable assertion. It does seem like a very odd co-incidence though, that temp readings taken by scientists, show high water temps, and that corals bleach at the same time, but what you say is possible.
Tony Duncan says:
December 1, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Almost every report I have seen associates bleaching directly with higher water temps.
that is because it is funded ‘global warming’ research.
let’s see, we are on the cold side of a cold interglacial…the world has previously been much warmer, and the corals did just fine. they apparently made it though the last few interglacials and the first part of the holocene.
The really funny part is that during EL-NINO phases,some waters in those areas can warm up more than ONE degree C in a couple months or so.It has also been known to cool down that much as well and even go from one extreme to another,in consecutive phase change.A normal irregular occurrence that has been going on for a long time.
SST:
A long time being in the Millions of years! 😉
TonyD getting silly with his feeble rationalizing reply to Steve’s point:
“I am just guessing, but I bet that the temperatures plummeted by hundreds of thousands of degrees shortly after the explosions.
I am also pretty sure that the corals in the vicinity of the hundreds of thousands of degrees suffered at least some bleaching if they did not die outright.”
LOL,
now you make it seem possible that at least some of the corals in the area of the blast can tolerate a mere few hundred thousand degree temperature INCREASE in a matter of seconds and still survive.
But they die easily when the water temperatures in area warms up (over several weeks) to a blistering 2 degrees C or so for a short time.
See the problem in what you suggest?
Sunset…
I am not sure how high the temperatures go from nuclear blasts over the entire ocean area that has any corals in it by atolls. Water absorbs heat pretty effectively.
Also I do not know the tolerance of coral to abrupt temp changes over a very short period of time at different distances from the blast sites. I guess it is possible that every single coral organism in the vicinity of the atoll died. Not sure how one would know that. I doubt that you or Steve or Mike do either.
But let’s say that the corals on the farthest areas from any specific nuclear blast is 10 miles away. What would a 15 megaton explosion do to water temps at that distance? Interesting question.
SUYTS
I look forward to your unmoderated post. Steve has never changed any of mine.
It was the largest nuclear explosion in history. The heat, radiation and shock wave killed every living thing within several miles instantly. No form of life would have even the remotest hope of survival.
even 10 miles away under 80 feet of water? People survived Hiroshima a few hundred yards away on land, and the bomb you are talking about is only 200 times more powerful.
This was more than 1,000 times larger than Hiroshima. It is the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs going off at once.
Now TonyD is trying to pin me with something I never wrote:
“Sunset…
I am not sure how high the temperatures go from nuclear blasts over the entire ocean area that has any corals in it by atolls. Water absorbs heat pretty effectively.”
I never write “entire ocean area”.
Your sloppy writing perhaps or just more of your weak reply skill you are quickly gaining fame with?
Liquid Water has a limited range to remain as a liquid in.From 0 degrees C to 100 degrees C.
The Nuclear bomb was likely to be over 300,000 degrees C at ground zero! That means any water in the vicinity where all the Corals would be (at the surface) would go to STEAM.
Temperature of a Nuclear explosion
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/SimonFung.shtml
Steve,
You maybe right. I just multiplied 7.5 KiloTon by 200 to get 15 megaton. and I totally screwed up the math
I just read that it was actually 12-15 kt, so you are absolutely right.
See how easy it is to admit a mistake.
now that I have shamefully admitted that, are you sure that a 15 megaton bomb will destroy every coral even 10 miles away under 80 feet of water? I do not know.
What is more shocking to the coral, an H-bomb, or a 2-degree rise in temps over several years?
The Polar bears migrating south are killing the coral.
Sunset.
I didn’t quote you, and you never wrote what you contend I said you wrote, and I never indicated that that was what you wrote.
All I am doing is questioning whether a 15 megaton bomb will kill every coral that is around the atoll. the atoll is 220 sq miles and in my experience corals grow in depths of more than 80 feet. So would the temperature of the ocean be high enough after a 15 megaton nuclear explosion to kill every coral.
