Archives par mot-clé : Coral reefs

climate-debate

New Study: Great Barrier Reef Coral Cover ‘At Its Highest Since Monitoring Began In 1985’

by K. Richard, Oct 28, 2025 in NoTricksZone 

Another alarmist narrative debunked by observations.

Coral coverage was supposed to be existentially devastated by the modern tenths-of-a-degree increases in sea surface temperatures and recurring bleaching events.

However, a new study points to assessments of coral cover percentages in the Great Barrier Reef and concludes is “at its highest since monitoring began in 1985.”

Further, the analysis reveals there is “no consistent correlation between rising temperatures and reduced coral cover,” and that “most corals [are] demonstrating rapid recovery” from bleaching.

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better to know...?

The Hill’s Crazy Coral Claims Challenged By Reef Recovery, Record Growth

by L. Lueken, Oct 16, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 

reef coral

A recent article in The Hill, “Climate change is not a ‘con job’,” claims that catastrophic, human-caused climate change is killing reefs via ocean heatwaves. This claim is false. [emphasis, links added]

In reality, corals have existed for millions of years, through warmer and colder periods, and in the recent past, coral reefs have recovered from bleaching events and even die-offs, proving the species is adaptive and resilient in the face of climate change.

The Hill article, from Rebecca Vega Thurber, the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute, is framed by Thurber’s annoyance that President Donald Trump says climate change is a “con job.” She claims her personal research experience refutes his comment.

Thurber explains that pollution from fertilizer runoff can kill corals, which is true, but goes on to assert:

“[E]very result we have collected, in every one of these well-intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades.”

She says their efforts to mitigate pollution were “overwhelmed by high water temperaturesdriven by climate change, or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.”

Thurber claims marine heat waves in the French South Pacific hampered her work by “transform[ing] these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.”

In point of fact, one long-term study from 2019 showed that rather than a “barren plain,” French Polynesian reefs have an “outstanding rate of coral recovery, with a systematic return to pre-disturbance state within only 5 to 10 years.”

A second study from 2024, published in Nature, sought to understand why reefs bounced backso readily after major heat waves, concluding that:

“Over the past three decades, there have been five main warming events that have caused mass bleaching around Moorea and Tahiti, in 1994, 2002, 2007, 2016, and 2019. Despite bleaching levels up to 100% for some coral species, reefs experienced as high as ~76% recovery following each event. …

“It is currently unknown what controls the ability of coral coverage to recover quickly at these locations. It has been suggested that reefs may develop an increased tolerance to higher SSTs following each bleaching event, and that the increased resilience would allow for a shorter recovery period with less die-off under subsequent SST extremes.”

In short, the scientific literature does not support Thurber’s contention in The Hill that coral reefs are dying off in vast numbers.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Science Yields Surprises! Island Nations Growing… “Atoll, Island Stability Is Global Trend”!

by P. Gosselin, Mar 8, 2023 in WUWT

IPCC high-end sea level predictions for 2100 are “highly erroneous”. 

Global warming alarmists like to claim that Pacific island nations are on the verge of disappearing – due to rising sea levels caused by polar ice melting due to global warming, which in turn supposedly is caused by rising concentrations of “heat-trapping” trace gas CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels.

These coral reef island nations risk going under real soon, unless we wean ourselves from fossil fuels soon, they say.

Coral reef island nations are emerging, not disappearing

But yesterday Kenneth here presented a new paper appearing in Nature, (Kench et al., 2023), which looks at whether the coral reef islands are in fact seeing unprecedented and undergoing accelerating physical changes that risk outrunning human adaptation measures. The authors analyzed the dynamics of a Maldivian reef island at millennial to decadal timescales.

Recent changes not unprecedented

The researchers found that “island change over the past half-century (±40 m movement) is not unprecedented compared with paleo-dynamic evidence”.

Nothing unusual is happening. The global data suggest that almost all islands are in fact growing, and not  disappearing under water like climate alarmists mistakenly believe.

“Recent shoreline changes (±40 m/50 years) are ‘dwarfed’ by the shoreline changes (±200 m/100 years) that occurred throughout previous centuries,” the study’s authors write.

 89% of all the globe’s islands are stable, or growing!

Moreover, just 4 years ago, another peer-reviewed publication appearing in a renowned journal found similar results: 89% of the globe’s islands and 100% of large islands have stable or growing coasts! According to Duvat, 2019:

“88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted. It is noteworthy that no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size. These results show that atoll and island areal stability is a global trend, whatever the rate of sea-level rise.”

Moreover, Khan et al (2018) found: “Prediction of 4–6.6 ft sea level rise in the next 91 years between 2009 and 2100 is highly erroneous.”