How many people are aware of the "total ecosystem collapse" in the coral reefs due to warming? Not many, probably, because this "reef shutdown" started 4,000 years ago, according to the authors of a paper published in Science, and ended 1,500 years ago when the reefs resumed growing as usual. The collapse, which represented "40 percent of (the reef's) total history", corresponded to the "period of dramatic swings in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation" that occurred long before soccer moms began savaging Gaia with their SUVs.
So, the lesson in all this, from the coauthor of the study?
"As humans continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the climate is once again on the threshold of a new regime, with dire consequences for reef ecosystems unless we get control of climate change."
Or, to put his statement through the paraphraser™, the world has always been heating and cooling to a much greater degrees than it is now, but now we can finally charge people for it.
Love it!
Every politicians wet dream. A tax on nothing.
Thought tax next...
Dire consequences or grave concequences? What's more serious?
grave.
Emotive words have no place in scientific studies. "Pump" indeed. Oh, I just exhaled. I just pumped some CO2 into the local atmosphere.
Through the magic of IPCC amplification this will cause the deaths of a million coral organisms. Absolutely definitely will. At the 90% confidence level.
Peterj says, "Every politicians wet dream. A tax on nothing" - which people (some people) are clamouring to pay.
There's a flaw in this "it's happened before without people, so what's the problem" stance.
Learning what climate effects in the past have resulted from known causes is a major way of predicting effects from our actions. For example, ice caps began to form when the long slow 50-million-year decline in CO2 reached about 400-450 ppm. Now we are approaching that level in the opposite direction and at 10 000 times the speed.
There is a recent book on this Understanding Earth's Deep Past: Lessons for Our Climate Future available for free download from the U.S. National Academy of Science.
As for the coral reefs, the last time they collapsed, species died or retreated to enclaves. Perhaps the "piece of work" that is MAN can do a bit better, since we are causing it. The page you linked to notes a conference about to be held in Cairns Australia -- the International Coral Reef Symposium. The "Book of Author Abstracts" [also free to download] runs to 600 pages.
@ dizzy at July 6, 2012 11:25 AM
"The "Book of Author Abstracts" [also free to download] runs to 600 pages."
If it were not for the joy of computers with their "garbage in, garbage out capacity", the report would only be a couple of pages long and would still only be guess work. As the ICCP has proven, "experts" are great on guess work. As long as it meets their need for additional funding the sky will continue to fall.