The following nonsense about the Barrier Reef was reported by our ABC yesterday:
A marine scientist says the Great Barrier Reef will be "boring and full of rubble" by the end of the century unless urgent action is taken to slow the rate of ocean acidification.
Scientists at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns on Tuesday focused on their biggest fear: what will happen if climate change continues at its current rate.
Janice Lough, from James Cook University, says marine life will suffer.
"There will be species of fish but probably not the ones that look so exotic and probably not necessarily the ones we like to eat," she said.
"It's going to be very boring out there."
University of Mexico researcher Roberto Iglesius Prieto says the cost of losing the reef cannot be calculated.
"Losing the beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, it would be a tragedy for humans," he said.
Dr Iglesius Prieto also praised the Federal Government's carbon tax and called for global action on climate change.
Pity the ABC didn’t report that a new study of coral reefs off the Pacific coast of Panama discovered just how resilient Reefs really are (paper's abstract below):
Cores of coral reef frameworks along an upwelling gradient in Panamá show that reef ecosystems in the tropical eastern Pacific collapsed for 2500 years, representing as much as 40% of their history, beginning about 4000 years ago. The principal cause of this millennial-scale hiatus in reef growth was increased variability of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and its coupling with the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The hiatus was a Pacific-wide phenomenon with an underlying climatology similar to probable scenarios for the next century. Global climate change is probably driving eastern Pacific reefs toward another regional collapse.
Blog site Resilient Earth goes on to say:
Ignoring for the moment the gratuitous last sentence (an obvious allusion to anthropogenic global warming) we should pause for a moment and consider what this means. The first point of interest is that nature, acting without human interference, has caused long periods of reef damage, lasting for extended periods. Aronson and his colleagues, including researchers from an array of institutions, believe that natural climate change was responsible for killing off the coral. Yet nowadays any reef that shows signs of ill health is automatically a victim of human activity. Also note, this was not some small, localized disaster either.
The second point is that this phenomenon was global, or at least “Pacific-wide,” which is near global enough. This period came a thousand years after the Holocene Climate Optimum, a period of global warming that scientists think may have led to ice free summers in the Arctic—something that now fills eco-alarmists, Hollywood airheads and media news manikins with dread. Here is more proof that climate is always changing.
Third and lastly, the reefs that had been so laid to waste have bounced back to abundant, glorious life. The standard line from the green lobby is that when the world's fragile reefs die they will never (ever!) recover. Humanity's failed stewardship of nature will be written in dead coral reefs and lifeless oceans. I guess that has been proven conclusively wrong.
So remember the next time some ecotard starts going on about the death of the ocean reefs—the reefs, like Earth itself, are more resilient than we know.
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