Serendib

Coral Bones emerges momentarily from hibernation to note Reef Ramblings on Arthur C. Clarke – Pioneer of Scuba Diving and Reef Exploration.

On hold

There are unlikely to be more posts on Coral Bones, at least for a little while. (I do, however, continue to blog on a variety of topics at Grains of Sand.)

I'd like to express my admiration for some remarkable people I have encountered (virtually or in real life) over the last few years. They are engaged in urgent struggles for understanding, justice and the protection of natural wonders, and deserve more support.

There are many sources of information on the future of coral reefs on the web. Some of them are listed in the links section on the right hand side of this page. Happy 'International Year of the Reef'!

Death sentences

In Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and sixteen other distinguished marine scientists call for... decisive action.


Photos: extant examples of reefs from the Great Barrier Reef that are used as analogs for the ecological structures anticipated under the paper's coral reef scenarios. Photos by O. Hoegh-Guldberg.

A post on Dot Earth, Carbon Dioxide Is Double Threat to Reefs, summarises non-technically.

P.S. 14 Dec: The Guardian reports this as Acidic seas may kill 98% of world's reefs by 2050.

Reefs and carbon sequestration

On 7 Dec, the Jakarta Post reported Asia to push coral reef into Kyoto system:

Indonesia and five other countries within the Asia and Pacific regions announced Thursday they will propose a huge global contribution from their marine and coral reefs to absorb carbon, to be taken into account...within the protocol.

But leading marine scientists say there slim to no grounds for claiming reefs as carbon sinks. Stuart Campbell of the Wildlife Conservation Society wrote on Coral List (7 Dec):

today’s Jakarta Post...claim[s] that the reefs of the Coral Triangle....act as sink for around 245 million tons of carbon per year. My reading of the literature suggests that reefs both act as sinks and sources of atmospheric carbon - depending on their productivity rates and many other factors - this is a complex issue and a publication by Kinsey and Hopley (1991) suggests that globally coral reefs act as a sink for 111 million tons of carbon each year, "the equivalent of 2% of present (that was 1991) output of anthropogenic CO2". But there are many complicating fators including production rates of reefs and their effect on the reduction of pH, solubility of CO2 and its release to the atmosphere. Generally the literature I have read suggests that coral reefs contribute to the global greenhouse effect, but in a way that is part of the natural cycle of inorganic carbon in and out of the atmosphere. I'd be interested in any recent publications that provide updated information on this issue or anyone who knows where the estimate of 245 millions tons of CO2 for the Coral Triangle Region came from?

Tom Goreau responded:

The claim that coral reefs are a CO2 sink is completely incorrect. They are in fact a source of CO2 to the atmosphere even while they remove carbon from the ocean. This has been understood by carbonate chemists for a long time but we keep having to deal with this popular error over and over again.

Because the ocean is a pH buffered system in which electrical charge is conserved, for every atom of bicarbonate in seawater that is converted to carbonate and deposited as limestone one molecule of bicarbonate is converted to carbonic acid and then to CO2 to balance the charge. So in effect for each atom of carbon removed from the ocean into limestone, one atom is released as CO2 to the atmosphere.

On a geological time scale limestone deposition and volcanic emissions are the two major sources of atmospheric CO2 (since photosynthesis and respiration plus decomposition balance). Atmospheric CO2 in turn dissolves in fresh water, where it is the major acid once it ionizes, and is then neutralized by chemical weathering of limestone on land and of igneous and metamorphic rocks, being converted into bicarbonate which washes into the sea, resuming the cycle.

Half of all the limestone buried in the sea is buried in coral reefs (since most open oceanic production dissolves in the deep sea), but to put it into perspective, this natural source of CO2 is 50 times smaller than fossil fuel input, showing how seriously we have perturbed the natural carbon cycles.

The only way that reefs could be a CO2 sink would be if they were autotrophic ecosystems that buried most of the algae carbon before it could decompose. But in fact reef sediments have very low buried organic carbon content, because the organic carbon is almost entirely decomposed. In fact, reefs are not autotrophic at all, they are heterotrophic systems that rely on external organic carbon input from land and oceanic zooplankton. Whenever I have measured oxygen in a reef it has always been below saturation, except directly over dense shallow seagrass beds in full sunlight. Overall the reef organic carbon cycle is consuming oxygen and producing CO2, as well as the CO2 produced by limestone deposition.

