Smashed Corals, & Civilizations – March 2024 Update
This year has not begun at all well. My favourite coral reef was smashed by Tropical Cyclone Kirrily and Mark Steyn lost the defamation case against him. Worst a jury in Washington DC determined that Mark Steyn has to pay US$1,000,000 to Michael Mann, as punitive damages. To be sure, the jury ruled actual damages to be just US$1, but the more substantive US$1 million must also be paid because, well, ‘How dare he!’
It is the case that rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation is not excessive. When people are offended, reasoning is impossible.
Increasingly they are whipped into frenzies by mad men repeating popular slogans. I see this on both sides of politics.
When it comes to the natural environment it is the key board warriors, those who rarely if ever get into the water at the Great Barrier Reef but who wave around their university qualifications, the talking-heads, who are gathering the most followers on both sides. They often repeat nonsense that they know is likely to be popular on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Just two years ago a few corals at the reef crest at John Brewer Reef bleached white, only to recover, and it was front page news around the world. Now those same corals are rubble, with that entire wall of coral having collapsed. The corals are now lying seven metres below along the sandy perimeter, click here. No one seems to want to report this reality. Physicist and marine biologists alike seem reluctant to consider what it all means; to sit amongst the rubble even for a moment.
Instead, they either promote, or deny, the bleaching at some other reef. Whichever, depends on their politics, not the state of the actual coral reef.
I’m told that these things happen, coral reefs get smashed up and then recover. There will be coral spawning in November. What remains of the reef crest, scoured back to bare limestone, I’m told it is now the perfect substrate for mass recruitment, after the next coral spawning. It will just take time.
I guess the same could be said about our civilization. That the smashing up of our civilization is inevitable.
You may remember my blog posts about this reef two years ago, with the spectacular photographs of the corals at the crest of John Brewer Reef, with more than 100% coral cover because the coral colonies were growing over each other.
These same corals were being reported around the world as the epicentre of a sixth mass coral bleaching, when they were looking more colourful than usual because they were a bit stressed and so they had kicked-out some of their brown zooxanthellae/symbiotic algae letting the more colourful natural pink florescent proteins show through. So, some of these corals were quite pink, click here.
Life tends to follow cycles and sometimes we find ourselves in a trough, hoping the situation will improve.
At what point in time, and how, do we as a community, a nation, a civilization acknowledge disaster – and sit with it? At what point do we turn over what has happened, and spend some time in reflection?
Bad things happen.
To what extent can we prepare for disaster? How much control do we ever have. How much control over personal disasters, natural disasters, and even the wars our nation states choose to support?
For sure, we will have more control when we act sensibly as a community and a nation. When we act rationally and empower the sensible ones while removing the key boards from the lunatics. Of course, they are going to protest, the mad men will demand their freedom of speech. So, freedom of speech is not the answer. It is useful, but there is also a need for discussion and for the expertise of those who actually know what they are talking about to be heard. Instead it is the slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies from both sides that are resonating.
At some point the nonsense claims from both sides need to be tested. That is why we need strong institutions that also care about the science. Instead they have mostly been smashed like that wall of coral at John Brewer Reef.
I have a six-part blog series about the defamation trial in Washington DC, ending with a comparison of Russian versus American historical temperature reconstructions, click here. And there is a link to my friend Ann McElhinney’s podcast series, Climate Change on Trial.
Mark Steyn claimed that there was something wrong with the hockey stick chart – he went as far as to call it fraudulent, that nonsense 1,000-year historical temperature reconstruction by the much-lauded American scientist Michael Mann that denies so much that explains European history including all the cathedrals built during the Medieval Warm Period.
What did come out in the trial, as part of the evidence provided by both Mann and Steyn, is that American scientists stopped collecting data on tree rings in the 1980s, when this proxy temperature data began to diverge from their own theory of catastrophic global warming. This is the data central to the hockey stick chart. It also became apparent, through the trial, that Michael Mann is not an expert in collecting or measuring the tree ring data, only choosing particular temperature series. That he doesn’t observe or measure. He does the statistics, all the while with little understanding of uncertainty and how it might be calculated. He is a physicist and an activist.
