The Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs will be annihilated by global warming, even if the world's governments slash greenhouse gas emissions,
scientists say. And its also probably too late to save the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs from global warming.
Ummm...what warming?
11 comments:
More modelling madness.
They constructed a computer model that predicted increased acidification due to increased disolved CO2, resulting in a decrease in the main compound the corals use to build their structures (the name escapes me).
Now you could test this experimentally very easily. A high school student could do this as a science project. But these guys have a model so no need for real world data.
And that my friends is climate science in a nutshell.
We should call it Playstation science.
If you read the article Professor Bob Carter is given the honourific of 'Climate Change Skeptic' and not his real title unlike the others who all get 'Professor'. But then again most journalists wouldn't know a basic scientific fact if it hit them in the head.
Why do you think this hasn't been tested experimentally? The progression: use basic chemistry to predict an effect, develop a model to predict the effect on a large scale, calibrate the model with measurements and make predictions.
What else would you do?
Some reading:
Early Royal Society report
NY Times article
Science Daily article
National Center for Atmospheric Research report
Nature paper
What's the source of the data?
I don't doubt that it is representative of the real situation, but not providing good, solid references is exactly what the AGW crusaders are almost always guilty of.
Someone has done the experiment and found there is no effect on coral calcification from increased CO2.
http://www.blackwell-
synergy.com/links/doi/
10.1046/j.1365-
2486.2003.00678.x/abs/
(link split in 4 parts to stop blogger trashing it)
I'd like to know where the data is from too. However, a 12-month running average is not a good way of determining the trend in warming as the maximum temperature is what causes bleaching. If you look at the later years, you will see a bigger swing between maximum and minimum. If you look at the trend for maxima, you will see they are increasing.
Forgive me for asking, but when did corals and other shelled creatures evolve and what were the carbon dioxide levels and corresponding pH values then?
Corals evolved about 200 millions years ago. CO2 levels have been up 10 times current levels in the period since.
BTW, the claim (in the so called study) is acidification will kill the corals.
The news report linked by Jonathan unfortunately obfuscates that claim by referring to increasing temperatures as the cause.
The study I linked to above experimentally falsified (the model derived) acidification claim.
Temperature Link
and Phil, to post links do it like the below, but replace the ( and ) with < and >
(a href="http://www.website.com) Click here for website(/a)
A chart from 1982 isnt going to say much of anything, even if that data is correct. If you're going to try to prove that it hasn't been getting warmer then you have to go back farther than that. ANY graph will flatten out if you focus in on it. The whole point to peple argueing that global warming, CO2 emissions, and acidity are increaseing is that humans are the ones doing it or atleast making it worse. This would start in the industrial age when began needing fossil fuels, etc. So going back to 1982 isn't going to show ANYTHING because we already started using fossil fuels and we already are in/past the industrial age. The key is to show the coral reef patterns before we gave in our influence, before the industrial age, to after/during our effects, until current times.
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