Florida ocean temps surge to 100F; mass coral bleaching event is found in reefs
<i>I am not an expert</i>. I&#x27;m just trying to contextualize the poor journalism in this article.<p>I don&#x27;t know how the same article can say, &#x27;Scientists are just really scrambling to keep what we have alive. It’s pretty crazy that at this point the best solution we have is to take as much coral out of the ocean as we can&#x27;, &#x27;while a lot of the coral was in OK shape, up to 10% of it was dying at the lab&#x27; and &#x27;This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying&#x27; in the same article without addressing the obvious discord of these statements with some objectivism, nor how much of this is about losing diversity for species that are not resistant to warming ocean temperatures (a very well known phenomenon) and how much of this is losing species that aren&#x27;t resilient or are otherwise rare to start with (the article specifically states, &quot;<i>It includes corals like Staghorn and Elkhorn that are “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because there are just a few hundred genetically unique individuals left</i>&quot;).<p>We know it&#x27;s bad, and it&#x27;s a problem people are passionate about, and it&#x27;s related to higher global average temperatures, but we have scientific models and don&#x27;t need to rely on personal verbiage or sensationalism to understand the impact. How does this vary from existing models? Was this unexpectedly early? What is the implication for it happening earlier in the years compared to other years in terms of annual averages?<p>Phrases like, &quot;depth refugees&quot; and &quot;little hope spots&quot; do not help us all understand what&#x27;s actually happening or the degree of the problem compared to predictions.<p>I witnessed the reefs in the Great Barrier reef go through bleaching over the last few decades, and it was horrific to behold personally. This article is making me feel dumber.<p>The results of the Australian bleaching were unintuitive, because the reefs actually ended up growing back to their highest levels after the events, though much like secondary succession in a forest it ends up favoring fast growing species and that has implications:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022-08-04&#x2F;great-barrier-reef-report-says-coral-recovering-after-bleaching&#x2F;101296186" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022-08-04&#x2F;great-barrier-reef-re...</a><p><i>The rapid growth in coral cover appears to have come at the expense of the diversity of coral on the reef, with most of the increases accounted for by fast-growing branching coral called Acropora.</i><p><i>Those corals grow quickly after disturbances but are very easily destroyed by storms, heatwaves and crown-of-thorns starfish. By increasing the dominance of those corals, the reef can become more vulnerable.</i><p>I found this article very helpful:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-019-09238-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-019-09238-2&#x2F;</a><p>This research helped me contextualize some of this continually sensationalist and frankly utterly shit quality journalism in the CNN article.<p>Here&#x27;s the most relevant parts of the nature article. Though the overall article is worth reading, this might be the most helpful part for those who don&#x27;t want to read the whole thing:<p><i>In concordance with the global predictions24,25,26, in the last decade, coral bleaching has increased in frequency and intensity (Fig. 3). Yet, in the last decade, the onset of coral bleaching has occurred at significantly higher SSTs (~0.5 °C) than in the previous decade (Fig. 4). At the thousands of sites surveyed, the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the first decade of the dataset, from 1998 to 2006, was 28.1 °C, whereas the mean SST recorded during coral bleaching in the second decade, from 2007 to 2017, was 28.7 °C. This change in coral-bleaching temperature is significantly different (Likelihood ratio test, Pr(&gt;χ2) = 0.001) between decades (Fig. 4). The increase in over half a degree celsius in coral-bleaching temperature suggests that past bleaching events may have culled the thermally susceptible individuals, resulting in a recent adjustment of the remaining coral populations to higher thresholds of bleaching temperatures26,27,28 (Supplementary Figure 19). Coral communities also may have acclimatized to increasing SSTs, highlighting the need for further research to understand the context dependencies of this trend towards a greater temperature threshold.</i><p><i>Our model showed that rates of change in SST are strong predictors of coral bleaching with faster rates of change correlating with higher levels of bleaching (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Figure 20). Global models predict a mean increase in SST of 0.027 °C per year from 1990 to 209029, which is almost double the rate (0.015 °C per year) of the previous 30 years. As SSTs continue to increase more rapidly, more localities are likely to experience coral bleaching. We show that coral bleaching is predictable, at large scales, by the intensity and the variance in frequency of extreme, high-SST events. We demonstrated that equatorial areas and areas with greater exposure to short-term SST fluctuations may be more resilient to high temperature events, and therefore may be important targets for conservation given their increased likelihood of persisting into the future30. Coral bleaching has had unprecedented negative effects on coral populations worldwide, and immediate action globally to reduce carbon emissions is necessary to avoid further declines of coral reefs.</i><p>I&#x27;m not in denial of the science, but when people write about the science as a personal tragedy and don&#x27;t include any of the relevant information to contextualize what they are saying, they lose all credibility with me.