Coral reefs are the first and worst victims of global warming, but they do not contribute to removing CO2 form the atmosphere at all. We must save them for their biodiversity, fisheries, shore protection, and tourism services, not because of false and misguided claims that they are carbon sinks.

Catch less to get richer

Economics of Overexploitation Revisited shows in four disparate fisheries that dynamic maximum economic yield can exceed maximum sustained yield.

"This means that if you reduce the harvest now, you'll actually be better off", says co-author Quentin Grafton
(Catch cuts 'bring bigger profits').

The fisheries studied include long-lived and slow-growing orange roughy which live on seamounts rich in benthic life including cold water corals.

Ecotourism 'benefits nature and reduces poverty'

I've been critical of ecotourism in the past, perhaps intemperately so. Conceding that "there is substantial evidence that well run eco-tourism projects can bring substantial benefits to a few poor communities", I have asserted:

too many poor people in the world are dependent on primary resources such as reefs and forests ever to be reached by eco-tourists. This great majority will not receive the benefit of eco-tourist dollars but will suffer the impact of the tourists’ pollution. Very often eco-tourism is a stalking horse mass tourism, which is hugely destructive of the environment in both the short and long run. (from Holidays on Death Row at Climatedenial.org)

Still, it is good to see further evidence that well run eco-tourism projects can benefit communities that depend on coral reefs. Nature's Investment Bank, a report from The Nature Conservancy draws on interviews with more than 1000 people in four recently protected marine zones in Fiji, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands. "In every case, the conservation schemes had boosted fish catches and helped create new jobs." The common factor in each case, say co-authors Craig Leisher, Peter van Beukering and Lea M. Scherl were:

the heavy involvement of the local community in the creation of the protection zone, the legal designation of "no catch" zones where fish could breed, and the policing of these zones by government agencies. In all four cases, action was taken after a collapse in fish populations through overfishing by outsiders.

But:

There has to be a sense of crisis before people are willing to change the status quo dramatically.

News reports here and here.

Under the sun

Nothing new, as far as I can see, in the Reuters feature 'Indonesia's corals threatened by climate change'; yet another heads-up ahead of the negotiations in Bali.

'The Amazon of the Seas' for the Coral Triangle may be a new-ish marketing term. Conservation organisations like WWF and CI started using Wallacea a few years ago to describe the terrestrial biomes at the centre of this amazing area, but that name - after Alfred Russel Wallace - is more obscure and, perhaps, Euro-centric.

HMG and Chagos

10 Downing Street has responded to a petition (noted on this blog here) asking the Prime Minister "to drop the [UK government's] appeal against the Chagos islanders' right to go home." It says:

[the former Foreign Secretary] decided to seek permission to appeal because our treaty obligations to the United States require the Territory be kept "for the defence needs" of both governments and our 2002 feasibility study came down heavily against the feasibility of resettlement.

The Court Of Appeal's judgment also raised issues of constitutional law of general public importance that, in her view, would adversely affect the effective governance of all British Overseas Territories. This would include confusion in the legal system applied in those Overseas Territories, and potential conflicts between local and English courts. For these reasons, the former Foreign Secretary thought it to be in the public interest that the effect of the Court of Appeal's judgment, even if correct, should be clarified.

Permission to appeal was granted by the House of Lords on condition that the Chagossians' costs were met by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Given the public interest the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband has accepted this condition. The Government expect the case to be heard by the House of Lords in 2008.

Tough love and resilience

Tim McClanahan, a Senior Conservation Zoologist with Wildlife Conservation Society who is based in Kenya, circulates notice of a new paper making a case for some good news. Here is his non-technical summary:

The future of coral reefs is precarious and continues to look bleaker as more and more seas report bleaching and further losses of living cover on reefs due to pulses of warm water. This has sent coral reef scientists and managers searching for locations where corals thrive and that are cool and likely to stay cool as climate heats up in the coming decades. The hope is to insure that these cool spots will provide a refuge for corals and to give them the highest levels of protection, in order that at least some corals and living reefs survive climate change. Unfortunately, the number of such places are few and located in areas that often do not support flourishing coral reefs and their legendary biological diversity, resulting in a future that many informed marine biologists see as few scattered spots of uninspiring diversity in a sea of chalky reef skeletons. Not what they have come to expect from this underwater Eden.