I say again I don’t know. it is a lot of bomb and a lot of ocean.
the question is one of volume and distance. The bomb blasts didn’t kill every living thing a hundred miles away. of that I am sure we all agree, so what distance and at what depth did the bomb kill all the coral? if it is more than 220 Sq miles and to a depth of a hundred feet, I will gladly admit I was wrong in considering the possibility that some coral survived.
And your link says millions of degrees, not hundreds of thousands as Steve wrote. I bet he WILL admit to that mistake!
Fifty years after atomic bombs rocked Bikini Atoll and pulverized its coral reef, the lagoon again boasts a flourishing coral community.
Scientists diving in the two-kilometer-wide Bravo Crater, created in 1954 by a blast 1,000 times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, found a thriving habitat with treelike corals 30 centimeters (one foot) thick.
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0526-dance_bikini.html
Steve, are you moderating now? I’ve a rather sober and lengthy post just waiting to be read by Tony.
Steve please look in the Spam box.Two of my postings have not showed up.
The first one,probably too many links in it.But the second one is a shortened form with just one link.
It is to show that Bikini Atoll has been hit with 23 Nuclear explosions spanning from 1946 to 1958.
From Steve’s link:
“Richards compared the Bravo bomb’s impact to 50 hurricanes striking all at once. The water flash-boiled as temperatures soared to 55,000 degrees Celsius (100,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and chunks of coral hit military boats in the lagoon as 30-meter (100 foot) waves sped outward. The blast stirred up millions of tons of sand that blocked sunlight and smothered the remaining corals when it resettled on the ocean floor.”
and,
“The Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific Ocean, hosted 23 U.S. nuclear tests in the 1940s and ’50s. The current study, published in the March issue of Marine Pollution Bulletin, is the first to examine coral diversity at Bikini since 1954, before the Bravo bomb vaporized three islands and left the 73-meter (240 feet) deep crater.”
Sorry Steve,
In the link you posted I didn’t see any calculations showing that every coral died in those blasts. though it did say that certain local species that used to be there are missing. Ones that only live near the shore.
It is an excellent article about the resilience of coral when left undisturbed.
Scientists diving in the *two-kilometer-wide Bravo Crater* created in 1954
You are embarrassing yourself.
The article make it clear that the corals recovery in the area was way beyond their expectations.
Quoting:
“The scientists found that about 70 percent of the atoll’s previous coral species have resettled the lagoon. “It’s made a brilliant recovery at Bikini Atoll,” said biologist Zoe Richards, a graduate student at the James Cook University in Australia and one of the study’s authors. However, the team found no signs of 28 delicate corals that used to live at Bikini.
When she slid into the water to collect specimens in 2002, Richards wasn’t sure what she would find—a moonscape, perhaps, or grotesque mutated creatures. While she did observe some barren sites, others were populated by masses of healthy-looking corals in yellow, brown, and red. She brought the specimens back to Australia for identification, a lengthy process, and compared the current species with the 1954 survey. ”
They expected worse and were surprised at the speed of recovery from the beatings it got a few decades ago.
Sunset….
here I go and lavish praise on you, and then you go and post a comment like this.
use the find command and type in “resilience”. See what commenter used that word the most on this post.
Sunsett…
THANK you, someone FINALLY posted something relevant to my comment.
“The blast stirred up millions of tons of sand that blocked sunlight and smothered the REMAINING corals when it resettled on the ocean floor.”
that is an assertion that specifically seems to say that ALL the coral died. Now, is it correct? DID ALL the coral around the atoll die? I am still not sure, but it does bring up another factor that I hadn’t considered.
Bravo! Sunset….
The Bravo Crater, not the entire Pacific Ocean
did I make a pun by accident?
I am funnier than I thought.
thanks for pointing that out Steve!
Hey guys. Exciting news.
I went and actually READ the paper that all this is based on. (I highly recommend this activity.)
