Anthony Watts wants coral reefs to face extinction - again

Photo: Toby Hudson

Coral reefs are critically important to the marine ecosystem. Despite this, there's another attempt to make corals extinct at Anthony Watts' blog wattsupwiththat.com (WUWT) (archived here). Anthony wrote an article saying how it was hilarious for scientists to want to study corals, because they've been made extinct a number of times before and came back hundreds of millennia later. Or something like that.

As Phil Clarke pointed out in a comment here, Anthony started his strange plea to stop studying corals by referring to an article on the website of the Global Reef Project. Anthony quoted the first sentence of the article, and decided to not post any more of it. Here is the first sentence, plus a bit more (my emphasis). The part that Anthony quoted is in italics. The part that contradicted his whole article is in bold:

Corals are 500 million years old, and date back to the late Cambrian period, during the Paleozoic era (Fig. 1). Evidence suggests that they started as simple, solitary organisms but, in response to changes in their environment, later evolved into the coral reefs we know today. It is also known that over the 500 million years, during which corals are known to have existed, they have experienced a number of extinction events. These extinction events were largely the result of dramatic changes in their environment, such as we are seeing today. 

Coral reef bleaching with world-renowned expert Terry Hughes - and a Gish Gallop from "science" quack, Jim Steele

Bleached staghorn coral
on the Great Barrier Reef
between Townsville and Cairns, March 2017,
Credit: Bette Willis, Source: JCU

Some years ago I visited the Great Barrier Reef offshore from the resort town of Port Douglas. It was a magical experience (and I think the only time I've scuba dived in the ocean). Later I had the privilege of swimming over part of the Great Barrier Reef again from the seas around the Whitsundays, staying at Airlie Beach. Apart from some snorkelling over coral reefs in a few other places, such as Bali, and doing some work with the fishing industry, I know very little about coral reefs. Any knowledge I do have is thanks to experts.

What I do know is that coral reefs are extremely critical ecosystems for maintaining marine life and protecting coastal environments, and for all sorts of human activities too, such as fishing, tourism and more.

I also know that our actions are killing many corals and even entire reefs.

Although I've written about them in the past, I'm reluctant to delve too deeply into a topic as complex and specialised as coral reefs for risk of giving wrong information. However the sort of nonsense that you read by deniers and disinformers, who seem to want to kill the reefs off as quickly as possible, has prompted me again. That plus the fact that governments in Australia (the Australian Government and the Queensland Government), a suspect coal company from India, and less prominent players are doing all they can to speed up the death of the Great Barrier Reef by giving our hard earned money, plus permits, for Adani to mine coal and wreck the reef (and use up our precious water).

On top of all that, the Great Barrier Reef is suffering another bleaching event this year, hot on the heels of the worst mass bleaching ever that happened last year.

What finally got me going was an article at WUWT by Jim Steele, in which he tried to tell his readers that the 2016 coral bleaching wasn't really widespread (it was the worst ever), and was caused by any of a whole number of different reasons he offered up, except the real cause - excessive ocean heat. Jim Steele's a global warming denier, in case you've not heard of him.

See update below, too.