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Analysis: A Third of Great Barrier Reef Coral Died in Catastrophic 2016 Heat Event

posted by takyon on Wednesday April 25 2018, @02:00PM   
from the going,-going,... dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Gazette Day reports:

In the year 2016, there was a heatwave that affected many parts of the world. The extreme temperatures were especially felt in and around the continent of Australia. As a result of the heatwave, the waters around the Great Barrier Reef warmed considerably. Scientists were worried that with the oceans already warming due to global climate change, the additional heat stress might cause considerable damage to the Great Barrier Reef.

After the heatwave subsided, a team of scientists conducted tests to find out how the heatwave damaged the reef. Extensive aerial surveys were conducted. These surveys concluded that a great deal of the reef had bleaching that had killed off many parts of the reef. [...] The surveys found that 90 percent of the corals in the reef suffered at least some type of bleaching. The worst damage was on the northernmost third of the reef. In this section, much of the damage was caused by the initial rise in temperature.

The other damage occurred later. The coral reefs depend on a symbiotic relationship with a certain type of algae. Over the course of a few months after the heating event, the algae separated from the reef causing additional reef death.

During the heating event in 2016, one-third of the coral reefs in the world were bleached and damaged in some way. The reefs do have the ability to come back from this [heat-induced damage] as long as the damaging events are not too frequent.

Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0041-2) (DX)

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Original Submission

• Re:Of course it's terrible Re:Of course it's terrible (Score: 2, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday April 25 2018, @07:11PM (3 children)

  by frojack (1554) on Wednesday April 25 2018, @07:11PM (#671793) Journal

  There are a bunch of stories like this in June through December of 2017.
  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-29/coral-regeneration-raises-hopes-for-great-barrier-reef-recovery/9001518 [abc.net.au]

  Then in January Nat Geo published this:
  https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/coral-bleaching-reefs-climate-change-el-nino-environment/ [nationalgeographic.com]

  From there on out, everybody plus dog has been jumping on the doom train.

  During this period there was no change in the direction or the actual measurement of sea temperatures, obviously - it all happening within 6-8 months.

  --
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• Re:Of course it's terrible Re:Of course it's terrible (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:10PM (1 child)

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday April 25 2018, @09:10PM (#671864) Homepage

  Indeed, the warming that set this change off started years ago. It just takes time to kick in and have its deadly effects. Sir David Attenborough has a quite compact summary of the changes to the GBR, for example, which his teams (actually independent university researchers, but with a synergistic TV budget) have been filming over a span of 4 years, in two of the episodes of Blue Planet II (first and last, IIRC). The stop-motion sequences, in particular the close-up ones, are quite frankly almost shocking. It's the Zed and Two Noughts of nature documentaries.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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  • Re:Of course it's terrible (Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday April 25 2018, @11:53PM

    by coolgopher (1157) on Wednesday April 25 2018, @11:53PM (#671952)

    As an Australian, let me reassure each and every one of you that our state & federal governments are doing absolutely everything they can _{to avoid doing anything about the issues the BGR is facing.}

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• Re:Of course it's terrible (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:01AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @06:01AM (#672042)

  Here's a quote from Professor Peter Ridd of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University

  Around the world, people have heard about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef: some 133,000 square miles of magnificent coral stretching for 1,400 miles off the northeast coast of Australia.

  The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging.

  Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true.

  And just for saying that – and calling into question the kind of published science that has led to the gloomy predictions – I have been served with a gag order by my university. I am now having to sue for my right to have an ordinary scientific opinion.

  My emails have been searched. I was not allowed even to speak to my wife about the issue. I have been harangued by lawyers. And now I’m fighting back to assert my right to academic freedom and bring attention to the crisis of scientific truth.

  The problems I am facing are part of a “replication crisis” that is sweeping through science and is now a serious topic in major science journals. In major scientific trials that attempt to reproduce the results of scientific observations and measurements, it seems that around 50 percent of recently published science is wrong, because the results can’t be replicated by others.

  And if observations and measurements can’t be replicated, it isn’t really science – it is still, at best, hypothesis, or even just opinion. This is not a controversial topic anymore – science, or at least the system of checking the science we are using, is failing us.

  The crisis started in biomedical areas, where pharmaceutical companies in the past decade found that up to 80 percent of university and institutional science results that they tested were wrong. It is now recognized that the problem is much more widespread than the biomedical sciences. And that is where I got into big trouble.

  I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.

  Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.

  These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.

  By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.

  The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.

  Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.

  The conflicting realities of the Great Barrier Reef point to a deeper problem. In science, consensus is not the same thing as truth. But consensus has come to play a controlling role in many areas of modern science. And if you go against the consensus you can suffer unpleasant consequences.

  The main system of science quality control is called peer review. Nowadays, it usually takes the form of a couple of anonymous reviewing scientists having a quick check over the work of a colleague in the field.

  Peer review is commonly understood as painstaking re-examination by highly qualified experts in academia that acts as a real check on mistaken work. It isn’t. In the real world, peer review is often cursory and not always even knowledgeable. It might take reviewers only a morning to do.

  Scientific results are rarely reanalyzed and experiments are not replicated. The types of checks that would be routine in private industry are just not done.

  Read the rest of the article in https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/08/peter-ridd-hits-back-at-jcu-james-cook-university-hard/ [wattsupwiththat.com]

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