But a recently published study documenting the change in coral reefs over the past 10 years in East Africa has considerably brightened this gloomy picture. The authors have identified another environment where high diversity corals may survive and possibly thrive. Ironically, these tropical seas are both warm and have among the fastest rising seawater temperatures, but what makes them different from many other reefs is that the temperature of the water is highly variable across seasons and years and this appears to give them the tough love that helps them survive the rare and deadly hot pulses that devastate their more pampered cousins. The study finds that these areas are often found around islands in the shadows of ocean currents where current speeds are slowed and where water temperatures fluctuate accordingly, but may also be found in subtropical locations that naturally fluctuate with seasons. This study and a companion study found that these reefs are among the most species diverse reefs, equally high in numbers of species to reefs found in environments with less seasonal and yearly fluctuations. This study shows that it is not just the high stability of tropical environments that creates high biological diversity but also fluctuations that prepare them for the unexpected and this may allow them to persist in what is becoming an increasingly hostile environment.

for further detail see: Effects of climate and seawater temperature variation on coral bleaching and mortality by T. R. McClanahan, M. Ateweberhan, C. Muhando, J. Maina, and S. M. Mohammed. Ecological Monographs, 74: 503- 525.

'On speaking before Al Gore'

This came in yesterday from Tom Goreau, who is on his way to the Sustainable Mariculture Conference in Makassar before attending the Bali climate change conference as advisor to the delegations of Jamaica and the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre:

ON SPEAKING BEFORE AL GORE

Tom Goreau, President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
November 24 2007

On November 20 2007 I spoke before Al Gore at the Global Warming Conference organized by the Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands. “Before” in the temporal sense of being the speaker scheduled just prior to Al Gore, not before in the spatial sense of being physically in the same room. Al Gore arrived a minute before his speech and left seconds after. He briefly met the Prime Minister, the Minister of Environment, the Governor, their wives, and the deputy head of the World Tourism Organization, but none of the other speakers. (In the interests of full disclosure, I was the first person to show data conclusively establishing the link between global warming and large-scale coral bleaching, to Al Gore’s Senate Panel in 1990, which was vilified and then ignored, but which led directly to the International Coral Reef Initiative when he became Vice President in 1993. Both his name and mine come from an old French word for a little pig.)

Al Gore gave a nearly hour-long speech that was gracious, charming, and packed full of homilies that “the future was in our hands”, and that “young people should learn about the environment”. But it contained absolutely no specific information, analysis, or strategy about climate change whatsoever. It was a rote feel-good speech, lacking any visual props, typical of political and religious exhortations, to which he added an opening sentence about how beautiful the Turks and Caicos were and how he would be back (rousing applause), and an ending sentence for local color that the “Caribbean should unite in the face of climate change” (covered in the press worldwide), although no specific suggestions were offered. The only practical tactical response to climate change he made was that he hoped young people would lie down in front of trucks building new coal-fired power plants.

My 20 minute speech “before” Al Gore showed that the last time that global temperatures were 1 degree C above today’s levels 125,000 years ago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Bahamas, and Jamaica were swept by waves of a magnitude that we have never experienced, that sea levels were 25 feet higher, and that crocodiles and hippopotamuses lived in London, England.

It pointed out that since CO2 was one third lower then than it already is now, those conditions underestimate what will happen if we add absolutely no further CO2 to the atmosphere. It showed how and why IPCC projections seriously and systematically underestimate future climate change sensitivity, which the past climate record clearly shows, by failing to account for either the major positive feedback mechanisms or the full time scale of climate system responses.

It emphasized that adaptation is only a stopgap measure, but for long-term climate stability the CO2 already in the atmosphere must be reduced by at least a third, not allowed to rise further as it would if the Kyoto Protocol was enforced. It summarized the history of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and how the original draft prepared by the UN (which I had a hand in writing) was turned by governments into scientific nonsense, promotes carbon accounting fraud, rewards bogus carbon sinks and penalizes the real ones, was incapable of meeting its own goals to protect the most climatically sensitive ecosystems, and therefore is a death sentence for coral reefs and low lying island nations.

