HALF of Earth's reefs will be permanently damaged by 2035 if temperatures continue to rise, study warns
The usual Warmist rubbish. Corals THRIVE in warmer conditions. Bleaching is caused by water-level falls, not warmth
Half of Earth's coral reefs will be permanently damaged by 2035 if climate change continues unabated, a new study has warned.
Researchers from the University of Hawaii predicted the effects to Earth's coral reefs based on changes to sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical storms, land use and human population.
Their findings suggest that, under a worst-case scenario, half of all coral reef ecosystems worldwide will be damaged in just a dozen years.
'While the negative impacts of climate change on coral reefs are well known, this research shows that they are actually worse than anticipated due to a broad combination of climate change-induced stressors,' said lead author Renee Setter.
Coral bleaching
Corals have a symbiotic relationship with a tiny marine algae called 'zooxanthellae' that live inside and nourish them.
When sea surface temperatures rise, corals expel the colourful algae, causing them to bleach and turn white.
While corals can recover if temperatures drop and the algae return, severely bleached corals die and become covered by algae.
Previous studies have shown how coral reefs are extremely sensitive to changes in their environment.
For example, research has shown how marine heatwaves can cause huge swathes of reefs to bleach.
But in the new study, the researchers set out to understand the timeline for these effects.
The researchers used climate models to look at global projections of five environmental stressors - sea surface temperature, ocean acidification, tropical storm, land use and human population projections.
Their results revealed that, when looking at a single stressor under current conditions, half of the world's coral reefs will be permanently damaged by 2050.
However, when multiple stressors are considered, this date falls to 2035.
'It was enlightening to find that coral would face multiple stressors – posing an even greater hurdle and challenge that would need to be overcome to increase the possibility of survival,' Ms Setter said.
In addition, the researchers found that by 2055, 99 per cent of the world's coral reefs will face unsuitable conditions based on at least one of the five stressors.
And by 2100, 93 per cent of reefs will be under threat by two or more of the stressors, according to the study.
'We know that corals are vulnerable to increasing sea surface temperatures and marine heatwaves due to climate change,' said Erik Franklin, co-author of the study.
'But it is important to include the complete anthropogenic impact and numerous stressors that coral reefs are exposed to in order to get a better sense of the overall risks to these ecosystems.
'This has great implications for our local Hawaiian reefs that are key to local biodiversity, culture, fisheries and tourism.'
The team now plans to carry out further studies to assess how climate change will affect individual coral species
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Some facts
Ian Plimer
I don’t have opinions. I have facts. They are repeatable and validated.
Fact #1: No one has ever proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. For more than two decades I have been asking scientists for this proof. If proven, it would also have to be shown that natural carbon dioxide emissions, 97 per cent of the annual total, don’t drive global warming. This also has never been done.
Fact #2: Basic chemistry and ice core drilling show that after a natural temperature rise, atmospheric carbon dioxide increases 650-6,000 years later yet we are told that we will fry and die from human carbon dioxide emissions. This is a lie.
Fact # 3: The main atmospheric greenhouse gas is water vapour. When water evaporates, such as from the oceans or sweat, it requires heat to convert to vapour. When water vapour condenses into rain, snow or hail, exactly the same amount of heat is given out. The Earth’s atmosphere contains up to 4 per cent water vapour and operates like a giant air conditioner.
Fact #4: Since the time of Christ, there have been thousands of predictions about the end of the world. If just one prediction was correct, we would not be here. All climate predictions in the 20th and 21st Centuries were incorrect. If a climate activist knocks on your door to tell you we are facing a climate emergency, sool the dog onto them. History is on your side.
Fact #5: Past climates have been cyclical with tectonic (400 million years), galactic (143 million years), orbital (100,000, 40,000, and 23,000 years), solar (11-year cycles of variable strength and Grand Solar Cycles), oceanic (60 years) and lunar tidal (18.6 years) with the non-cyclical impacting and massive explosive volcanoes. Cycles have not changed because humans are alive today and cannot be changed by feelings, ideology, or legislation.
Fact #6: There has been ice on Earth for less than 20 per cent of the time. Over the history of time, there have been 6 major ice ages when ice expanded during glaciation and retreated during interglacials. We are currently in an ice age that started 34 million years ago. The current interglacial started 14,400 million years ago in the Northern Hemisphere and we were at the peak of the current interglacial 7,000-4,000 years ago in the Holocene Optimum.
Fact #7: Compared to today’s global temperature, the planet has been warming for the last 14,400 years ago, cooling since the Holocene Optimum, cooling since the time of Jesus, warming since the time of the Vikings, cooling since Medieval times, and warming since the Little Ice Age which peaked 300 years ago in the Maunder Minimum. Since the intense use of coal in the Industrial Revolution some 170 years ago, the planet has had three slight warmings, two slight coolings, and one period of stasis. If human emissions of carbon dioxide drive warming, then there should have been no coolings or stasis.
Fact #8: Carbon dioxide emissions increased during the second world war, a period of cooling. During the Global Financial Crisis and the Covid epidemic, carbon dioxide emissions reduced due to contraction of industry and travel yet temperature increased.
