"That’s it for corals.
"The IPCC have gone full apocalyptic: “Coral reefs would decline by 70 to 90 per cent with warming of 1.5°C…” And this catastrophic prophesy will unfold sometime around 2040. (See the graph).
"The IPCC are practically holding the Great Barrier Reef hostage. Things are so dire, the Financial Review has just declared that the next election is the Great Barrier Reef election...
"This news will come as a shock to corals on the Great Barrier Reef which are obliviously living across a range of 2,000 km and a span of five degrees Celsius from 27 to 32°C. But ... what would a dumb coral know – possibly something after 200 million years of climate change, most of which was hotter.
"Corals survived the rock that killed the dinosaurs. They survived Toba, the super volcano that left a crater 100km long. Corals survived a 125m sea level rise at the end of the last ice age. And they survived the ice age — and the fifteen before it. They also survived the super cyclones that have been hitting the coast of Queensland for the last 5,000 years and there is no sign that storms are getting worse....Who knows what handy genes corals carry after 200 million years of climate change?"
~ Jo Nova, from her post 'IPCC Coral-apocalypse: 243,000 km² of Great Barrier Reef corals to die in only 20 years'
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Thursday 11 October 2018
QotD: "So that's it for corals, so dire, the Financial Review has just declared that the next election is the Great Barrier Reef election. This news will come as a shock to corals on the Great Barrier Reef which are obliviously living across a range of 2,000 km and a span of five degrees Celsius from 27 to 32°C"
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Something we should bear in mind: Corals are the reef-builders now, but this is neither a necessary nor even a common state of affairs in Earth's history. Large reefs have been built by nearly every phylum throughout Earth's history. One of the things that marks the end of Cretaceous, for example, is the loss of certain bivalve mollusk reefs. I have seen Jurassic age sponge reefs in person, reefs that are quite extensive. Bryozoans have made reefs as well. The idea that coral reefs are somehow special is due only to the fact that they are the major reef builders now, not any principle of ecology. In fact, we are seeing a replacement: barnacle are becoming increasingly dominant reef-builders, as they can attach to the hulls of ships. A geoengineering solution to reef loss is to develop ships that work with, instead of against, barnacles.
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