by L. Lueken, Oct 16, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch
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.
…