I've heard the Australian
Great Barrier Reef has been
dying since the 1960s.
So it's amazing
I'm still reading
the Great Barrier
Reef is dying !
Reef is dying !
It seems
that the coral
that the coral
would ahave
already been
already been
long gone
by 2020 ...
by 2020 ...
perhaps
secretly replaced
by plastic replicas,
like people put
on the bottom
of their home
fish aquariums !
Primary source:
The chart above
has fifteen years
of missing data,
Fifteen years
is a long time
to ignore actual
measurements
( after 2005 ).
Claims are that growth
on the reef has slowed
by -15% in the 15 years,
from 1990 to 2005.
Another 15 years
have passed, so
so did the reef's
growth rate
decline by
another -15%,
for a total
growth rate
reduction
of about -28%,
since 1990 ?
Of course
a growth rate
reduction
of 15%, or 28%
does not mean
the reef has
stopped growing.
That would require
a 100% reduction
of the growth rate.
Porites corals
are typically used
to estimate coral
growth rates of the
Great Barrier Reef.
( GBR )
The yearly
[coral growth]
rings are roughly
10 millimeters thick
so a coral that is
many meters across
can be hundreds
of years old.
AIMS is the
Australian Institute
of Marine Science.
In a study,
AIMS took cores
from more than
300 corals
on the GBR
and concluded
that for
the past
300 years
coral growth
was stable,
but in 1990
there was an
unprecedented
and dramatic
growth rate
collapse of 15%.
Peter Ridd explains
AIMS didn’t measure
the rings correctly,
and used young and
small corals, not the
original large old corals
of 1990:
AIMS used much smaller
and younger corals
for the 1990-2005 data,
compared with the
mostly very large
and old corals of the
pre-1990 data —
and this is what caused
the apparent drop at 1990.
AIMS continues to predict
a significant fall in
coral calcification rates.
The best test
of any prediction
is making actual
measurements.
None since 2005 !
Missing data
since 2005
says a lot.