I do know that in Russia, proper tree ring research continues because I can read their published papers. The botanists have continued counting band widths beyond the 1980s and so they are less concerned with the ‘climate emergency’ and none of their reconstructions look like hockey sticks. None of the Russian reconstructions deny the Medieval Warm Period.
Science normally begins with observation, and hopefully also with collecting some real data that usually involves going outside into the real world at some point; even under the water if we care about the Great Barrier Reef. This is also how we can get a feel for the natural variability within a system and therefore what we might be able to expect by way of statistical uncertainty, including within cycles and particular habitats.
In the West, popular commentators from both the left and right of politics seem preoccupied with their established narratives that increasingly bear no relationship to reality.
The new disinformation legislation for Australia may have a particular focus on climate change. After all, I’m told, it is critical to public confidence in the energy transition whether to ‘renewables’ as the right and now left are implementing, or ‘nuclear’ as the right is still planning. They have both been hard at work over the last decades smashing up the most reliable energy source in Australia, coal fired power. They are not investing in, and neither should you apparently. This energy transition is about money and greed and control of the narrative.
The reality is that whether it be temperature data or coral cover data, the methods of collection, analysis, storage and reporting have so deteriorated over the last two decades we really have no real idea of trends.
It is hard to know where we are in the shorter and also the longer cycles. And the greedy, and the power-obsessed really don’t care. That is the sad reality.
It is that time of year when there is always some bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. And I saw some limited bleaching of young corals at a depth of 11 metres off Mooloolaba, beyond the southern limit of the GBR, when I was Scuba diving a couple of weekends ago.
Some of the worst bleaching is apparently off from Keppel Island, near Yeppoon in central Queensland. I had been waiting for conditions to improve to get out there and have a look for myself. Last Friday I went anyway to Monkey Beach reef with my snorkel, mask, and favourite free-diving fins. The water was so turbid, and visibility so bad, I couldn’t see the corals, click here.
Meanwhile, we have keyboard warriors variously telling us there is record coral cover, or the reef is stuffed, depending on their politics. I have noticed that neither have bothered to go and see for themselves, or to explain their ideal averages replete with invented uncertainty values. Indeed the relevant Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) data is all categorical. I could explain more, if someone cared to organise some discussion.
The understanding of the statistics, especially by the physicists, it is terrible. It is the biologists that understand statistics, at least they used to. That was explained in the Mark Steyn defamation trial, the lack of understanding of uncertainty, and variability, and I see it everywhere in the Great Barrier Reef maths.
Grab a number and blame someone on the other side of the faux-political divide. That is how science is done in the West today.
I noticed in the Daily Telegraph, a week or so ago it was written and I quote:
‘Oceans absorb about 90 per cent of atmospheric heat’.
In fact, most of the atmosphere is transparent to incoming solar radiation, that is not absorbed until it intercepts the oceans – that cover 70 percent of this planet. To be clear the heating, that could be causing the coral bleaching, is not from the atmosphere it is from the sun.
I can see the absorption of the sun’s rays beginning with the longest wavelengths in the red spectrum by 5 metres and orange by 10 metres when I Scuba dive in clear water on sunny days. So, the clown fish off Mooloolaba that I photographed at 11 metres the other weekend are not orange in colour because all the warmth in the orange spectrum has been absorbed into the water before this depth, so the clowns appear mostly black with two very white strips.
The Pacific Ocean has been particularly warm this last summer, and this shows in the satellite data as a more than 2 degrees temperature anomaly in sea surface temperatures across the equatorial Pacific. Atmospheric temperatures have lagged this warmth by a good two months, also evident in the satellite data as ‘atmospheric heat’ – to quote the Daily Telegraph. A conclusion could be that the oceans, not carbon dioxide, are causing the current spike in global warming. But no one is encouraging such thinking, or reflection, not on either side of politics.
