Coral Bleaching & The Reef: Walter Starck
Posted by jennifer, April 12th, 2006 - under Uncategorized.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change, Coral Reefs
There is a widespread belief, cultivated at least in part by Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg that global warming has resulted in more coral bleaching.
Given the interest in the subject, I have copied the following comment from Dr Walter Starck, from yesterday’s rather long and tedious thread:
“Bleaching events result from extended periods of calm weather during which mixing from wave action ceases and surface water becomes exceptionally warm. Such warming is especially marked in very shallow water such as on reef flats. At the same time the absence of waves also eliminates the wave driven currents that normally flush the reef top. Bleaching conditions require at least a week or more of calm weather to develop and this may happen every few years, only once in a century, or never, depending on geographic location. On the outer GBR it is uncommon due to ocean swell and currents even in calm weather. In the mid-shelf and inshore areas it is much more common due to the absence of swell and reduced currents.
Characteristic bleaching scars and isotope temperature records from coral cores commonly show evidence of past bleaching events going back thousands of years. There is no evidence for a recent increase in frequency and/or severity of bleaching events and nothing to link extended periods of calm winds with global warming.
In past geologic periods when global climate was warmer than at present corals enjoyed greater latitudinal distribution. The most likely effect of a warming climate on reefs would seem to be an expansion of their geographic distribution and there is some evidence this is already happening. In Florida recent growth of coral has occurred farther north than it did a few decades ago and in the same areas sub-fossil corals indicate previous such advances in the recent geologic past.
Hoegh-Guldberg has found an attractive GW niche in the well established guild of GBR doomscryers. It has provided notoriety, acclaim and generous research support. Whether his prophesies will stand up to the reality test remains to be seen. Based on the track record of science based doomscrying his odds don’t look too good. In fact sheep’s entrails and tea leaves seem to produce better results, probably because they at least incorporate some element of intuitive judgment.”
Last year Walter wrote a review titled ‘Threats to the Great Barrier Reef’, published by the IPA, it can be downloaded by clicking here.
This picture was taken at the Great Barrier Reef by Roger Steene:
While you all debate the merits of the science AGW, oceans, GBR etc there is another issue I want to get to the bottom of, its called turning off the alarms. Who authorized this process and why?
A previous comment “I became accustomed to managers everywhere blaming their instruments many years ago” should have included witnessing people switching of alarms when there was confusion over events.
Loud ringing tones still annoy folk in their business and relaxation, ask anyone standing beside a strangers phone when it goes off. But of course, it’s not your communication each time there is an alarm, is it? Silencing alarmists is quite a natural human reaction for many of us.
Ian “Fix that instrument” was more familiar. Over time I devised a number of simple tests, the first was ask the nearest operator for an opinion, the second was get another yard stick. When all three agreed we had a useful measurement.
Ian, the master of cherry picking, discusses only a very narrow subset of points to suit his line of debate that bleaching/degradation warnings are exaggerated. Found guilty of excessive unwarranted optimism. He ignores the contributing factors that have been raised above that affect the corals, he ignores the potential for these factors to work together to cause lasting bleaching in ways unprecedented in our understanding of historical records, and he ignores the mentions of this complexity in the papers he discusses.
* Not all corals are alike and not all reefs are alike yet the GBR is being compared to other reefs. Do the heat tolerant corals include many soft corals?
* How much diversity in the GBR is expected to endure a combination of direct and indirect human impacts and climate change? How will this impact the important life-support functions of coral reefs?
*It’s not a simple question of average or evenly distributed or gradual increase in water temperatures but it’s generalisations of average temperatures that Ian keeps blindly debating. It’s location location location of the epicentre of abnormally high temperatures, the duration and the frequency. It’s also other potentially related factors such as abnormal currents, storm damage, runoff, diseases.
* Coral reefs are unaffected by argumentative logic. Unfortunately they can’t be convinced with well-referenced writing not to bleach permanently.
I’d like to see Dr Starcks’ explanation of the stark death events which have just occurred in the carribean. Just a natural occurrence?
Excellent comment on turning off alarms hammerbambamboy, it’s all clear now.
Ian Castles is known to be an important ally of the IPA and what we’ve witnessed lately is that he’s not just concerned with the working process of the IPCC and good science as he says, but he’s keen to argue any line against AGW and against any negative effects expected from climate change. Good science is increasingly rare these days, eh? We should prepare a museum for it. Ian’s agenda is clear: silence alarms and tell people that their instruments are broken.