Fact #9: Carbon dioxide is plant food, if the atmospheric carbon dioxide halved there would be no plant life on Earth and hence no animal life. It is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-poisonous gas. We breathe in 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide and, as a result of metabolising carbon-bearing foods and drinks, we exhale 4 per cent carbon dioxide. If it was toxic, people would die from kissing, swilling a carbonated drink, or eating bread.
Fact #10: Australia is already at Net Zero because the adsorption of carbon dioxide by grasslands, crops, rangelands, forests, soils, and continental shelf waters is far greater than human emissions. There are a finite number of atmosphere-derived carbon atoms in grass eaten by cattle which are transformed into meat, gas, liquid, bones, horns, and skins. Most of this carbon is returned to the atmosphere. By using leather, we sequester carbon atoms and hence beef farming saves the planet.
Green Marxist activists have captured the language with terms such as climate crisis/emergency, carbon capture, transition, and Net Zero yet they don’t live in caves as hunter-gatherers.
These hypocrites emit carbon dioxide to fly around the world to lecture those who they regard as morally inferior and they support wind and solar power and EVs as a mechanism of transferring money from the poor to the rich
Support of renewables means activists are happy with widespread pollution around wind turbines by the toxin bisphenol A, slicing and dicing of birds and bats, sterilising pastures, and dumping of toxic turbine blades that poison soils and waterways. Promoting solar panels means support for widespread sterilising of productive croplands which become contaminated with poisonous selenium, tellurium, and lead while also supporting the building of solar panels in China by slave labour.
Climate activism has nothing to do with the environment or climate. It is immoral and kills people.
If Australia becomes a renewable powerhouse of the world, we weaken the nation. When short-life turbine blades and solar panels made in China need replacing, they may refuse to provide them and, with neither coal nor nuclear power generation, Australian industry, farming, and domestic life would be destroyed.
As the European gas crisis shows, we must quickly become energy independent. We are reaping the rewards of 50 years of dumbing down education, tampering with the primary temperature data record, and the dismissal of common sense as extreme right-wing politics. There has been a deliberate attempt to frighten ill-educated young people using lies about a hypothetical climate emergency by the mainstream media uncritically acting as stenographers for the Greens.
It is time to stand up to the scam of the ideological policy and politically-created energy crisis. If carbon dioxide emissions really do drive global warming, then financially-crippling emissions reduction by Australia will have no effect whatsoever on total emissions. Why even bother?
We must fight for energy independence, freedoms, and true environmentalism.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/my-cpac-turpitudes/
**************************************************************False predictions fuel climate ‘consensus’
In its 2020 State of the Climate report the [Australian] Bureau of Meteorology informs readers, ‘Observations, reconstructions and climate modelling paint a consistent picture of ongoing, long-term climate change interacting with underlying natural variability’. Such vague prognostications, even when technically correct, are essentially worthless. Surely for half a billion dollars a year taxpayers deserve better than that?
Specifically, the Bureau predicts ‘Further sea-level rises along with the likelihood of more frequent and severe bleaching events in coral reefs ….’ Really? Eighty per cent of Pacific islands and atolls are stable or growing and GPS satellite observations tell us the Australian continent is sinking. Moreover, a recent Australian Institute of Marine Science report finds that coral coverage on the northern and central parts of the Great Barrier Reef is at its highest level since monitoring began 36 years ago.
But then, grim forecasts are in the Bureau’s DNA. Its long-range forecaster, Andrew Watkins, predicted in November 2019 that, ‘Summer is looking hot for most of the country and dry for the east. The highest chances of it being drier than normal, unfortunately, are in those drought areas through central New South Wales, southern Queensland and eastern Victoria’.
A month on, the prophesy became, ‘February to April has roughly equal chances of being wetter or drier than average for most of Australia’. Take your pick. Two weeks later an extreme deluge hit south-east Queensland and northern NSW dumping up to 325mm in a few hours, triple the monthly rainfall.
Undaunted, and contrary to American forecasts, the Bureau declared ‘the 2021-2022 La Niña season is finally over.’ After three months it changed to, ‘will last through to 2023’. Who knows?
Lest Mother Nature should suggest cooler, wetter, the Bureau is there to enlighten us. Even if the 2022 winter seemed colder to some, those who shivered through it were reassured that the national mean temperature was still 0.36 degrees Celsius above the 1961 to 1990 average, which includes a decade of 0.20 degrees cooling.
And should people washed away by the east coast floods think this was wetter than normal, they get comfort from the knowledge that, ‘the nationally averaged rainfall data has not threatened any records’. It matters not that the national average for a continent the size of Australia is meaningless.
But, for the BoM, the medium is the message, so it is important to frame a narrative which aligns aberrant weather events to its catastrophic global warming thesis. By targeting policymakers and the public, it hopes to create a permanent feedback loop.
But it can be a tough gig keeping temperatures rising. It may mean remodelling the record three times in nine years and ensuring things are warmer than thermometer readings had previously measured. This is difficult when more reliable UAH satellite observations record a ten-year pause in Australian temperatures.