It demonstrated why coral reefs could take no further warming, how the global coral reef satellite sea surface temperature data base I developed had predicted coral bleaching accurately for decades, showed global trends that indicate much worse is imminent, and revealed for the first time that changes in ocean circulation are already underway worldwide and destroying fisheries from the bottom up. It showed photos of how we had kept coral reefs alive in places where they would have died from heat stroke by giving the corals 3-5 times faster growth rates and 16-50 times higher survival, how we restored coral reefs and fisheries in a few years in places in the Caribbean, Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia where they could not recover naturally, and how we turned beaches in the Maldives that were being severely eroded by sea level rise into growing ones.

It explained how CO2 could be removed from the atmosphere and stored in ways that greatly increased soil fertility by improving ancient, but until recently lost, methods of Amazonian Indians. It discussed the need for small island developing states to adopt new, proven, but currently unutilized technologies to tap tidal energy to prevent CO2 emissions and to recycle wastes and renewable biomass into clean water, fertilizer, and gaseous and liquid fuels. It argued the need to build large-scale ecosystem restoration into climate change treaties as critical to stabilizing climate, soil, water, fisheries, and biodiversity resources. It outlined tactics and strategy that Small Island States could pursue in the UN Climate Summit in Bali to turn it into a scientifically sound tool for effective action. It summarized many unexpected findings from our extensive survey of the health of Turks and Caicos reefs last year, and the implications for their management.

Later, many people kindly told me that they learned more from my speech than all the rest put together. The Turks and Caicos Government paid Al Gore [what is reported to be a six figure sum] for his celebrity photo-op advice. They paid me precisely nothing. The publicity was directly proportional to the money paid. Gored again!

The handwriting is now undeniably on the wall, in both planetary and personal senses. Without unimaginably radical changes in the next weeks, right after the UN Climate Change Summit in Bali I’ll be forced to quit my quixotic endeavours, and take a job asking the public if their hamburger is to go and if they want ketchup on their fries.

Tsunami damage report

At the time, there was much comment in the media, not all of it well-informed, about the impact of the Sumatra-Andaman tsunami of 26 December 2004 on coral reefs across the Indian Ocean. Andrew Baird notifies that an edition of the Atoll Research Bulletin devoted to this issue, no. 544, is now available on line.

In one of the papers, Baird and colleagues report on findings in Aceh. They write:

the initial damage to corals, while occasionally spectacular, was surprisingly limited and trivial when compared to pre-existing damage most probably caused by destructive fishing practices.

Hope in Buton

John French, whose recent work also includes revolutionary undergarments, has drawn an introduction to a seaweed farming project in Buton, Indonesia supported by Oxfam which, it's hoped, may help local people whose reefs are at risk to generate income.

YouTunicate

Project Sea Camel is posting a series of underwarer classes about corals and other marine organisms on YouTube here.

Soft corals 'melt due to global warming'

It's too late. We have now actually missed the boat in finding some key pharmaceuticals. There is a huge gap in our knowledge of soft corals in the reef environment, and with the rate of extinction, we have lost certain species forever.

-- says Hudi Benayahu of Tel Aviv University.

'Life'

John Bohannon's lively account of the Genoa Festival of Science (Celebrating Food, Feces, and 3 Billion Years of Evolution) links to Beginnings, an excerpt from Life with photography by Frans Lanting, music by Philip Glass and video by Alexander V. Nichols.

I think the excerpt is beautiful and worth watching. It covers the development and emergence of single and then multi-cellular life forms in the sea, but does not of course pretend to be comprehensive, and makes some poetic short cuts. It includes marvellous images of stromatolites, probably the first reef builders, and modern corals, which differ significantly from their ancient ancestors, and modern jellyfish which look, at least superficially, like those of the Middle Cambrian (500 Million Years Ago, Jellyfish Left Their Mark in Fine Sea Sediments).

Flush

Carl Hiaassen writes that "One of South Florida's dirtiest secrets is the daily dumping of a half-billion gallons of sewage into the Atlantic Ocean":

Among reputable marine scientists there is little debate. Sewage contains higher levels of nitrogen, ammonia and other contaminants that are widely believed to promote algae blooms and disease in coral communities.

As coral formations die off, fish, lobsters and sea turtles lose critical habitat.

Your average second-grader has no difficulty understanding that polluting the ocean has unhealthy consequences, but [the politicians] are slow learners.

