We’re publishing a guest post by journalist Chris Morrison about one of the great global warming myths – that coral around the world is rapidly disappearing thanks to man made climate change. In fact, it’s in rude good health.
Corals occupy an exalted place in the climate tablets of doom. These photogenic little critters find themselves on the science obit pages on an almost daily basis. In fact, their demise has been grossly exaggerated for political purposes. There may not be too much certitude in climate projections, but at least we can hang our hat on one scientific prediction – the little fellows will be around for another 500 million years.
Their demise of course is projected from the bleaching that occurs when they expel symbiotic algae in reaction to sudden changes in water temperature. The changes occur due to natural weather oscillations, often around the El Nino event. These occur on a regular basis and once localised conditions have been stabilised, the coral usually recovers. Tropical coral grows in temperatures between 24C and 32C and sometimes grows quicker in warmer waters. Cold water coral is also abundant and grows in latitudes up to 65 degrees above and below the equator, often in deep water and at temperatures as low as 4C. The one event all this coral is unlikely to be affected by is climate warming, or cooling, which occurs over a much longer period.
The mythology around Corals represent one of the more obvious misinterpretations of data that seek to suggest local and temporary weather-related events are connected to long term changes in the climate. Needless to say, there is not a scintilla of scientific proof to make the connection in the case of coral. Professor Peter Ridd, an authority on the Great Barrier Reef who has spent 40 years observing it, noted recently that the reef was in “robust health”. Coral growth rates have, if anything, “increased over the last 100 years”. Fired from his post in 2018 at James Cook University in Queensland for “uncollegial” activities, i.e., questioning global warming dogma, Professor Ridd went on to note that “somehow, our science organisations have convinced the world that the reef is on its last leg”. The BBC rarely needs much convincing of coral catastrophe: “Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals since 1995 due to warmer seas driven by climate change”, it reported in October 2020.
Of course, corals need environmental protection. It is not a good idea to drench them in untreated sewage, smash up their habitat with reckless fishing, dump litter on them or douse them with toxic chemicals. But these are mundane planet-keeping measures, nothing like as exciting as ‘save the world’ political posturing in aid of the net zero project.
Corals are the second most successful animal on the planet after their close cnidarian cousin the jellyfish. They have been around for 500 million years (reef building ones for 400 million) having survived five major extinction events including the Permian-Triassic Event, which wiped out 96% of marine life. They have survived C02 levels as high as 2,240 parts per million (ppm) in the Ordovician period, to the more modest 400 ppm we know today. During their time on Earth they have survived massive temperature changes such as the Permian period when global temperatures rose by around 10C and the Ordovician period when they dropped by 8C. And of course they are happy to live almost anywhere. Even in Scotland, where the Darwin Mound remained untouched by the recent massive expulsion of greenhouse gases by the COP26 private jets.
Corals, like polar bears (numbers rising nicely), are just too valuable a propaganda tool for the climate change and net zero green zealots to relinquish. Too pretty. It was surely not a coincidence that in the run up to COP26, one of Prince William’s £1 million Earthshot gifts was handed out to a small Bahamian company called Coral Vita that says it grows coral to replant in the ocean. How did coral survive so long just left to its own evolutionary devises? But thanks to this company’s good offices, you can now “sponsor” or “gift” a coral, gaining “discount codes for our Coral Vita shop”.
The second danger to corals, it is suggested, is posed by higher levels of CO2 dissolved in the ocean. This is often said to make the ocean more acidic, although the correct scientific term is less alkaline. The ‘acid’ will then attack the calcium carbonate skeletons of the corals, it is said.
It is possible to plot average temperatures and atmospheric levels of CO2 over the last 600 million years since complex life began to evolve. Temperatures vary greatly, as do CO2 levels, although the latter have trended downwards to our current low point. It would take a much larger brain than your correspondent possesses to make any connection between the two, although it may not be beyond the ability of a number of self-identifying IPCC scientists. Compared to the geological record, current CO2 levels are very low – some scientists even suggest dangerously low – and temperatures could do with being a little warmer. Corals, as has been observed, have put up with huge variations in temperatures and CO2 levels in the past.
In 2015 the noted physicists Dr. Roger Cohen and Professor William Happer of Princeton wrote a short note looking at ocean ph. They found that doubling atmospheric CO2 from 400 to 800 ppm only decreases the ph of ocean water from about 8.2 to 7.9. They went on to note: “This is well within the day-night fluctuations that already occur because of photosynthesis by plankton and less than the ph decreases with depth that occur because of the biological pump and the dissolution of carbonate precipitates below the lysocline.”
