[Coral-List] Evidence that ocean warming has caused most Caribbean coral loss

[Ulf Erlingsson]

Dear John and others,

Please don't forget to mention that the baseline in that graph is the PEAK of the LITTLE ICE AGE, and thus a very poor reference point for global warming. A better reference point would be the average temperature the first 10,000 years after the end of the last Ice Age, i.e., from 8,000 BC until today. In those 10,000 years there has been but one Little Ice Age, which is why glaciers advanced from the Middle Ages until the end of the 1800's and started receding in the 1900's. It is disingenuous to the point of willful desinformation to ignore this in the graphs and arguments.

Chances are we are heading towards a new Ice Age now, and that the warming we see at present is just an interlude to this general cooling that will take place over the next 50 to 100 thousand years.

Ulf Erlingsson

> On 2017-04-25, at 08:50 , Bruno, John <jbruno at unc.edu> wrote:
> 
> This is a common misconception from folks unaware that global warming began many decades ago. Please have a look at the NOAA data plotted in this figure from my post: http://theseamonster.net/2017/04/caribbean-bleaching/nclimate2915-f4/ <http://theseamonster.net/2017/04/caribbean-bleaching/nclimate2915-f4/>  Or the graphics in Kuffner et al 2014 below it. These data should sort you out. The Caribbean had clearly warmed significantly by the time mean coral cover had been roughly halved (around the mid-1980s). Also, we haven’t lost any reefs yet, what we’ve lost is coral cover (and fish biomass).