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.

No honesty or diligence about #climate change or coral reef science from Bob Fernley-Jones at WUWT

As you know very well by now, science disinformers abound at Anthony Watts' blog wattsupwiththat.com. It's one of the reasons his blog exists.  It's not so that Anthony can write stuff. He doesn't do that much any more. It's so that disinformers and science deniers can comfort science deniers that their false opinions are promoted by other people. (Other reasons include making money, panhandling for jaunts, and trying to convince his readers that he's cleverer than the really clever people.)

Dead coral, Lizard Is. GBR. Credit: Greg Torda

Another case in point today, when a dud ex-engineer (so he says) called Bob Fernley-Jones (Mechanical engineer retired, Melbourne Australia) made up a whole bunch of stuff about coral reefs (archived here). I'd say it was so that he could try to portray himself as being cleverer than climate scientists and coral reef experts. Instead he's a Dunning Kruger case, and a whiner.

As well as that, Bob's article shows:

• disinformers will make up stuff that they think their readers want to read
• disinformers don't think much of the intellectual capability of their readers, with good cause
• disinformers are fairly confident that their readers won't bother to do any fact-checking, again with good cause.
• Bob is sloppy and careless, with missing links and missing diagrams. Actually, it's Anthony Watts who was sloppy in this case (he also got Bob's name wrong). Bob complained in the comments about some of the missing links and diagrams.
• Bob is a messy thinker, with a summary at the end that is meaningless, incomprehensible nonsense.

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.

Bob Fernley-Jones' fixation on hot Marches toward coral bleaching

There are some things associated with climate change that seem to upset deniers more than others. Deniers don't care much about killer heat waves, record floods or major long-lasting drought. They do seem to get upset by reports of coral bleaching. Today there was an article at WUWT by some denier called Bob Fernley-Jones (archived here). Bob was writing about an article at The Conversation published more than four months ago, on April 29, 2016.

The article was about the extraordinarily hot temperatures in the Coral Sea in March this year. Here's the chart that was shown in the article, which I've copied directly from the Bureau of Meteorology:

Figure 1 | March temperature for the Coral Sea. Source: Bureau of Meteorology.

The Great Barrier Reef: an unmitigated disaster - if only the Australian public knew...

Here is the video from the Climate Council, with Tim Flannery, Amanda McKenzie and Dean Miller on the disastrous bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.

Graham Readfearn has written about how Ben Webster at the anti-environment newspaper, The Australian, tried to downplay the disaster.

They just don't get it at WUWT. It's the pace of change that's the problem.

Deniers like to claim they aren't stupid and they aren't ignorant. I can't say what happens in the rest of their lives, but those who deny climate science, when it comes to climate science, are either stupid, or ignorant or knowingly telling lies. There is no middle ground.

There's an example again today at WUWT (archived here). Again it's from Eric Worrall. He wonders why, if global warming is threatening the food chain, it didn't threaten it during the Cretaceous period. You don't believe that anyone could be so foolish? It's true. Eric wrote:

The obvious question – why didn’t this hypothesised collapse occur during previous epochs with high CO2 levels, such as the Cretaceous Age? According to Wikipedia, the Cretaceous age enjoyed CO2 levels of around 1700ppm. Yet the Cretaceous was also the age of the Dinosaurs – the period was characterised by large tropical jungles, shallow warm seas, and a vast abundance of life, both marine and terrestrial. I suggest it takes a pretty robust food chain to support a predator like the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

It's as if he's never heard of any of the great extinction events, like the massive Permian Triassic events, which in part were the result of rapid greenhouse warming.

Willis Eschenbach turns on the charm for NOAA's coral watch crew

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is giving us all a lesson in how to win friends and influence people. The lesson came about because he was wondering why NOAA gave some rough estimates to the Guardian without asking his permission first. The numbers were about the global coral bleaching event that's on the cards. Willis wrote a courteous email to NOAA as follows (archived here):

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale surfs the surface at Florida Keys

Update: For the benefit of new WUWT visitors, I wasn't banned from WUWT for troll behaviour. I was banned for being a "clueless female eco-nut", because of an innocuous tweet. (In four years I only made about 30 comments at WUWT, mostly polite and on topic.) Click here to read about it. I'm not alone. WUWT is intolerant of anyone who accepts science.

Also, don't fall for the typical paranoid conspiracy ideation you may have read at WUWT. 7DaBrooklynKnight7 has never been banned, and what he, not I, suggested was his parting comment is not lost forever, it was moved to where super-silly comments often go - to the HotWhoppery :)

Unlike WUWT, I rarely disappear comments completely and have had to ban very, very few people, and only then for extreme behaviour. Click here for the comment policy. (Also unlike WUWT, and the shameless double standards of it's various anonymice like the "Bob Tisdale's" of the world, I respect people's right to privacy and prefer to focus on the science.)

Sou 28 October 2014

---

Perennially puzzled "Bob Tisdale" is a one trick pony. His trick is sea surface temperature. Or so he pretends. He's no climate expert. He's not a climate scientist. He's best known at WUWT for his dabbles in ENSO.

Today "Bob Tisdale" wrote an article at WUWT (archived here) that he claims disproves practically everything in a recent paper about coral reefs. Not just any corals, the paper was specifically about corals in Florida Keys. Thing is, Bob Tisdale didn't bother reading the paper much less try to understand it.

Bob has no excuse for not reading the paper. It's open access and you can read it here. The title of the paper is:

A Century of Ocean Warming on Florida Keys Coral Reefs: Historic In Situ Observations

It was reporting research done by scientists at the US Geological Survey and elsewhere with a team led by Florida-based marine biologist Ilsa Kuffner.

Bob wasn't interested in the paper. He wasn't interested in the fact that it was a report based on in situ observations. He probably isn't at all familiar with the reefs around Florida Keys. Just the same he took it on himself to decide that the research should have instead been about:

One Hundred and Forty Three Years of Gridded Sea Surface Temperature off the Coast of Florida using HadISST

Deniers toss out direct measurements, preferring homogenised estimates

Bob didn't want the scientists to use site-specific data, or temperature under the sea surface where the corals are. Data painstakingly collected from specific locations over decades, using thermometers, calibrated data loggers and precision thermographs.  Data carefully analysed by qualified experts over weeks or months. Without filling in gaps in data, and where the researchers discarded the small amount of data that couldn't be corroborated.

That sounds like just what deniers clamour for, doesn't it. You'd think they'd be singing the praises of the researchers. Recall their horror at gaps in climate data being infilled by estimates based on surrounding regions. Recall the perennial protests from deniers at climate data being homogenised to correct for calibration errors, station moves, breaks in the data.

Not this time though. Nope. This time they want massaged, combined, "manipulated" data estimated from multiple sources. Bob Tisdale didn't want a bar of actual direct observations using thermometers and precise measuring instruments on site. Instead Bob trotted off to KNMI Climate Explorer and got different data. He preferred gridded data estimated from combining observations from ships, from buoys, from satellites, with data gaps filled by interpolation. He wasn't interested in the temperature changes of the coral reefs themselves. He was only interested in the temperature of the thin skin of the sea surface - averaged over a wide area well beyond the corals the scientists were researching. Yet leaving out some of the area that the researchers did cover.

Bob spent a few minutes plotting HadISST surface temperatures of the ocean far afield. He then triumphantly pronounced the months of dedicated detailed scientific research about coral reefs in Florida Keys was dead in the sea water (so to speak).

But it's Bob who is wrong and woefully so.

(This article is very long. If you're on the home page click the read more to see what the paper is about and the reaction of the fake sceptics and resident pseudo-science disinformer, Bob Tisdale, at WUWT.)