Guess what? They say that all the coral WASN”T killed during the nuclear tests. In fact they based the corals resilience (their word) on a baseline from a study done in 1954 after a number of bombs had already been exploded (though not the biggest one).
“In the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands, 23 nuclear
tests with a total yield of 76.3 megatons (TNT equivalent)
were conducted across seven test sites located either on
the reef, on the sea, in the air and underwater between
1946 and 1958.”
“Here, we compare biodiversity of the modern coral assemblage at Bikini Atoll to that of the coral assemblage at Bikini Atoll prior to testing (Wells, 1954).”
The modern Bikini Atoll community may have been
replenished by self-seeding from brooded larvae from SURVIVING
adults (e.g. in genera Pocillopora, Stylophora, Seriatopora
and Isopora), SURVIVAL OF FRAGMENTS of branching
corals, and/or migration of new propagules from neighbouring
atolls. The patchy nature of impacts may have mitigated
the overall effect of disturbance at Bikini Atoll, with
some PATCHES SURVIVING after each impact. Corals living on
DEEP EXPOSED REEFS on Bikini Atoll may also have escaped
some of the direct impacts, and thus have played an integral
role in MITIGATING THE OVERALL EFFECT of the disturbance
event.”
You know you are right. It is better to investigate things yourself and not just take someones absolute pronouncements as truth that should not be questioned.
I guess that means the coral survived a 10C warming effect over a short period of time?
I have seen photos of the aftermath of above ground testing in Nevada. The ground tended to get a bit warm!
The resiliency of nature is, indeed, an exciting discovery! I would caution you, though, if you continue to read/think for yourself, you may start extrapolating some meaning from these revelations and the next thing you know, you may become, (gasp), someone who is skeptical of things he hears and reads. Especially when it is attached to hyperbole and sweeping statements.
Welcome friend!
SUYTS,
I have never NOT thought and read for myself, much to the joy and consternation of my parents and teachers.
I have made it much of my life’s work studying self deception and the various different factors that go into reinforcing and undermining it.
I do not blindly accept ideas based on authority, but I do not blindly reject ideas from science because they do not conform to my ideology. I am careful to check the actual information and explanations from various sides of an argument and make up my own mind always open to new information or frames of reference that might cause me to change. I also do not unilaterally reject information because it comes from a source that others have determined is discredited.
Your previous comments do not support what you have just claimed.
Mike,
Point out where that is the case.
if you are referring to this post. I disputed Steve’s sweeping statement that ALL life was killed at Bikini Atol because of the largest hydrogen bomb explosion. After a lot of obfuscation someone eventually posted a quote that implied that was true, and a source. I went to that source and read it, and pointed out here that the authors clearly state that some coral did survive.
I also clearly stated that I believe coral and other life forms to be very resilient.
Initially I sarcastically disputed Steve’s sarcastic mathematical derision of anecdotal loss of corals. In the process I was repeatedly characterized as being irrational and stupid.
Both you and SUYTS made assertions that I acknowledged as being tenable positions to take. Whereas no-one took my position as being rational, when if fact, at least according to the one source that was used, my position was not only tenable but accurate.
In reading my above previous post, these things seem to support what I claimed.
TonyD:
As a supporter of the ACC doctrine and a defender of the cause you place your self outside of individual thought and logical thinking. ACC is based on believing the output of those promoting the agenda even when the output is not supported by real life events as seen in historical records.
Whether coral survived the blasts or repopulated from other regions only shows the true resiliency of coral on a global basis in spite of claims to the contrary which is the point Steven was making with this thread.
The fact that ACC is not the primary cause of disruption of coral colonies is a side issue.
This entire thread ended up being a discussion of your misunderstanding of the original post rather than the issue of coral resiliency.
Mike,
Those are all assertions, and assumptions about me. You state that because I am a supporter of ACC it therefore logically follows that I am incapable of independent thought and logical thinking. That is a testable assertion.
