Above, John Cook of the University of Queensland interviews experts on coral’s response to ocean warming and acidification. John tells me this is one of the most depressing segments he has done for the Making Sense of Climate Denial online course. Factoid: the global warming and acidification event is changing the ocean more rapidly than at any time since the planet was last struck by a major asteroid, 65 million years ago.
The third global coral bleaching event ever on record was confirmed by NOAA scientists after observing that record ocean temperatures cause widespread coral bleaching across Hawaii and expand to the Caribbean.
These scientists warned that this bleaching event, which began in the north Pacific in summer 2014 and expanded to the south Pacific and Indian oceans in 2015, is hitting US coral reefs disproportionately hard.
NOAA estimates that by the end of 2015, almost 95 per cent of US coral reefs will have been exposed to ocean conditions that can cause corals to bleach.
“The coral bleaching and disease, brought on by climate change and coupled with events like the current El Niño, are the largest and most pervasive threats to coral reefs around the world,” said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator.
“As a result, we are losing huge areas of coral across the U.S., as well as internationally. What really has us concerned is this event has been going on for more than a year and our preliminary model projections indicate it’s likely to last well into 2016,” Eakin remarked.
While corals can recover from mild bleaching, severe or long-term bleaching is often lethal. After corals die, reefs quickly degrade and the structures corals build erode. This provides less shoreline protection from storms and fewer habitats for fish and other marine life, including ecologically and economically important species.
NOAA scientists explained that the biggest risk right now is to the Hawaiian Islands, where bleaching is intensifying and is expected to continue for at least another month. Areas at risk in the Caribbean in coming weeks include Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and from the US Virgin Islands south into the Leeward and Windward islands.
The next concern is the further impact of the strong El Niño, which climate models indicates will cause bleaching in the Indian and southeastern Pacific Oceans after the new year. This may cause bleaching to spread globally again in 2016.
A severe worldwide coral bleaching event is now underwayThis is big.
For the third time in recorded history, a severe coral bleaching event is set to damage 38 percent of the world’s reefs, and researchers warn that the rising ocean temperatures responsible could bring on unprecedented destruction.
Spanning from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean, the bleaching is expected to destroy 12,000 square kilometres of coral this year, with the possibility of spreading even further in 2016. A deadly combination of a monster El Nino event, the large ‘blob’ of warm water circulating through the Pacific Ocean, and the effects of global warming has been blamed for the bleaching event, which will likely last for at least the next couple of years.
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The two previous global events occurred as recently as 1998 and 2010, and while they were both devastating to coral populations – in 1998, 16 percent of the world’s corals and 10 percent of the Great Barrier Reef population were wiped out – what’s concerning about the current event is how long it’s likely to drag on.
Right now, the researchers are saying we’re set to lose 5 percent of the world’s coral in 2015, but the destruction will only get worse the longer the bleaching continues into 2016. “We’re looking at a similar spatial scale of bleaching across the globe, but spanning across at least two years,” said Eakin. “So that means a lot of these corals are being put under really prolonged stress, or are being hit two years in a row.”
Coral bleaching takes place when ocean temperatures heat up and stress out corals so much, they evict the algae that live inside them and give them their colour. The problem is, these algae also provide the corals with nutrients, which means they’re left vulnerable in conditions they haven’t evolved to deal with, and often die out.
For the all science, not only “cherry picking”: 2010 …:
NOAA: “Not all bleaching events are due to warm water. In January 2010, cold water temperatures in the Florida Keys caused a coral bleaching event that resulted in some coral death. Water temperatures dropped 12.06 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the typical temperatures observed at this time of year.”
“A healthy, resilient reef can either resist a stressful event, like bleaching, or recover from it. When a coral bleaches, it is not dead. Corals can survive if water temperatures return to normal quickly.”
I have been waiting for three days to give someone else the chance to comment first on this post, hoping that Crockers would understand the significance of this latest round coral bleaching, and by extension, the impacts of AGW on the oceans.
So someone finally makes a comment and who is it? Our denier friend Arkady, who mutters something about cherry picking and then proceeds to cherry pick some inane bit of information that is contradictory to the evidence in this post. It must be very frustrating for Peter to expend this kind of energy and get this as a response.
This a a great post—-the video of the interviews id well done and powerful, and the two text clips are informative and to the point. Peter has done other posts on ocean warming and acidification, algal blooms, AGW impacts on fish and sea-dwelling mammals, etc. They have often not gotten much of a play, and, as one who has a background in the sciences, that has always mystified me. I will shout a bit and say—–START PAYING ATTENTION TO THE FREAKIN’ OCEANS, PEOPLE!
The basis of all life on this planet is water, and the oceans hold 97% of it on the planet. The organisms living in the oceans have given us the oxygen that all higher life forms need to survive. The oceans provide the major source of food for 1/5 of the human population. The oceans cover 70+% of the planet, and we still know very little about them, both in the physical and biological sense. Why? We have been too busy exploiting the planet to really examine it, and we have spent too much effort and $$$ on going to the Moon (to bring back sacks of rocks) and talking about going to Mars (which is only a jobs program for NASA and aerospace contractors).
Think about it. Life inhabits a very thin skin on this planet. Nothing much lives more than a few feet above or below the Earth’s surface on the 30% of the Earth that is land. Not much lives in the very cold or very hot and dry areas. In contrast, the ocean averages TWO and ONE-THIRD miles deep and life is to be found in every drop of it.
We are constantly talking about how it’s so wonderful that renewables are going up and fossil fuel use is going down (except it’s really not). If we don’t start paying more attention to the oceans, what happens there is going to bite us in the ass (and be very difficult if not impossible to fix).