Attenborough enters deep water over coral

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Climate Debate Daily reports that in the Guardian last Tuesday, the wonderful, inimitable David Attenborough warned alleged that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already above the level which condemns coral reefs to extinction in the future, adding the world had a “moral responsibility” to save corals.

This caught my attention. Already condemned to extinction? That is alarming.

But just a moment. Does he know the conditions corals have survived since they evolved? Does he know the current pH level of surface waters and the rate of change? Does he know that bleaching events cannot be linked to global warming? Has he heard of studies that show no change in marine biota even at pH levels ten times less alkaline than now? Continue Reading →

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A dreadful trend

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There was a recent post by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit that was difficult for some of us to understand. Fortunately, there’s an exposition of it at Climate Skeptic called “How to manufacture the trend you want” that makes it all clear. It’s regrettable, but please have a look.

It has to do with rates of calcification in Great Barrier Reef coral growth over the past 400 years. On January 2, 2009, in Science, De’ath et al reported an ‘unprecedented’ decline. But it seems aimed more to alarm than inform us. They showed a graph to support their claims. Steve revealed a graph of a longer time series that tells quite a different story.

Then we got to see the actual data followed by the deficiencies in the data; well, what a trend! It turned out that ‘unprecedented’ referred only to the last 153 years.

Richard Treadgold

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