MSNBC on Dying Reefs

[Randall_James]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20169258/

[acrodave]

that sucks but then again corals have been around since the dinosaurs and they are still here.but im sure we are not helping things

[MrSpiffy]

I swear, they try to blame everything on global warming...

You know, I love the reefs, too. But all this really is, is media fearmongering on a slow news day. Whenever there's nothing to report, they always bring some old news story up and rewrite it to scare everyone about how something is dying, bad, tragic, or horrifying. It really does get old after a while... To me, this is just like the boy crying "Wolf!" all the time. Eventually, they'll actually have something important to report and no one will care.

Honestly, there really isn't anything new here... people have been saying the reefs are dying for, likely, decades now.

[Randall_James]

I do not know what to believe, the press in general is about as credible as Fat Rosie on dieting... They rant and rave over just about everything without so much as a concern about what the truth is..

Guess I will just continue to preserve my piece :)

[woz9683]

Man-made global warming is nonsense. Our climate has been changing since the world started turning. We go through periods that are hot and periods that are cold. It's been a hell of a lot colder than it is right now in the past, and it's also been quite a bit warmer. Some things adapt and some do not, it's unfortunate if coral reefs are not able to adapt this time, but they've adapted before and I, for one, would be very surprised if they didn't make it this time.

[Randall_James]

did I not just see that we were coming out of a "mini iceage" of the last 500 years on the Discovery channel that made a mess of world populations and cause terrible losses across Europe?

[woz9683]

I think I saw that one too. It's amazing how much they contradict themselves. At least they aired something that showed a warming trend isn't a bad thing.

[Sarcophyton874]

I think that most of the coral reefs will die off and then come back sometime later after they adapt. It's hard to believe that NOTHING this bad hasn't happened before in the entire time coral reefs have existed.

[woz9683]

That's the point. We know for a fact the planet has been through hotter and colder temps, harsher and milder conditions, and life has survived.

Take the Discovery Channel show that Randall_James just mentioned. People are susceptible to this too. Nearly 1/3 of the world's human population died during the most recent "little" ice age (ice age=not global warming) but people recovered. I'll bet there might even be more people today than there were 1,000 years ago.

[acrodave]

if the people would go back about a year later of when they took the pic. you would see night and day. the corals would be all healed over and growing fine.wild corals grow crazy fast especially sps. when u have extreme low tide there is alot of die off and after a few week they are all better

[woz9683]

Another good point, there's absolutely no valid comparison in some of these "studies". I "read" An Inconvenient Truth just so I could be informed on both sides of the debate, I put "read" in quotes cause the thing is a picture book with very little information and even less support to back up anything said in it. But anyway, they'd put two pictures of a glacier, or coral, or any number of other things next to each other and show how much they had receded or died off, etc. just in the past few years, and then miraculously they put dates in the bottom corner, and one would be maybe January 2004 and the next August 2005. And I'm just sitting here thinking, first of all, is a year and a half really a valid time table for measuring glacial movement, and second of all, it's probably pretty normal to see water around a glacier in the middle of the summer.

The same thing applies to the coral example acrodave just gave, did they take pics of the coral at exactly the same time of year, same tide conditions even. We all know how quickly a coral can brown out and in most of these ambiguous pictures it the brown out or RTN probably doesn't have a damn thing to do with global warming.

[greenbean36191]

These studies aren't done by looking at individual corals. They are looking at average cover on the scale of entire reefs. You run a measuring tape over the reef for 30 meters or so and every 10 cm or so you note what's below the tape- live coral, dead coral, rock, algae. Then you move the tape and do it again and again until you have a large enough sample. When people do the same thing in the same places year after year it gives an excellent picture of the trends that are occurring regardless of how individual corals do.
For example, the study of reefs pretty much started at a lab in Jamaica in the 60s. People have been running transects there ever since. Some corals are healthy and growing, some have diseases, some are bleached, and some are recovering. Regardless of what the individual corals are doing we can look at the percentage of live coral people were measuring over the years and compare it to what is there today and we know that total live coral cover has dropped by 80% over the past 40 or so years.