Reefs Have Seen It All Before

A commenter here has recently told me that I should take anything the Daily Mail (UK) says, with a grain of salt. And I realized that, Yes, I probably should, as the media, be they Leftist or to the right - but as many of us realize, are almost 100% to the Left - have an agenda. And one must needs dig deeper to make certain of the realities behind the story.

So when I saw this article in the Daily Mail about coral reefs, I figured I ought to take it a step further. The article describes findings in the paper, but gives no link to the paper itself.

An Excerpt from the Daily Mail gives us the following:

'The world's reefs looked almost identical 50 million years ago, researchers have said.

They say reef fish - including the clownfish made famous in Disney's Finding Nemo, were already in place, alongside virtually all the major families of the 4,500 species of fish seen today.

The new study shows that the ancestors of these fish colonized reefs in two distinct waves, before and after the mass extinction event about 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs.

'Reef fish represent one of the largest and most diverse assemblages of vertebrates', said Samantha Price, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC Davis.

'If you were able to dive on a coral reef 50 million years ago, the fishes would seem familiar, you would recognize it as similar to a modern reef,' she said.

Price is first author on a paper describing the work, published April 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.'

Ok. So that tells us that coral reefs had been established pretty much as we see them today, 50 million years ago. But it doesn't tell me what the research actually said. Fortunately they give enough information to look up the peer-reviewed research, a paper published in the Royal Society Journal, Pierce et al, 2014.

As broken down in an article on another site, it notes that coral reefs and accompanying biota were established during a period of massive climate change. To quote:

'The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary -- formerly known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary -- is often remembered as a violent time that took out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. Now new work shows how the K-Pg extinction event may have actually helped establish our modern reef fish communities.

Today, about 4,500 fish species live in reefs, which house one of the largest, most diverse collections of vertebrates on Earth. About 7 percent of all vertebrate species have made their homes in coral reefs, which only make up less than 0.01 percent of Earth’s surface. Yet, their origin and early evolution isn’t very well understood. The earliest known fossil assemblage of modern coral reef fish dates back 50 million years. The rest of the patchy fossil record suggests that the major colonization of reef habitats must have occurred in the Late Cretaceous and early Palaeogene.

A team led by Samantha Price from the University of California at Davis used a phylogenetic approach (with evolutionary trees) to analyze the early dynamics of modern reef fishes. About 92 percent of reef fish belong to a single group called acanthomorphs, the spiny-rayed fishes. By looking at niches they occupy as well as DNA data, the team hoped to pinpoint when different acanthomorphs colonized the reefs.

Their results show that the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous had a major, and positive, impact on the evolution of reef fishes: Reef lineages successively colonized reef habitats throughout the time periods that straddle the K-Pg boundary.

They found two waves of reef colonization on either side of the mass extinction event: one in the Late Cretaceous from 90 to 72 million years ago and the other immediately following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.'

The Earth has seen quite a bit of climate change since then, with major swings up and down in both temperatures and sea level - yet the coral reefs have survived. One would think, listening to 'man-made' global warming alarmists today, that coral reefs didn't stand a chance- 'the oceans are overheating! Coral reefs will never survive!'

It is true that some coral reefs have had a hard time of it of late- but when one looks at the sources of the problem, they find it is more human-caused pollution, such as run-off of excess fertilizers into the rivers dumping into regions where some corals occur. A prime example would be the bleaching of coral in the Florida Keys.

But it does NOT make sense that the current changes in ocean temperatures would be catastrophic to coral reefs, though this is exactly what the IPCC and others would have you believe.

Why do I say that? Quite simply, because the corals have seen it all before, and that many times over. It doesn't make sense for ocean temperatures during the Holocene - the epoch of time we currently occupy - to be so MUCH harder on coral reefs. Because ocean temperatures have been higher in the past.

The Eemian is a prime example of this. The world was several degrees C warmer during the Eemian, than it is now. Sea surface temperatures were 1-2C higher than anything currently being measured. The Arctic was so warm that forests existed well up into the Arctic circle, where there is only frozen tundra today. The Arctic itself was ice-free during the summers- and polar bears survived that handily.

And corals thrive at or near the surface of the ocean, in fact they follow sea level changes. So if current temperatures across the globe are somehow absolutely Disastrous for corals, how did they survive all the thousands of climate shifts over the past 50 million years, when there are clearly much warmer periods behind us? Something is clearly wrong with the claim....

In looking up this material, I came across a hint about that. Seems that hurricanes go a long way towards cooling off the coral reefs. To whit:

Hurricanes redistribute heat energy from the surface of the ocean, cooling it. That is the reason hurricanes exist in the first place: they are part of the heat exchange cycle. If there is one thing CO2 does NOT do (and there's quite a bit it does not do, despite claims), it is to make hurricanes worse. Otherwise, they need to explain why there were so many hurricanes during the Little Ice Age, when both CO2 and sea surface temperatures would have been lower.

Corals of course have adapted to climate change in many other ways, in order to survive. Among various other adaptations is corals' symbiotic relationship with colonies of bacteria . And reef regeneration often works at much higher rates than researchers had thought.

Coral reefs, like virtually All life on Earth, have long since adapted to climate changes, and come up with multiple ways to respond to changes, be they rapid or slow. But you are only very rarely going to hear any of this, unless you are willing to dig deeper yourself. The vast majority of the media, activist scientists, and politicians pushing an ideology, are not about to clue you in on such things.

Which is why I have learned to take even the Daily Mail, with a grain of salt (water). But at least they are trying.