Respected scientist and long-time Bureau critic, Dr Jennifer Marohasy, despairs. She says, ‘I have shown repeatedly, including in peer-reviewed publications, that without scientific justification historical temperatures are dropped down, cooling the past. This has the effect of making the present appear hotter – it is a way of generating more global warming for the same weather.’
The public was alerted to these practices through the Climategate emails, and similarly in Australia the BoM’s lack of transparency, unscientific practices and appalling quality control were exposed. Weather-stations continue to be discovered in heat traps. Record low temperatures have been underreported or ‘lost’ and a much touted ‘hottest-ever’ day had to be quickly retracted when it was demonstrated it wasn’t.
It’s easy to dismiss these criticisms as carping. After all, Australia is a big place and weather forecasting is fraught. But surely the most benevolent analyst would conclude that global-warming politics, not science, predominantly drives people and culture at the BoM. Indeed, it is an active member of a global political consensus which is intent on weaponising the climate to achieve social change. Within this coven there is no room for agnostics or dissenters.
Finally, after decades of deceit and denial, mass delusion is colliding with reality. Months before winter’s onset, gas and electricity prices in Europe are ten times higher than usual. Fertiliser production is down 70 per cent and the metals sector faces an existential threat. Nationalisation beckons.
True, Russia is a significant contributor, but the real pain is self-inflicted and comes from irresponsible emissions-reduction policies which have exposed populations and economies to the mercies of Moscow and the weather with no Plan B.
Predictably the poor and infirm will pay the highest price. More people die of cold than heat and for many this winter it will mean choosing between already unaffordable heating and, skyrocketing food prices.
The perpetrators of this disaster will use it to demonstrate how, ‘Capitalism has run its course and must yield to environmental concerns’. Unsustainable growth has long been pushed by the Club of Rome and the climate collective as an existential threat and Malthusian authoritarians now largely control the agenda.
This is not conspiracy theory. A recently leaked IPCC report argues the current capitalist model must be discarded ‘to avoid exceeding planetary limits’. In other words, unless growth is abandoned, global warming will cause more frequent catastrophic weather events and millions more will die of heat and starvation.
Yet, despite rising emissions, the UN’s own World Food Program reports the planet is producing enough food to feed one and a half times the present population. The problems are storage and distribution. The anti-capitalists don’t explain how limiting economic growth and making energy unaffordable for refrigeration, transport and cooking, assist in delivering nutrition to the needy.
Well, ours is not to question. The anti-growth consensus knows best and is re-setting capitalism to become the ‘sharing economy’ of the future. In this utopia ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’. What could possibly go wrong?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/false-predictions-fuel-climate-consensus/
*****************************************************************Reality check: European wind industry ‘struggling’ with rising costs
European wind turbine manufacturers are financially struggling and cutting jobs, putting them at risk of losing market share to Chinese competitors, despite the energy crisis, major industry players have warned.
Turbine makers General Electric Renewables and Siemens Gamesa both announced job cuts in recent weeks, and European manufacturers were “all financially struggling,” Jon Lezamiz Cortázar, global head of public affairs at Siemens, told the Financial Times.
“Everything is getting much more expensive in an already stretched wind industry supply chain,” he said. If the situation did not improve, “it may happen that the European Green Deal is installed with non-European technology”.
The Global Wind Energy Council said it was likely to downgrade its forecasts for the amount of new capacity added this year globally from around 101 gigawatts to 94-95 gigawatts. This amounts to almost no growth since last year, with 2021 being a peak year for offshore wind installation.
The challenging picture comes even as European leaders scramble to boost their supply of domestically produced renewable energy in the context of a global energy crisis fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The EU wants to increase its target for renewable energy from 32 per cent of total power production to 45 per cent by 2030.
“Companies are laying people off, at a time when the supply chain should be ramping up,” said Ben Backwell, chief executive of the Global Wind Energy Council.
Inflation and the rising cost of key materials, such as steel and copper, have pushed up the cost of making turbines. But long lead times and turbine prices that are locked in by customers years in advance have made it difficult for manufacturers to pass on higher costs. Many have now started raising prices and renegotiating contracts with customers.
The industry is also grappling with supply chain delays, already strained by the lockdowns during the pandemic and exacerbated since the war in Ukraine. That put companies at risk of having to pay so-called “liquidated damages” to customers, or compensation payments related to project delays, analysts said.
Vestas Wind global head of marketing and public affairs, Morten Dyrholm, said the current situation amounted to “a pretty critical period in time for the supply chain”.
Shares in Vestas, turbine maker Nordex and offshore wind farm developer Orsted have all been sliding since their peaks in early 2021.
Vestas missed analyst expectations for its second-quarter results, posting an underlying operating loss of €182mn, while Siemens reported its first quarterly loss in nearly 12 years.
Morningstar analyst Matthew Donen said western companies were at risk of losing out to Chinese competitors, many of which were more financially resilient and could build turbines for less.
https://www.ft.com/content/0e747284-64da-4690-b416-3acabaaf4943
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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