[Hat tip to GCRA]

Happy 55th!

To Ivy-Mike and the thermonuclear age.

The fireball was over 3 miles (5 km) wide, and the mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 57,000 feet (17.0 km) in less than 90 seconds. One minute later it had reached 108,000 feet (33.0 km), before stabilizing at 120,000 feet (37.0 km) with the top eventually spreading out to a diameter of 100 miles (161 km) with a stem 20 miles (32 km) wide.

The blast created a crater 6,240 feet (1.9 km) in diameter and 164 feet (50 m) deep where Elugelab had once been; the blast and water waves from the explosion (some waves up to twenty feet high) stripped the test islands clean of vegetation, as observed by a helicopter survey within 60 minutes after the test, by which time the mushroom cloud and steam had been blown away. Irradiated coral debris fell upon ships stationed 30 miles (48 km) from the blast, and the immediate area around the atoll was heavily contaminated for some time.

Before:
After:

Chagos petition

Ian Orr asks British citizens to sign a petition on the number 10 website calling on the Prime Minister "to drop an appeal against the Chagos islanders' right to go home". You have to be a British citizen to sign.

Orr also asks people to urge their media contacts to give publicity to a letter from an All-Party group of UK MPs, MEPs and members of the House of Lords which "should appear in a UK daily paper on 2 November". Once published, the final text will be on the website of the UK Chagos Support Association. (A draft text is attached as a comment at the bottom of this post. "It shows that the Prime Minister's fine words in his recent speech 'On Liberty' ring hollow when compared with the treatment over the years of the Chagossians". )

"Chagossians deserve support", says Orr. " To see their faces, go to an excellent site for photos of the exiled Chagossian community in Mauritius by the photographer Phuc Quach."

The Chagos Islands have some of the finest coral reefs in the Indian Ocean...and one of the largest U.S. military airfields in the region.

'Parrotfish to aid reef repair'

...say Peter Mumby and colleagues (BBC, Nature)

Marine methuselahs

Andrew Baker notes a BBC report about the discovery of 'Ming the Clam' an Icelandic bivalve thought to be 405 to 410 years old and the 'oldest known animal'. He tells Coral Bones:

"Although this is an impressive lifespan for such an unassuming mollusc, many corals are probably much older. Off the island of Ta'u in American Samoa, in approximately 13m (40ft) of water, lives an enormous helmet-shaped coral at least 7m (22ft) high and 12m (37ft) in diameter. This coral, a colonial invertebrate in the scleractinian genus Porites, consists of at least 100 million polyps and is likely to be at least 600 years old. It may well be much older, given the fact that it began life in relatively deep water and therefore may have grown more slowly during its first few centuries. In fact, it's not inconceivable that it dates back as far as the fall of the Roman Empire or the birth of Christ. Chuck Birkeland and others at the University of Hawaii have studied this coral for some time, and have identified it as a candidate for the title of "world's largest coral".


The photo shows this coral, which I believe is affectionately nicknamed 'Big Momma', next to a diver for scale. Note that a large tumor-like growth is visible on the side of the colony (which the diver is inspecting), indicating that methuselahs like this coral may show cancerous signs of their age.

Not only is this coral almost certainly older than Ming the Clam, but it is also still alive (unlike Ming). If we can protect this coral, and others like it, from the combined effects of climate change, overfishing, nutrient pollution and disease - stressors which, combined, ravage reefs worldwide - there is every reason to expect it might continue living for centuries to come.

Although colonial invertebrates like this coral might not fit the standard idea of (solitary) 'animals', they nevertheless qualify for the longevity title, particularly considering the fact that all of the coral's polyps are genetically identical to one another (minus some somatic mutations along the way). Indeed, there is every reason to expect that this enormous coral is the same genetic individual that first settled as a planktonic larva on this distant reef over a thousand years ago."

500 million years of moon gazing

The discovery suggests that the basic mechanisms for responding to light were in place

at the origins of multicellularity in animals.

-- Reported in the New York Times as Sexy Corals Keep ‘Eye’ on Moon, Scientists Say.

At loggerheads

Peter Aldhous reports:

In March 2006, the entire Hawaiian swordfish fishery was shut down for the season - 120 boats consigned to port after their hooks snagged their 17th loggerhead turtle of the year. Now it turns out that a dozen Mexican fishermen, sailing six tiny boats with outboard motors, posed an even greater threat, drowning 700 loggerheads in a year.

