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. 

Annual large scale coral bleaching: Eric Worrall @wattsupwiththat sez - who cares?

Coral feeding at night. Credit: Laszlo Ilyes  via Wikipedia

Once again the "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists at WUWT show that they are also fake sceptics. Eric Worrall has written an article (archived here) about another paper in Nature's open access journal, Scientific Reports. This one is about the bleaching of coral reefs, looking at the likelihood of what they term annual severe bleaching (ASB), which should be self-explanatory. The paper is by a nine-person team led by Ruben van Hooidonk from NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami.

Annual coral bleaching will probably happen fairly soon

Using statistically downscaled models to get a picture of what is likely to happen in particular areas, the authors found that before this century is out, practically all coral reefs will suffer severe bleaching every year. That's if we continue on the current emissions path. Given that it takes five years or more to recover from a severe bleaching, that means that coral reefs are in dire danger - which you knew already, I expect.