[Newsbot]

Title: Giant Coral Reef in Protected Area Shows New Signs of Life
Category: Environmental
Posted By: N_Fiddledog
Date: 2016-08-18 13:12:46

[N_Fiddledog]

Looks to be blocked. Try this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/scien ... hange.html

[N_Fiddledog]

Here's a bit of it for a taste.

$1:

In 2003, researchers declared Coral Castles dead.

On the floor of a remote island lagoon halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the giant reef site had been devastated by unusually warm water. Its remains looked like a pile of drab dinner plates tossed into the sea. Research dives in 2009 and 2012 had shown little improvement in the coral colonies.

Then in 2015, a team of marine biologists was stunned and overjoyed to find Coral Castles, genus Acropora, once again teeming with life. But the rebound came with a big question: Could the enormous and presumably still fragile coral survive what would be the hottest year on record?

This month, the Massachusetts-based research team finished a new exploration of the reefs in the secluded Phoenix Islands, a tiny Pacific archipelago, and were thrilled by what they saw. When they splashed out of an inflatable dinghy to examine Coral Castles closely, they were greeted with a vista of bright greens and purples — unmistakable signs of life.

“Everything looked just magnificent,” said Jan Witting, the expedition’s chief scientist and a researcher at Sea Education Association, based in Woods Hole, Mass.

[N_Fiddledog]

Here's a different one from 2014.

$1:

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-dead

And here's a current one from Watt's:

$1:

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/

[BartSimpson]

In other news it hasn't snowed in the UK since 2009 and all of the glaciers in the Himalaya have melted.

[N_Fiddledog]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

In other news it hasn't snowed in the UK since 2009 and all of the glaciers in the Himalaya have melted.

Just in case people don't know what Bart's winking at, I believe the melting Himalayas was a prediction that turned out to be an IPCC blunder.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8387737.stm

Here's some info on the failed 'snowless UK' prediction by Dr. David Viner - Climate Research Unit of University of East Anglia.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,”

Top 5 failed ‘snow free’ and ‘ice free’ predictions

[BartSimpson]

Don't you miss the 1990's back when gloom and doom was gloomier and doomier? At least the climate alarmists have learned to stop making wild eyed predictions that will be debunked by reality in their own lifetimes.

[N_Fiddledog]

I was reading somewhere about the problem they have making their predictions.

If they predict too far away nobody cares. If they predict closer they're climate clowns, because the deadline hits and nothing has happened.

So usually what they do now is just reinvent the data to fit the lie and say "See!" or they point at weird weather and call it "climate disruption." Or they gather the children round the fire, put the flashlight up to their faces and talk about "tipping points."

So to speak.

[N_Fiddledog]

They'll be puffing themselves up about the Arctic melt soon. It was kind of melty this year.

They won't be telling you about the cyclone though.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/18/ ... a-ice-low/

[Strutz]

Thanks for posting this NF.

This was very interesting to read about. Nature certainly has its way of recovering from what seems like the end. There have probably been many cycles of this occurring well before scientists began keeping track of the reefs.

It's almost seems as though the coral goes into a hibernation state to protect itself then comes back when the conditions are right and adapts itself to whatever changes have occurred in its surroundings.

[Thanos]

I'm more impressed that they're able to heal and grow again after a period of severe stress than I am in bothering with any of the politics about it.

[N_Fiddledog]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

They'll be puffing themselves up about the Arctic melt soon. It was kind of melty this year.

They won't be telling you about the cyclone though.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/18/ ... a-ice-low/

Told ya so...

‘Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... CMP=twt_gu

BTW that one comes from the same idiots who got themselves stuck in Antarctic ice in an attempt to illustrate said ice was nothing but lie and an illusion perpetrated by "Big oil," or some such thing.

[herbie]

Awwrrrightee then! There's no problem, it's all bullshit.

I guess I can go shit in your swimming pool then.

[ShepherdsDog]

Olympics are over....no need to train for Rio now.

[N_Fiddledog]

Kind of 'Good news/Bad news.' First he tells me I have a pool. "Woo hoo! Wears my inflatable horsie!? "

Then he tells me he's going to shit in it.

Or did I miss something? Was there a point buried in there somewhere?