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We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected.

Put me firmly in the camp of "we need to protect the environment at all costs" (ex. I believe that companies that pollute our waters should get shut down, I believe boats that produce massive amounts of pollution should be sunk by our navy, etc), but I also tend to no longer believe the click-bait headlines that our entire society is rife with. These headlines produced by journalists, not scientists, are the information that gets propagated and that is poisoning our society with misinformation.

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Well, maybe we should also read beyond headlines — because this article offers a glimmer of hope, but no guarantee that the world’s reefs will bounce back from the very real damage they’re being subjected to.

Yes, exactly. It's like nobody read to the end of the article:

"For sure, it's good news, but what we are seeing now in the Mediterranean Sea and other parts of the world is that these marine heat waves are recurrent—happening every summer or every second summer," Kersting said.

These corals also grow very slowly—at a rate of about 3 millimeters a year—"so if you are having every second summer a heat wave, and it's killing 10 to 15 percent of the cover, I mean, the numbers are clear," he added.

"They actually need help from us. We need to stop climate change, because it's not going to be enough."

Global warming is just starting. Ocean temperatures are on an uptrend. If every human being disappeared right now, temperature would increase for decades.

Even those who read the full article tend to gloss over the very real consequences that are being promised. It's part of people's nature to just try and suppress issues as long as possible because, hey, there's a marginally good thing happening, it's impossible for a bad thing to be happening as well, right? Depressing but it's not unusual when the news is a constant stream of darkness.

How does this at all prove the "cataclysmic forecasts from scientists" — namely, that climate change will destroy the reefs — wrong? The scientist responsible for this study himself says, "We need to stop climate change, because it's not going to be enough," i.e. this discovery doesn't chance the broad forecast at all.

The headline itself explains it: what happened to the corals was previously stated to be fatal. But it turns out not to be fatal. That's a miss and raises questions about whether the new predictions at the bottom of the article are also wrong.

People survive gunshots to the head and chest, falls from high heights, heart attacks and smallpox.

Most things that are reasonably described as "fatal" aren't actually death sentences; well, no more than actual death sentences, for which reprieves are granted all the time.

Doesn't make them good, or even particularly less bad.

> but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists

This is a really dangerous mindset.

"We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected."

Yet again, someone falsely ascribes views to scientists that they never had. I keep track of this stuff, and I don't know what forecasts you are talking about.

Actual forecasts (ipcc reports), if anything have been overly conservative. And they are grim. There is active research as to why they are overly conservative and reality is proceeding worse than the already grim forecasts.

this is how the reactionary mind works. the problem isn't the problem. the problem is how THOSE PEOPLE reacted to the problem such that now I, THE REASONABLE AND INFORMED ADULT MODERATE, must now devils-advocate (aka advocate) for the problem.

As I've gotten older I've realized that "moderates" who generally agree with you but advocate for less action (and often inaction) are generally the biggest stumbling block to getting things done.

MLK's letter from Birmingham jail is still really true to me today (you can just search for "moderate" to find the part I'm talking about) https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

I've found in my personal life (so maybe this doesn't hold true on the internet, but maybe it does when there is something at stake, like karma points) that moderates who advocate for lesser actions, but 'agree' with me are really just people who don't agree with me at all but don't want to take an action (disagreement) they perceive as possibly being damaging to a relationship.

One Person's Source: All of the people who say 'I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal' in my life have turned out to be veeerrrryyyy socially conservative.

So this is part of it but I've also met people who agree with me but are still resistant to action. The most obvious time for this is protests, I've met so many people who agree with what the protestors are protesting for but don't like how they are going about doing it.

Though I will say using protests as an example here while valid is a little of a unfair because people always criticise protestors for their tactics, regardless of how reasonable (I know I have in the past)

You ever though that maybe they have seen this bullshit before and realize it is not the end of the world, That we need to do something just like we did for Acid rain and the Ozone layer but that all of the bullshit predictions that where made where nothing but bullshit. They where real and valid issues, we dealt with them and we did so in measured and moderate courses. But the radicals had us all dead multiple times over while we dealt with them with moderate action.

If you think the greenhouse gas problem is comparable to the acid rain or ozone problems then you fundamentally do not understand the science, and you as an engineer fundamentally do not understand what "orders of magnitude" are.

It is only from a position of wholesale ignorance of the scientific reality that you can make such a facile equation.

To put it in a simple analogy, you just said "those alarmists told me it was going to rain last week and it didn't, therefore this hurricane warning is bullshit i'm not evacuating".

