Great Barrier Reef

I quote this little item out of Australia. It is a timely reminder that the media is profoundly lazy and insecure in their shallow knowledge and will pile on any fashion to tell a good story.

These days I am perusing dozens of stories with little or no credible linkage to the global warming theme, yet everyone is assigning the label to just about any apparent environmental anomaly.

Perhaps I should construct a story about how global warming is causing the miraculous recovery of the Great Barrier Reef.

None of this is advancing knowledge or actions where action is truly mandated and is promoting action were none is warranted. Today I see a story suggesting that George Bush is about to announce some sort of action on global warming. I hope it is a hoax.

They survived this, they’ll survive warming

Andrew Bolt

Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 12:03am

You know those scare campaigns every few years about the Great Barrier Reef facing extinction thanks to global warming? Relax. It turns out that coral is actually so tough you couldn’t kill it with a nuclear bomb. In fact, much of the stuff just grows back fine, the seas are so coral-friendly these days:

SOME corals are again flourishing on Bikini Atoll, the Pacific site of the largest American atom bomb ever exploded, but other species have disappeared… Ms Richards said she did not know what to expect when she dived on the crater but was surprised to find huge matrices of branching Porites coral - up to eight metres high - had established, creating thriving coral reef habitat.

The truth is that I never understood this story at all. Mankind’s involvement with the massive reef is at best ephemeral and it is remote from the type of coastal pollution you see around Taiwan for example. Any observed collapse phenomena was most likely no more than a natural event that simply had not been observed before.

The most powerful force affecting natural populations is the predator prey cycle. Many of these will swing from a massive destruction of the host environment, through near complete collapse through a long slow rebuilding and recovery and suddenly back to massive destruction. Whatever happened on the reef looked very much like that.

We should be more concerned about the ongoing unnecessary influx of pollutants into the sea off the industrial heartlands of the world. Most such pollutants are actually safe to dump this way, but the problem is the lack of an audit trail that allows us to spot truly dangerous pollutants getting into the environment.

It likely required trivial abatement systems and a dose of common sense to prevent the dumping of mercury compounds in Japan fifty years ago, but no regulatory system was in place to catch it.

Does anyone actually believe that the Chinese are on top of this threat yet? Or India? I know that while most individuals in charge of these situations will do the right thing, there are always individuals who are both reckless and ignorant who are utterly focused on short term results. Every disaster will shake out another such fool.

In any event, it is fair to say that the global warming theme is been devalued by this sort of nonsense diverting attention.

Ocean Acidification

Recently,one of my correspondents brought up the subject of increased CO2 impacting the building of coral reefs through acidification of the ocean. I will admit that I am personally dismissive of this particular pathway. However, it is worth some discussion.

CO2 is absorbed into the upper layer of the ocean and is fairly quickly absorbed into the dissolved calcium carbonate content of sea water. This is a continuous process that with a rising atmospheric CO2 content might quite easily be expected to increase. Again though, the ocean mass is a huge sink that holds and maintains a calcium carbonate content in equilibrium with the accumulated calcium carbonate content on the ocean floor. In other words, it behaves like a saturated solution which is not likely to be much affected by a minor change in one of the variables.

There has been major variations of both CO2 content in the atmosphere and ocean uptake rates established as part of the geological record without any evidence of a radical change in reef formation which is of course the driver of this tenuous argument. At least no evidence that I am aware of. Meanwhile the carboniferous age bespoke a very high CO2 atmospheric content with a derivative ocean uptake.

I then return to the the other aspect of this acidification protocol and its effect on sea life. That is that sea life accumulates calcium carbonate through a direct ion exchange mechanism that can be mimicked with a direct current anode cathode pair. In other words, the life form energizes its environment to produce the appropriate shell. It is not dependent on the prevailing chemistry except to remain itself healthy. Before any effect was generated by this mechanism, it is a good assumption that the sea would have to become itself inhospitable.

So it is easy to see why I have been fairly dismissive of any negative effects to the ocean itself. The truth is, is that the ocean is a wonderful sink that has so far been able to handle our worst. I only get nervous over man made molecules that lack a biological pathway to breakdown.