One aspect that you are not considering is that I do not have the technical knowledge to understand all of the complex issues involved. So I have to base my opinions of the opinions of others that DO understand the technical issues and can explain then to me in less technical ways
I have repeatedly stated that some of your assertions are tenable as I have with Steve and others on this blog, when I am actually presented with real substantive information. I do not deny it outright, unless I have contrary information.
Steve posts way more information than I have the time to check on. Some of it is exaggeration or out of context, or irrelevant, but some of it is quite relevant and to the point and if true would substantially alter ACC or show it to be an very faulty model.
There are a few telling things however. When Steve or others post peer reviewed papers and I read them, I almost always find that the reasoning, methodology and conclusions are very reasonable, and that often one issue has been pulled out of context for the post in order to support some point that appears to undermine ACC.
This article on Corals is a case in point.
As you rightly point out, my hijacking this post around the issue of whether all corals died or not is totally irrelevant to the point of Steve’s post. You writing that I totally misunderstood it is indicative of your, and other people’s constant attempts to portray those that disagree as being either blind or stupid. Since I am neither that severely damages your credibility with me, though I still consider actual information you supply.
As I have said I have studied self deception rather deeply. The fact that no one on those post ever wrote that it was pointless whether the corals were all killed and repopulated or whether some survived is also indicative of an ideological attachment so strong that it is considered imperative never to admit a mistake. I have encountered this response repeatedly on this site. That is why I pursue those lines, to see if my conjecture that it is imperative NOT to be wrong about anything is a major motivating force in these posts and comments.
And then when I actually read the coral article, the authors explain that the reason their expectations were low, was because they had based them on their experience with other coral reels which suffer disturbance by human activity, and Bikini Atoll is devoid of all such disturbance, and has been since the tests.
this is totally in keeping with my understanding, especially from scientists at the Biological Research Station in Bermuda.
Corals as well as many life forms are able to adjust to certain particular stresses and survive, but multiple stresses over extended periods of time are problematic.
You contend that scientists don’t really have a clue about water temps and therefore any correlation with coral bleaching is either sloppy, coincidental, or fraudulent.
I have met and worked with coral specialists and the ones I know are absolutely not those things. I also know climate scientists who are also not as you and others portray them here. Telling me how stupid or gullible or greedy these scientists are undermines your credibility, not theirs.
When I have checked out data that is presented as undermining ACC it often has some element that renders it either irrelevant, wrong, or inconclusive. the inconclusive ones are the interesting ones. So things like adjustments of satellites telemetry out of line with actual tidal gauges is worth exploring, and there are many other issues that have been brought up here that are worth checking. I certainly don’t think climate scientists are infallible.
Also on this blog and others I see statements by climate scientists taken out of context or twisted in such a way as to sound damning, yet when I look at the actual source, it is nothing like it is being presented.
The most obvious case is Jones saying “There has been no warming”, when in fact he said that warming was only 93% statistically significant. The climate-gate emails and the subsequent investigations as well as the IAC report have been totally distorted to present what can only be called propaganda. Again I have read many of the emails and looked at the reports, and the denier interpretations is so out of line with mine, that I give no credibility to assertions of motivation from any denier site without checking myself.
The inability to admit a mistake even about totally irrelevant issues is no small thing. I consider it highly unlikely that you are so knowledgeable about all the fields that you express a high degree of confidence about that I will take you word over that of trained scientists in the field.
One valuable thing that Steve does do with this blog is point out media reports that do not understand climate science at all and print inaccurate and sometimes ridiculous statements that are alarmist and should be corrected.
Yet Steve does nothing to correct ANY statements on this blog that are clearly wrong or exaggerations, and won’t admit it when he does so. Anyone who TRIES to do so is attacked and ridiculed even when they are pointing out something that is obviously wrong.
Even so I still read the blog and look for information that is pertinent. And I continue posting because it is interesting to note what elements of my comments are responded to and which are not. Especially when I make specific very clear points.