I do understand what orders of magnitude is, I also understand that none of the orders of magnitude predictions have come to pass. If you cannot make accurate predictions, it's not science plain and simple. In less than a week there have been two articles on this site attributing their phenomena to global warming. Both subjects I am extremely knowledgeable on, the first being a claim that the climate exodus has begun in the the Florida Keys due to global warming. The article was a lie on it's face, I live there, people are leaving because there is an economic crisis in the Keys. I cited very specific evidence in that discussion as I literally hear people every day talking about it and why they are leaving. I talked to the guy this morning that owns the auto-shop 1 island down from me, he told me he had a contract on his commercial property and is getting out, he is in his 70's works alone and is getting too old for it. He cannot get help due to the affordable housing crisis and can sell his property and retire so he figures it's time. This is the reason and a reporter could have spent 5 minutes in the Keys and came to that conclusion, but the headline for the story was written and then the facts where put together to fit the foregone conclusion.

The second was this one which is also bad science. I drink with some of the worlds top scientist in the coral research area, I live on the same island, my daughter volunteers at their facility and I help with reforestation efforts in this area, when they do reforestation dives. in my other posts I clearly articulate the facts as to what is causing reef die off. I did not say global warming is not a problem, I said radicals are lying and trying to co-opt every bad thing that happens in nature to AGW, because they "want" it to be orders of magnitude. They did the same thing with acid rain and the ozone layer both where fixed by addressing and banning products (lead in gas, CFC's, refrigerants) not by silly proposals like cap and trade. Or suggesting that we are all going to have to just reduce our standard of living to save the world in 10 days.

A measured approach to migrating to Solar, Wind, Tidal and electric vehicles is how we will address global warming. Not creating a stock market for carbon. It's literally the stupidest idea ever and is advocated because it's a great way to skim money off the top by the elites and to limit entry into industry via regulations.

When they attribute these things to AGW, make predictions and they don't come true then they are engaging is agenda and advocacy and not science and it causes real issues. When these lies get exposed as they have, like with the CRU and the pause-buster papers, it gives ammo to the likes of Trump and the Koch Brothers to gut the EPA and roll back hard won environmental changes that where back by real science that made accurate predictions. the radicals insistence that AGW be tied to everything, gave us opening of public land to drilling and fracking. The radicals directly defeated the hard won battles fought by the moderates that won them. So you will forgive me when I see a statement that we the moderates enable the opposition, when it has been the radicals and their willingness to bend the facts that has enabled the deniers to throw the baby out with the bath water. People that mask advocacy and agendas as science, have no right to, they are stealing hard work and research to further their agenda. Which is unfair to the people that did the real work. AS their disinformation allows the properly done work to be discredited by showing the agenda, and then pandering to it, to discredit the real data.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

People just love kicking down anything or anyone popular.

But just because that is an automatic human reaction, as you mention from some "I'm smart and know better" than other people, for some emotional high, that also applies to the extremists who push it hard on both ends with the same "I know better" motivations. Often at a much higher and frequent degree.

You could make a good argument that the moderates are often the lessers of evils and the most frequently right, just as long as we stay aware of their own weaknesses as motivation killers or overly compromising middle ground that can sometimes be the worse of the three generalized positions (sometimes doing nothing is better than something for the sake of appeasing the loudest voices, which one could argue is not true moderation).

Regardless these meta discussions only have so much value and are always a massive distraction.

At our core, we are socially uncomplicated. We exhibit swarm behavior and calibrate ourselves based on our nearest neighbors (or, in a more complicated way, how social media can be used to distort our views). This is how the Overton Window works, it's why there's a bias towards appearing as a moderate.

It's a good heuristic, it's just wrong in the case of our climate situation.

There will always be plenty of grey area when it comes to what we can practically do in response to climate change, even if we all did reach a common sense type consensus on how bad it currently is.

Especially when it comes down to local level policy for such a global issue.

This will always be a hard fight.

No, quite a lot of scientists have made such claims about coral reefs over time. Not all and some have refuted those claims too, so the media is certainly to blame for presenting a false consensus. But for example:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exa...

(original is paywalled)

Activist scientists and lobby groups have distorted surveys, maps and data to misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, according to the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt.

A former head of Greenpeace Canada famously turned on his old employers and started arguing that coral bleaching predictions related to climate change (ocean acidification, back then) were wrong:

https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O...

Many papers on ocean acidification, said to be caused by rising man-made CO2 levels in the atmosphere, predict that it will result in the mass extinction of marine species that employ calcification, including corals, shellfish and many species of plankton, and that this, in turn, will result in the extinction of many other marine species.