...researchers calculate that in 2005 the gill nets killed at least 299 turtles and the long lines more than 680. That is catastrophic, as the US National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that the loss of just a few dozen large juveniles per year would "appreciably increase" the population's risk of extinction.

Under a project called GloBAL researchers are looking to see if similar disasters are unfolding elsewhere. But in Mexico, at least, there is some good news. [Hoyt] Peckham [of the University of California, Santa Cruz] and his colleagues worked hard to stress the value of conservation - even bringing over fishermen from Japan, who told their Mexican colleagues of crashing turtle populations on the nesting beaches.

Last month, the long-line fleet agreed to use alternative fishing gear. "That was the most powerful conservation action I'll probably be able to make in my career," Peckham says.

This story is tragic, with a dash of hope. The direct relevance to coral reef protection may be limited but here are three possible links:

1) There may be lessons for more sustainable small-scale fisheries directly affecting reefs;

2) Some of the seven sea turtle species play a direct role in the ecology of coral reefs. I understand that green turtles, for example, are important herbivores on reefs. Other species may play a role indirectly through their consumption of seagrass and other organisms. Healthy reefs produce sand in which, ultimately, many but by no means all turtles nest; and

3) Mexico's Pacific coast is not entirely devoid of hard coral, as there is Cabo Pulmo. A whole eco-region conservation approach could better protect both coral and turtle.

Why care? David Rains Wallace quotes John Steinbeck: "There is some quality in man than makes him people the ocean with monsters...An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep".

Without its known wonders the ocean would be a desolate waking.

Reef shark/coral reef movie

David McGuire circulates a note about Sharks: Stewards of the Reef, a film about shark/reef interactions, finning and threats to coral reefs (with reference to analysis by Bascompte et al published in PNAS in 2005).

[The film has been out for some months, but this note is prompted by a short exchange on Coral-List.]

Ocean acidification blog

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg praises a blog on ocean acidification by Jean-Pierre Gattuso.

I'm embarassed to say I wasn't previously aware of this blog, and am happy to discover it. But with titles like Dynamics of dimethylsulphoniopropionate and dimethylsulphide under different CO2 concentrations during a mesocosm experiment, some of the posts may take a little chewing before digesting.

Easy finger food to whet your appetite is provided by Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker, and my earlier piece in New Scientist.

Al Gore and coral reefs

A UK high court judge has criticised Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth for innacuracies, including the statement that "coral reef bleaching events are due to global warming".

In New Scientist's enviroment blog Catherine Brahic reminds us that:

[According to] the IPCC [2007 Fourth Asssessment] report, if the temperature were to rise by 1 °C to 3 °C, there would be increased coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality, unless corals could adopt or acclimatise, but that separating the impacts of climate change-related stresses from other stresses, such as over-fishing and polluting, is difficult.

The IPCC states that most corals will bleach if temperatures rise by more than 1 °C over what they were in the 1980s and 1990s (Table SPM-1 in IPCC's WGI ). Temperatures over the past 50 years have warmed by 0.13°C per decade (p 5 of WGI summary for policy makers).

Many scientists agree that limiting warming to 2°C above 1900 temperatures will need CO2 emissions to be cut by more than half from their 2006 levels by 2050. So unless drastic, world-wide policy measures are agreed, increased coral bleaching looks pretty likely.

Bleaching is caused by other factors as well, namely disease. There is some evidence warming will also increase the incidence of disease.

Other factors that can cause bleaching include a sudden influx of large amounts of fresh water. This happened, for example, to coastal reefs in Jamaica after exceptionally heavy rainfall associated with a hurricane some years back. The link has, I think, been quite well understood for years.

Understanding of the role of diseases in coral mortality, and the interaction of disease with other factors, including warming, has been developing over a number of years (see, for example this article from back in 1997) and has a long way to go. Among those publishing in the field are James Cervino and colleagues, and Drew Harvell and colleagues. But I doubt any knowledgeable scientist would deny that Al Gore's statement captures an essential truth and a central concern, if not the whole truth plus footnotes.

