The Starck Truth about The Great Barrier Reef
Posted by Paul, May 9th, 2008 - under Uncategorized.
Tags: Coral Reefs
Walter Starck has an excellent 4 page rebuttal of a greenhouse doom and gloom article by Charlie Vernon over at On Line Opinion. Vernon’s article entitled, ‘The plight of the Great Barrier Reef:‘ claims that by 2050 the Great Barrier Reef will be unrecognisable: “Bacterial slime, largely devoid of life, will be everywhere.”
Dr J.E.N. (Charlie) Veron is Former Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and an author based in Townsville Queensland.
Walter Starck’s response is entitled, ‘The Great Barrier Reef and the prophets of doom:’ “Even the more extreme model projections only depict tropical oceanic warming still well within the limits that thriving reefs tolerate.” Dr Walter Starck has a PhD in marine science including post graduate training and professional experience in fisheries biology. He is the editor and publisher of Golden Dolphin, a quarterly publication on CD focusing on diving, underwater photography and the ocean world.
As I understand things, the last interglacial was much warmer than today’s. How did the the great barrier reef survive that? Or for that matter, the last glaciation period and the loss of 400 feet of sea level it caused — The reef would have been high and dry wouldn’t it?
Man always thinks the way things are when he was born is the way things always were and will always be. Can’t be much more wrong than that.
Glaciers never go away, they just go back to get more rocks.
The Barrier Reef is still there? I thought the Crown of Thorns ate it decades ago. Bob Carter wrote an extremely well well considered article about it’s “demise” a few years back.
Funny, I thought it was supposed to be all covered in silt from cane farms. Ooops, sorry, that was before anyone realised that cane land is only ploughed every 3 or 4 years as part of the “ratoon” system, and only then in the dry season. And then there was that little issue of what a superb silt trap is produced when flood water has to slow down to pass through 30km of tall, dense, vigorously growing, grasslike vegetation on a flood plain.
The operative word is “flood plain”, that riverine landform produced by continual DEPOSITION of sediments. But as far as the planet spivs were concerned, even hard evidence of beneficial effect can be flogged as some sort of threat to the gullible.
Well the sediment is from overcleared overgrazed rangelands not cane and the nutrients more from cane. And as we all know Burdekin sediment rates on inner reef are 5-10X pre-European.
Agriculture and pastoralism have no issues ever according to the industry apologists. It’s all just 100% perfect.
Bill-tb has a point. Those who would deny climate change are the ones truly in denial.
Walter says; “Australia’s annual carbon dioxide emissions are about 1.5 per cent of the global total and barely equal to China’s increase in six months. Estimates of natural uptake in our land and EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) area are greater than our emissions. As a nation we should be accumulating surplus carbon credits.”
Just to be clear, Walter means anthropogenically produced CO2. I wonder why I have never heard that simple fact on the many hundreds of hours devoted to the topic of AGW on Radio National and ABC news? You would think that a national broadcaster who had the best interests of the nation it serves at heart might run with that little fact?
Even if all 20 something million of us were to die tomorrow of a plague, atmospheric CO2 concentrations would still rise this year by 98.5% the rate of last year or more.
Once global cooling, whatever its cause, puts the chill on the warmistas, the purported acidification of the oceans will become the next big FUD campaign.
Walter, your skill set will be increasingly called upon to refute such demagoguery.
Correction Creep, a couple of sampling points near the mouth of one of our largest river systems shows an increase in siltation. The other 2000km of inner reef, and all the outer reef, are doing fine, especially the 800km north of Cairns and the 400km between Yeppoon and Bowen.
And this claim of 5 to 10 times pre-european sediment levels is pure bollocks. For a start there have been a number of years, especially in the 1940s when the Burdekin didn’t even flow. So clearly, there could not have been any sediment deposition by a river that is not flowing.
At very worst, there might have been a few years in which sediment levels were higher than the pre-settlement mean but that would also have been the case in the pre-settlement record as well.
In any case the NASA Aqua project shows that the sea temperatures have been cooling in recent years (even with the “corrected” data).
Alarmist Creep said, “And as we all we all know Burdekin sediment rates on inner reef are 5-10X pre-European.”
I assume the reference is to the widely cited study by McCulloch et al:
McCulloch, M., Fallon, S., Wyndham, T., Hendy, E., Lough, J. and Barnes, D. 2003 Coral record of increased
sediment flux to the inner Great Barrier Reef since European settlement. Nature 421, 727-730.
This study used Ba/Ca ratio in coral cores as a proxy for suspended sediment from 1755 to 1997. They found a step increase in 1870 which they attributed to introduction of cattle into the Burdekin at that time. However, other studies have found Ba/Ca ratios to be influenced by various factors and difficult to interpret. In addition to the introduction of cattle in the Burdekin, 1870 was also the end of a 70 year long dry period when there were few major floods. It is further difficult to understand why the 50,000 cattle at that time caused such a marked jump in Ba/Ca ratios; but, the 1,000,000 head there today plus large agricultural areas haven’t resulted in any significant further increase.
We do not in fact “…all know Burdekin sediment rates on inner reef are 5-10X pre-European.” It simply suits some of us to believe it.
They were obviously “Manbearcows” Walter. As part of their evolution into Al Gore’s manbearpigs, these 50,000 cows were prone to uproot vegetation and wallow in mudpools, the contents of which were then easily flushed down stream. It may not make sense to you and me, but after bonging away half an ounce of hooch at a GBRMPA “workshop”, it all falls into place.
You’d have to be desperate to defend Burdekin land managememt (ask Burrows). About what you’d expect from industry apologists, resource exploiters, and denialists.
It’s called no grass. Too many yaks. Urea and molasses. And epicentre of the known El Nino universe.
I guess one could table the 1000s of photos, surveys, satellite imagery but they’d be dismissed too. Then there’s the sediment flume work comparing defence reserve areas vs grazing. Bombs are much better than Cattle. Of course then there’s the elemental analysis of sources of sediment in the Tully catchment – is sugar – but why digress.
Three big Burdekin changes (1) dam (2) drier years since 1980s (3) the first big pulse was the A horizon going to Fiji.
Suppose I’d better send the full paper to Motty for his delectation.
Now I didn’t say what effect it was having on the reef long term. And I’m not calling for the end of agriculture or pastoralism in the Burdekin either. But why waste topsoil, grass productivity and crop fertiliser. Doesn’t make sense.
And indeed locals have recognised the problem and are working at it.
Remember we’re on your side.
What really irks me about the Greens is their attitude of wanting two camps,believers and deniers.
Most logical,sane people are considering all the possibilities and are rightly sceptical until the hard core scientific evidence is made available.The Greens just want to shunt us all into their camp via a collective guilt trip based on scant science at best!
The Greens are doing their cause more harm than good,because when they do actually have the substance and scientific proof,no one will listen.
Remain sceptical but believe the traditional tried and tested scientific methods.
Finding holes in Jesus’ hands and blood dripping from them,using the scientific method,is still not proof.
“What really irks me about the Greens is their attitude of wanting two camps,believers and deniers.” – Arjay
Huh? That is something soley attributable to the greens?? Pffftt!
Travis you statement was intended to disredit the logic that followed.Yes,this is not solely a Greens syndrome,but they have perfected the art.
“Travis you statement was intended to disredit the logic that followed.Yes,this is not solely a Greens syndrome,but they have perfected the art.”
The IPCC and “The Greens” have nothing to do with each other.
“Man always thinks the way things are when he was born is the way things always were and will always be. Can’t be much more wrong than that.”
That is why there is a scientific method, to remove such subjective biases.
one small point SJT, good science only comes after an event