Looking at trends is an art form, ask any lady.
I reckon finding useful parallels for complex events is another art. I wondered about the limits of measuring reef response to Ph change and reckoned the first problem was probe sensitivity. That is what I used to work on decades ago with a Beckman type potentiometers as the Ph meter in a variety of solutions.
With constant migration of microbes across the reference junction (Kcl) I found it was nearly impossible to measure neutral Ph conditions in any event, on the bench and in the process. Acid etching hardly ever improved that probe. More modern solid state ion detectors may well have overcome this problem though. But don’t ever consult a sales brochure on their erformance. .01 Ph indeed! and in whose lab?
Why not use disolved 02 as another yardstick?
However given marine organism are far more sensitive to say dissolved chlorine than we are, let’s agree the sensitivity depends on the organism rather than the dose. Also we can ask a silly question, how much acid in solution does it take to scrub clean the face of a new brick wall? How sensitive is our potential GBR limestone? Are we going to dissolve the reef from the topside, inside or the underside in our soup?
More likely it will be crushed to death by the hammerings from the water. My bet is the brick wall tells us as much as the Ph meter in some UNI lab if you believe in doing the science before the event.
Something we can say from the practice, a low Ph solution is a good brew when it comes to fermenting, hardening cellulose fibers and separating the elements from a crushed mineral matrix.
Climate science has a lot of catching up yet in regards to natural reef engineering.
So seawater – pH about 8.5. The slightly alkaline pH of seawater is due to the natural buffering from the carbonate and bicarbonate dissolved in the water.
Surely you’d be testing your electrode against reference solutions? And presumably only used for seawater (alkaline) application?
Incidentally some aquarists use injected CO2 to control their pH in both marine and freshwater applications every day. And regulated by a solenoid valve on the CO2 bottle controlled by a pH meter. CO2 does work ! My experience was that calibration monthly found little drift in the meter, but your mileage may vary.
Phil, First of all let me remind you of just what the IPCC experts said in Chapter 2 of the WGI Contribution to the Third Assessment Report:
‘Mann et al. (1998) reconstructed global patterns of annual surface temperature several centuries back in time. They calibrated a combined terrestrial (tree ring, ice core and historical documentary indicator) and marine (coral) multi-proxy climate network against dominant patterns of 20th century global surface temperature. Averaging the reconstructed temperature patterns over the far more data-rich Northern Hemisphere half of the global domain, they estimated the Northern Hemisphere mean temperature back to AD 1400, a reconstruction which had significant skill in independent cross-validation tests. Self-consistent estimates were also made of the uncertainties. This work has now been extended back to AD 1000 (Figure 2.20, based on Mann et al., 1999). The uncertainties (the shaded region in Figure 2.20) expand considerably in earlier centuries because of the sparse network of proxy data. Taking into account these substantial uncertainties, Mann et al. (1999) concluded that the 1990s were likely to have been the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, of the past millennium for at least the Northern Hemisphere.’
The chapter was the product of 2 Coordinating Lead Authors, 8 Lead Authors including Michael Mann and Jean Jouzel and over 140 Contributing Authors including both of Mann’s co-authors (Bradley and Hughes), Australians David Karoly and Kevin Hennessy, Keith Briffa and Hans von Storch.
The MBH reconstruction, charted as the ‘hockey stick’, attained iconic status in the IPCC Third Assessment Report. The Panel fell for it hook, line and sinker. Until Steven McIntyre started asking questions of Michael Mann in 2003. In co-authorship with Ross McKitrick, McIntyre has ‘shown conclusively, in peer-reviewed journals, that [the] results lack statistical significance, depend on an improper application of Principal Component Analysis, and lack robustness because of their dependence on flawed bristlecone pine data. None of these points has been overturned’ (Pers. Comm, Ross McKitrick to David Henderson).
It is difficult to believe that any public or private sector organisation within a national jurisdiction could make such monumental blunders as did the IPCC in the TAR, and get away with it.
But, to their shame, many mainstream scientists won’t admit the errors even now. Barrie Pittock, in the Supplementary Notes and References to his recent book ‘Climate Change: Turning Up the Heat’, says that ‘Mann and co-authors are the recognised experts in this field, and thus best qualified to make the expert judgments on data quality and representativeness needed.’
As I’ve already noted, Keith Briffa is a lead author of AR4, and Jean Jouzel, a lead author of the ‘hockey stick’ chapter of the TAR, is the review editor of the relevant chapter of AR4.
