Here's a different one from 2014.
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Last year, marine biologist Peter Mumby took a dive into the Rangiroa lagoon, in French Polynesia. What he saw shocked him so much he thought he might be lost.
He’d expected to be surrounded by death, by a reef of dying coral whose skeletons were slowly crumbling into the sea. Instead, majestic, olive-green Porites corals, the size of large hippos, carpeted the sea floor, providing a playground for parrotfishes and the occasional shark that weaved between the cauliflower-shaped giants.
“I was absolutely astonished and delighted,” says Mumby, a professor at the Marine Spatial Ecology Lab of the University of Queensland, Australia.
He had good reason to be. In 1998, a heatwave, which raised ocean temperatures, had caused corals worldwide to go a deathly white - a process called bleaching - and die.
When Mumby had visited Tivaru on the Rangiroa lagoon six months later, he’d found a vast majority of the region’s prolific Porites coral, normally the hardiest of coral species, had followed suit. Based on the known growing rates for the species, Mumby predicted it would take the Porites nearly 100 years to recover, not 15.
“Our projections were completely wrong,” he says. “Sometimes it is really nice to be proven wrong as a scientist, and this was a perfect example of that.”
Mumby’s discovery marks a high point spot in the scientific community’s research into, and gloomy prognosis for, coral reefs around the world.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140916 ... m-the-deadAnd here's a current one from Watt's:
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In my essay, The Coral Bleaching Debate: Is Bleaching the Legacy of a Marvelous Adaptation Mechanism or A Prelude to Extirpation? I presented evidence from a synthesis of the most recent peer reviewed science that demonstrated coral reefs can be very resilient and the gloom and doom claim of climate alarmist Hoegh-Guldberg that “as much as 95% [of the world’s coral] may be in danger of being lost by mid-century.” is most likely biased fear mongering.
The literature review suggested coral should be very resilient to climate change because: 1) Coral had previoously adapted to warmer ocean waters than they now experience in the present and survived more frequent El Ninos over the past 6000 years. 2) Storms render the greatest mortality but coral quickly recover via “re-sheeting” also known as the Phoenix effect. 3) Coral adapt rapidly to climate change by shifting and shuffling their symbionts, acquiring new symbionts better adapted to the new conditions. 4) Much like trees and shrubs devastated by a fire, where new growth from protected buds can relatively quickly restore the forest; likewise coral can rebound from “cryptic polyps”.
While the Australian reported a balanced article comparing Hoegh-Guldberg’s gloom and doom to my more optimistic interpretations, the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Media Watch decided despite all the evidence for a more optimistic outlook, such an interpretation needed to be attacked. To protect Hoegh-Guldberg’s more catastrophic illusions, they dismissed my analyses, NOT with evidence, but via a “shoot the messenger” tactic. (Media Watch’s tactics were demolished here.) But now, as before, researchers are re-visiting what they thought were previously “dead reefs”, and they continue to find coral reefs are indeed highly resilient.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/18/ ... esilience/