There are cycles within cycles, and it is useful to acknowledge where we find ourselves within the different phases, particularly if we risk phase alignment and thus more extreme conditions whether at sea or in Washington DC.
As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of delusion only when we are prepared to turn over the truth and examine it from different perspectives.
Thanks for reading this far.
If you like to know the individual facts, as well as the totals and ideal averages consider subscribing to my irregular email updates.
Cheers, Jennifer Marohasy. Writer. Adventurer & Scientist. 18th March 2024
Some Background
In a secular society that is a democracy, government policies would be based on evidence. Governments might rely on scientists to provide this information, and citizens would expect journalists to be a little sceptical of everyone and to honestly report corruption especially of the evidence so critical to good policy.
None of this happens anymore. Not at all. Not where I live, in Australia. Rather our society is increasingly conformist and corporatist, with legitimacy and authority held by special interest groups with decisions made through constant negotiations between these groups and government. Meanwhile many scientist just make it up; their peer-review publications are as good as fiction. It doesn’t matter whether the issue is Covid, the state of the Great Barrier Reef or the historical temperature record.
It was back in November 2017 that I showed there was a lack of equivalence between the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature measurements from platinum resistance probes in automatic weather stations and traditional mercury thermometers for the weather station at Mildura. My more recent transcribing and analysis of the data from Brisbane Airport confirms that the probes can be calibrated to measure warmer than a mercury thermometer.
Before that, beginning back in 2014, I showed that official temperatures are often remodelled by the Bureau, so the present appears as much as 2 degrees warmer for the same weather. I have also shown that limits were placed on how cold temperatures could be recorded. There is also the issue of scratching record hot days that occurred more than 70 years ago.
These are the same temperature measurements that underpin the faux temperature reconstructions compelling entire economies to switch to renewables with far reaching implications. These are the measurements that are being used to tell young women they should not have children, because the world is overheating and there will be no future for their children.
Very few people understand how temperatures are measured, yet they will appeal to this data when making important life decisions including the car they aspire to drive and how many children they won’t be having. In a recent blog post, I try and explain something about the history of temperature measurements using Cape Otway Lighthouse as an example, and how this long and continuous series was compromised with the abrupt change to a probe, and how the Bureau have further homogenised that part of the record that probably did have some integrity through its routine, industrial scale remodelling of all the temperatures series that it uses to report on climate variability and change. The only true way to lead a no-regrets life is to put sometime into testing core underlying assumptions, I challenge everyone to do that by reading ‘Parallel Temperature Data, Except for Cape Otway lighthouse’. My link is to the article at WattsUpWithThat.com, as the comments thread is also worth scanning.
‘The Twitter Files’ confirm what many have suspected for years: that governments and much of the mainstream media actively work with social media giants to censor and de-platform those they disagree with and push particular agendas.
Many of our once trusted institutions are now engaged in little more than keeping us, the public, in a state of unnecessary and constant fear.
Managers at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have for years misled the public on the state of the climate. It is not getting drier, nor are rainfall events more extreme, and the extent to which some coastal locations may have warmed over the last hundreds years is unclear because of all the changes to the measurement methods. The extent of the remodelling of the temperature record can be explored through an interactive table, unique to this website, with maximum and minimum annual series for all 112 ACORN-SAT sites (versions 1 and 2) juxtaposed against the real data.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade researching a technique for forecasting rainfall using artificial neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence. The technique is detailed in a series of peer reviewed papers with most listed at ClimateLab.com.
I’ve published on a great diversity of topics, as you can see if you sort through the list of my publications at Google Scholar, click here.
I’ve also made some short films over the last few years. Mostly about coral reefs, but also one very short film about sea level change in Noosa National Park.
Thanks for reading this far!
I do have an official Facebook page, but I never know when I might be next ban from posting there. To be sure to stay-in-the-loop, and receive my irregular monthly e-newsletter, consider subscribing. If you like the work I do, you can make a donation via paypal.me/ClimateLab.