‘Lambert got McInytre and McKitrick on a radians/degrees conversion blue’? Well actually he got you, Phil. The blue was made by M&M, but they were McKitrick and MICHAELS, not McIntyre.
Steve McIntyre had nothing to do with it. So far McIntyre found the most extraordinary number of serious errors by the multi-proxy scientists, but I don’t think he’s made any significant errors himself.
As for McKitrick, he acknowledged his mistake immediately it was pointed out. It was a minor glitch compared with the howlers he and McIntyre have identified in the work of the hockey team.
Incidentally there were two economists among the 20 Canadian signatories of the recent open letter to Canada’s PM. One of them (McKitrick) is the co-author of papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The other (van Kooten) has a Degree with Distinction in geophysics as well as his qualifications in economics. I’d be interested to know how many leading climate scientists have peer-reviewed papers in economics journals, or honours degrees in economics.
Sorry more like 8.2 trending to 8.1
Oh Ian do rave on. McIntyre by now is so shrill that he could tell us anything. He’s so buried in the contrarian side that he can’t see daylight and he has surrounded himself with all the other nonsense of the contrarian side as well. I don’t see that the Hockey Stick has been conceded at all and all the howlers are because McIntyre says they’re howlers. It’s all just very esoteric mathematics that the average person has no hope of understanding. There’s been claim and counter-claim. Let’s spend hours getting all the papers from each side and line them all up.
ClimateAudit isn’t discursive – it’s just attack attack attack. The fact that McIntyre was into Osborn & Briffa 24 hours after publication makes his case laughable in my opinion (or he’s a genius!).
You’d get an Oscar Ian for your cries of “shame shame shame”. “It is difficult to believe that any public or private sector organisation within a national jurisdiction could make such monumental blunders ” – I’m rolling on the floor laughing – every day the paper brings more nonsense. It’s called Canberra !
Don’t get too precious !
At some point Ian you have to move on. But of course the IPA wouldn’t want this would it?
So trucked over to ClimateAudit after some absence.
Page 1
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=626
Uh-huh yea – oh really .. .. mmmmm. A brief perusal. Stopped browsing did the dishes at that point. Says it all to me !
Bambi would like to see Dr Starck’s explanation of the stark death events which have just occurred in the Caribbean. These events have presumably occurred in the ’25% of reefs globally [which] have been estimated to be heavily impacted’ which Walter Starck referred to above.
He said that ‘Whether this situation will improve or grow worse in the future is unclear. There is evidence in both directions.’
Neither he nor I has said or implied that corals can’t bleach permanently.
Phil; whats your interest in CA? It’s just another ho hum blog, unauthorised bleating lot.
Did any of them actually do anything Phil?
BTW seems you have the edge in our seawater Ph debate. Mine was all about slops!
Ian; its time you conceeded, we know precious little about reefs from sitting on a stool in Canberra.
Ian should admit to the possibility of severe degradation of the GBR
Phil raves on Hockey Stick. Snore – grizzle.
More maths errors asserted.
http://timlambert.org/category/science/mckitrick/
Read the comments including Wag The Dog
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/hockey-stick-is-broken.html
Amman and Wahl 2006 are in press.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/WahlAmmann_ClimChange2006.html
Anyone any wiser?
I’ve already agreed with the three Australian researchers whose paper Phil cited above that the fundamental research question that remains to be answered is, ‘Can organisms and ecosystems accommodate, acclimatise to or adapt to rising temperatures faster than ocean temperatures may rise?’
I also agree with the researchers that ‘the response of corals, coral reefs and other significant reef organs to climate variability will be complex.’
I do not believe that these research findings support CSIRO’s unqualified assertion, stated as a matter of certainty, that an increase of 1-2 deg. C over an unspecified period into the future, would mean that ’58-81% of the GBR is bleached every year.’
This argues for Walter Starck’s presciption for
‘Open, objective, rational, evidence-based analysis.’
I agree with bambam that, considering the size and importance of the GBR, we are scratching for both LOCAL science and scientists. But I find it encouraging that the authors of the McNeil et al papers recently published in Geophysical Research Letters come from three different Australian research institutions.
I for one don’t want to see research of this calibre picked off by ‘any bunch of would be experts in the media’ – or even by the expert at another institution whose position in 1999 was ‘that corals have no defences against factors bringing about bleaching.’ (I don’t know what Prof. H-G’s present stance is, but I’m not impressed with his statements in press releases over the past few months).