“RESEARCHERS in Australia say the growth of coral on the country’s iconic Great Barrier Reef has fallen since 1990 to its lowest rate in 400 years”, variations of this message have been repeated around the world with global warming, and the associated acidification of oceans, claimed to be the cause. [1]
That was at the beginning of this year, in January, and the media frenzy was based on a paper by Glenn De’ath, Janice Lough and Katrina Fabricius published in the peer-reviewed journal ‘Science’. [2]
Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre has recently had an opportunity to download all the data used to construct the key illustrations that suggested catastrophe.
Mr McIntyre concludes that looking at just yearly averages (above graph) there has been a general trend of increasing coral calcification rates at the Great Barrier Reef since the late 1500s.
In recent years there have been fewer measurements of coral at the Great Barrier Reef and the apparent downward spike in 2004-05 may be an artifact of the data – lack of data. [3]
[Read more…] about Coral Calcification and Ocean Acidification Revisited
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