It cites some examples:

Even scientists one might expect would be more moderate in their tone employ alarmist language. An example from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution: The anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 is driving fundamental and unprecedented changes in the chemistry of the oceans. … We argue that ocean conditions are already more extreme than those experienced by marine organisms and ecosystems for millions of years, emphasising the urgent need to adopt policies that drastically reduce CO2 emissions

So it's not really the case that scientists are pure-white victims of the press, here. Many scientists have made terrifying predictions about the health of the oceans and been happy to milk the resulting press coverage.

I don't know what to tell you. Wattsupwiththat is not a scientific website, it's a political website. It is a source of misinformation

You can just with your own two eyes at bleaching events in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Pacific, and Caribbean if you don't want to believe the scientific community.

You're cherry-picking counterexamples to make your case, which is not valid. Reality is bad. You are misreading the data. You are also conflating acidification with temperature change. Coral is going to die because of the heat well before aragonite and calcite dependent populations collapse because of pH changes.

Look, if you want to try and shoot the messenger, do so but do it properly. Otherwise you just look foolish.

The webpage I linked to on that site is not "politics". It's a copy of a paywalled Australian newspaper article discussing scientists who disagree with the supposed consensus - deeply relevant to the points at hand. If I'd been able to link to the original I would have done, and then you wouldn't be talking about Wattsupwiththat at all, but that wasn't possible so I had to link to a duplicate. If you believe that Australian newspaper is also a "politics website" that is a "source of misinformation" then justify that.

Or better, stop messenger shooting and tackle the actual arguments being made by the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

Now, in your rush to condemn you've missed the point being made here, and missed it very badly indeed.

So I'll spell it out again. My "case" is nothing to do with corals or reefs. I don't care about corals or reefs, to put it bluntly. I care about the state of debate and its relation to science, or lack of it.

So reread and you'll see I was responding to this statement:

Yet again, someone falsely ascribes views to scientists that they never had. I keep track of this stuff, and I don't know what forecasts you are talking about.

That's a strong claim: that scientists are having views ascribed to them by the media that they never actually had (views of impending coral doom), and thus this discovery that the corals aren't dead after all shouldn't affect our perceived reliability of scientists.

The article in the Australian clearly shows that this view is false: an authority no less than the chairman of an Australian authority devoted to the Great Barrier Reef has said explicitly that "activist scientists" were working to "misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching". Clearly this is more complicated than scientists (all of them) being ascribed views they don't have by journalists.

First, The Australian is checking the referrer. If you google for "Activists ‘distorting’ reef data" you will be able to view the article. It should be the first or second result.

Second, the link you provided is about bad media coverage, and Wattsupwiththat presented it in a biased manner. The reality is one Australian agency thought 22% of the reef died in 2016, and another thought that 35% died. The person in charge of the first agency took issue with the head of the other agency's language and some (poor) unrelated media reporting that grossly overstated the extent of the die off. He was completely correct to take issue with the poor reporting. But there is no dispute that 1/4-1/3 of the reef bleached that year. If you are interested, here is the publication from the 2nd agency, with methodology: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04660-w

Notably, the scientist you are talking about, Dr. Reichelt, didn't disagree with the consensus. Quoting him, "This is a frightening enough story with the facts, you don’t need to dress them up. We don’t want to be seen as saying there is no problem out there but we do want people to understand there is a lot of the reef that is unscathed"

If it's of interest to you, https://www.aims.gov.au/reef-monitoring/gbr-condition-summar... is a great resource, and will show bleaching events and recovery in the various regions of the Great Barrier Reef.

> If you believe that Australian newspaper is also a "politics website" that is a "source of misinformation" then justify that.

I don't want to jump in on the rest of your conversation but I saw this and thought I could chime in. The Australian is our only national broadsheet with a long history of fairly good reporting, good commentary from all sides of politics, but a definite conservative editorial slant. Unfortunately over the last few years its reporting in general and environmental reporting in particular, have veered away from good quality conservative aligned journalism towards the more typical Newscorp produce. On reef issues in particular Graham Lloyd is well known for cherry picking sources even if they have little expertise in the area or have already had their views discredited in the scientific community.

https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/muddying-the-wate... https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/great-barrier-gri...

So to answer that statement, the Australian is definitely a source of misinformation on environmental issues and if its not a politics website, it has a strong political agenda.

Like this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7139797.stm

Pardon me at this point for disbelieving in the ability to accurately model very complex systems.

And no, our technology has not suddenly achieved this magical ability in the last 30 years.

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