I'll hazard that most scientists in the field would say that, pace the IPCC, the chances of coral reefs acclimatising and thriving under a temperature rise of more than 2 °C during the 21st century are about as great as my acclimatising to having a tonne of concrete dropped on my head (which may be a good idea for other reasons).

[As Spencer Weart tells Andy Revkin, “The I.P.C.C. was set up to be the lowest common denominator, to weed out anything anyone could disagree with. It was deliberately created, largely under the influence of Reagan administration, because governments didn’t want a bunch of self-appointed scientists from academies and so on out there. It’s no accident that it’s the Intergovernmentalpanel. Even the Saudi government has to agree. That means that when the I.P.C.C. says you’re in trouble, you’re really in trouble.”]

Perhaps Nobel laureate Gore could nuance a future statement along these lines: "Manmade global warming plays a significant and growing role in the bleaching and death of coral reefs, with devastating effects for some of the richest and most wonderful life on Earth and the human communities that depend on them. On present trends this is likely to get much worse. There are a lot of other ways in which humans damage coral reefs and these need to be managed too."

Pipe dream

This blog is behind the curve in noting James Lovelock and Chris Rapley's letter to Nature, Ocean pipes could help the Earth to cure itself (see, for example, the BBC story here).

Responses from serious scientists and others seem to have been divided. For example, the felicitously named Quirin Schiermeier at Nature News (Mixing the oceans proposed to reduce global warming, 26 Sep, subscription only) reports a split of views on the likely net effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations:

"The concept is flawed," says Scott Doney, a marine chemist at [the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution]. He says it neglects the fact that deeper waters with high nutrients also generally contain a lot of dissolved inorganic carbon, including dissolved CO2. Bringing these waters to the lower pressures of the surface would result in the CO2 bubbling out into the air. So contrary to the desired effect, the scheme could result in a net 'outgassing' of CO2, he warns. "There is no technological fix for this problem," he says.

Others say such a project would have no net effect on CO2 in the atmosphere. "At every meeting I've been to, when they have talked about this idea for surface ocean CO2 removal, the point has been made that you would bring up nutrients and inorganic carbon in the same ratio as you remove as biomass," says Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist at WHOI. And there are potentially many harmful impacts on sea life, he says.

In a BBC video report, Lovelock suggests that the pipes might specifically benefit coral reefs by bringing up cool water to save them. In the same clip John Shepherd, who is one of the most eminent oceanographers in the UK, says the idea may be dangerous, but he is not quoted on specifics, and I have not yet seen in any media an analysis by coral reef specialists of what they think the effects could be. Perhaps they don't think it is worth commenting on (Ove?).

One marine scientist I have talked to says:

This whole crazy scheme is proposed by people with no understanding of marine ecosystems or carbon cycles. Upwelling deep water just causes eutrophication and the algae will kill any coral reefs. Besides almost all the carbon taken up by algae is eaten, or rots, returning the CO2. Almost none is permanently buried, which is the only number that counts. This is the most inefficient possible method of carbon sequestration unless you turn the whole deep sea anoxic and kill all the fish.

P.S. 5 Oct: Oliver Morton hoists some comments from Professor Peter Williams into Nature's climate blog, including:

Even if the engineering problems could be solved, and the system made cost effective, both of which seem very doubtful, the proposal would have the reverse effect of that claimed.

Exploding heart

A campaign to jumpstart better protection of the Florida manatee.

Carnival of the Blue V

Shifting Baselines ("A Cure for Ocean Amnesia") has a roundup of best ocean blogging in September at Carnival of the Blue V.

'Oceans in Peril'

Worldwatch has just published Oceans in Peril: Protecting Marine Biodiversity:

Marine reserves are essential to protect the biodiversity that maintains ecosystem integrity, say the report's authors [...who...] call for a radical change in fisheries management from a single-species approach to one that is ecosystem based and also includes the use of precautionary measures to tackle pollution and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that are changing the temperature and chemistry of the oceans.

'Plunder or protect'

WWF Australia is calling for the entire Coral Sea region to be declared a marine protected area. The campaigners are using economics-based arguments:

The resident population of sharks at Osprey Reef, the main dive site in the Coral Sea, is 40 animals, making each shark worth over $250,000 per year. When you compare this figure to $62.50 - the asking price for shark catch by local fisheries, it is more than evident Australian reef sharks are more valuable alive than dead.

News reports include this, this and this.