The scientists noted that “scare stories about dissolving carbonate shells are nonsense”. Regarding their own paper, the authors concluded: “This minimalist discussion already shows how hard it is to scare informed people with ocean acidification, but, alas, many people are not informed.”
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I’m all for protecting our seas, but as the author himself intimates, there may be bigger fish to fry!
Coral can look after itself.
The real story here is the shameful way Peter Ridd was dealt with.
Full story on WUWT site. He lost his court case because the OZ ‘law’ decided that he should. Freedom lost that day.
Coral, science.
Makes me so angry this article (and encouraged!); The way that this set of privileged scumbags have exploited everyone’s love and concern for the natural world to advance their own empire building, thereby:
Ruining everyone’s mental health, especially children who now believe the world is basically fucked.
Subverting genuine environmental causes like deforestation and pollution and subsuming them into their own made up bullshit.
Capturing once noble charities and NGOs into their own confected crisis.
When we, ordinary people, have destroyed and made an example of these pathetic criminals and their families, it’s good to know we’ll still have coral reefs and polar bears to admire.
Well said.
Like convid, the climate crisis is a made up fiasco to scaremonger the sheeple and drum up revenue prospects for the so called “elite’s” businesses… The average person even if scientifically trained has no perspective of geological time.
Follow the money and all the bullshit makes sense.
At last a positive note on DS. Wonderful news but I guess it won’t be put on MSM..
It raises the question: How good is modern education? Is it just being exploited by some to encourage the belief in fake news about many things? Maybe we’re entering a phase within which we don’t trust so-called ‘experts’ much at all. Scepticism is healthy, after all.
Whenever there is aass hysteria about any subject you should instinctually criticise and study it.
You will often find the flaws very quickly.
Climate change is one such su ject.
Wee fact for you: the climate has always changed and always will.
Taxing you won’t change this fact.
”Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom” by Patrick Moore (one of the original founders of Greenpeace) is well worth reading. He debunks all this ridiculous scare-mongering, and he’s not happy with David Attenborough either!
Christopher Booker is worth a read too:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Scared_to_Death.html?id=fUhfAAAACAAJ
This is the calculation, using internationally recognised data, nothing fancy, no hidden agenda, just something we can all do by taking our socks and shoes off.
Assuming increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing the planet to warm:
Atmospheric CO2 levels in 1850 (beginning of the Industrial Revolution): ~280ppm (parts per million atmospheric content) (Vostock Ice Core).
Atmospheric CO2 level in 2021: ~410ppm. (Manua Loa).
410ppm minus 280ppm = 130ppm ÷ 171 years (2021 minus 1850) = 0.76ppm of which man is responsible for ~3% = ~0.02ppm.
That’s every human on the planet and every industrial process adding ~0.02ppm CO2 to the atmosphere per year on average. At that rate mankind’s CO2 contribution would take ~25,000 years to double which, the IPCC states, would cause around 2°C of temperature rise. That’s ~0.0001°C increase per year for ~25,000 years.
One hundred (100) generations from now (assuming ~25 years per generation) would experience warming of ~0.25°C more than we have today. ‘The children’ are not threatened!
Furthermore, the Manua Loa CO2 observatory (and others) can identify and illustrate Natures small seasonal variations in atmospheric CO2 but cannot distinguish between natural and manmade atmospheric CO2.
Hardly surprising. Mankind’s CO2 emissions are so inconsequential this ‘vital component’ of Global Warming can’t be illustrated on the regularly updated Manua Loa graph.
Mankind’s emissions are independent of seasonal variation and would reveal itself as a straight line, so should be obvious.
Not even the global fall in manmade CO2 over the early Covid-19 pandemic, estimated at ~14% (14% of ~0.02ppm CO2 = 0.0028ppm), registers anywhere on the Manua Loa data. Unsurprisingly.
In which case, the warming the planet has experienced is down to naturally occurring atmospheric CO2, all 97% of it.
That’s entirely ignoring the effect of the most powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas, water vapour which is ~96% of all greenhouse gases.
And if you’re interested, here’s the composition of some of the more prevalent gases in the atmosphere:
Nitrogen (N2) 78.0%
Oxygen (O2). 21.0%
Water vapour (H2O) 3.0%
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 0.095%
Aerosols 0.070%
Methane (CH4) 0.036%
CO2 – Natural 0.040%
CO2 – Man 0.001%