There has been a lot of reporting lately on the latest bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef with some, as usual, excellent reporting from Chris Mooney and his team from the Washington Post, however much of the analysis relies on the dubious timelines being followed from the IPCC modeling which in a time of abrupt climate change are continually undershooting on the speed of the unraveling.
“The study found that in the past 27 years, there have been 372 events that subjected corals to stress due to unusually warm ocean temperatures. It further found that in 75 percent of these cases, while temperatures rose above the hottest temperatures normally found during the hottest month of the year, they at first “remained below the bleaching threshold,” which is defined as 2 degrees C higher than those hottest temperatures.”
These corals have been stressed to varying degrees almost continually over the last quarter of a century. As a result of that stress they are less resilient when the next inevitable attack occurs.
This latest setback has been amplified by the recent record breaking El Nino that many pundits, with the mandatory dose of hopium project will abate to at least a neutral state if not morphing into La Nina and the Reefs will ‘bounce back’. The La Nina brings warm water to the Western Pacific which will continue to stress the G.B.R. should it occur and irrespective the long term trend is to ongoing warming.
These reefs act as the oceans incubators and function as the nursery of the marine food web. It is patently clear that like the Polar Icecaps acting as the planetary thermostat and the Reefs as the incubator are both irretrievably broken and factoring in the 10 to 20 year lag between cause and effect we are in dire trouble.
“The Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral structure on Earth, is suffering from what may be its worst bleaching event ever recorded. But according to new research, future bleaching events could be even worse and may “disable” a natural protection mechanism of the reef’s corals — leaving them more defenseless against warmer seas“.
The full article, continues here: ‘This year’s severe bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is only the beginning’.
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
Leave a Reply