Stop That Now! Climate change helps aggressive mangrove forests build bigger tropical islands

The oceans were supposed to be swallowing up the islands

Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.

The Howick Group of islands is north of Cairns Australia. Three scientific expeditions mapped out them out in 1928 and in 1974, and again in 2021, and lo, they have grown, especially in the last four decades. That makes them like most of the 709 islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans that were studied a few years ago. Satellites showed that 89% of those islands had grown.

It turns out warmer more carbon rich world makes mangroves happy. Who could have seen that coming, apart from every biologist on Earth?

From the commentary in the video below:

“We’ve seen some really dramatic changes. Some of the things that we’ve seen are advancing fronts of forests. Forests that were mapped to small patches on the windward part of the reef flat are now occupying a much larger section of […]

Crabs are just another victim of Wind turbines thanks to EMF pollution from undersea cables

Edible crab like the one used in the study. Jean-Pol Grandmont Wiki

It’s a Nightmare on Crab Street

Crabs are being drawn to high electromagnetic (EMF) fields around undersea cables and getting trapped there for hours, “mesmerized”.

They are not just immobilized, in lab tests it screws up their blood chemistry and circadian rhythm too.

Nature-lovers might wonder what other marine life is also being impacted? What if the magnetic fields are playing havoc with migrating fish and turtles too? It might be handy to find that out before we build bigger taller towers offshore with bigger stronger cables.

Where is the Green outcry, or the Save-the-crabs campaign? Perhaps some kinds of pollution are OK “for the greater good”?

These are not some esoteric rare crustaceans, by the way, but common dinner crabs — the ones food chains and fisheries depend on.

If these crabs were victims of coal plants the headlines would be a catastrophe.

Underwater power cables are ‘mesmerizing’ crabs around Scotland

In a new study, researchers found brown crabs ‘freeze’ when they come too close to the electromagnetic fields generated by these cables. This disturbing behavior may negatively affect the marine creature’s […]

What a recovery! Hottest ever year causes… coral reefs to grow

Life bounces back

The Great Barrier Reef has had a good year. 2020 might have been the hottest or the second hottest year on record, but it was a bonanza year for reef recovery.

The reef covers 344,400 square kilometres, survived the Holocene Optimum, the Minoan warming, the Roman warming and the Medieval Warming, and is already recovering from a streak of few nasty El Ninos and a cyclone or two.

But the bottom line is that coral deaths are not easily relateable or predicted by hot weather or high CO2. If sea level changes or temperature volatility are the real culprits, the ocean currents or cloud cover may be the driver, and not the number of cars or solar panels in Australia.

As Peter Ridd has said for years: The Great Barrier Reef has about the same amount of coral as it did in 1985

Coral Cover, Northern Great Barrier Reef.

 

What a difference a few years makes. Where, here, is there any sign that either CO2 or high temperatures is a problem?

Coral Cover, Central Great Barrier Reef.

 

The trend appeared to be “all down” in 2011, but neither heat nor El […]

All reefs look dead from a plane — Great Barrier Reef still alive underwater

Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?

The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.

This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]

Busted: Reef fish aren’t bothered by “acidification” and James Cook Uni isn’t bothered by potential fraud.

“Clark et al. (2020) found 100% replication failure. None of the findings of the original eight studies were found to be correct.”

Scientists tried to repeat eight experiments that showed “acidification” would make reef fish get hyper, act like their predators smell nice, and generally swim in the wrong circles, behave weirdly and need therapy sessions. Turns out the fish will be OK, but James Cook Uni’s reputation may never recover. The original junk experiments and press releases came out of the coral reef centre at JCU.

This is the “replication crisis” Peter Ridd warned us about. He was fired from JCU in 2018 after stating that work from JCU’s coral reef centre (ARCCoE) was not trustworthy. He also helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish. Obviously this latest reef research shows he was right to be concerned about quality assurance at JCU. One JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden, and yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots. Indeed, two years on, JCU has not even officially appointed the committee to investigate her potentially fraudulent work. It seems JCU would rather employ untrustworthy scientists than […]

Sea Level scare industry urges plans to panic and evacuate over 1mm rise

Please, sell us your low lying land

Let’s play sea level bingo with the latest advertising from the Merchants of Sea-level Scares.

Hitting the media outlets tonight — the latest “Prepare to Die” news stories claim we must plan now for evacuees, refugees, inundation and homeless koalas. All the usual features of marketing are there — firstly all the images they use are from mocked up futuristic sea level rise. Secondly, it’s not a continuation of current trends, it a sudden acceleration — in this case from 1mm to year to 9mm a year, effectively starting tomorrow.

1 tiny millimeter

From 1969 – 2013 the seas have not changed the beaches around these Tuamotu atolls — or almost any other atoll you can name.

By every method known to man, seas are rising around 1mm a year:

1,000 tide gauges, hundreds of studies of beaches, satellites measuring sea levels, and satellites measuring beaches.

All anyone needs to know about sea levels is that for the last 50 years sea levels have been rising at 1mm a year as shown by a thousand tide gauges all over the world. There was no acceleration. (Beenstock et al). Some of those gauges […]

Antarctic Sea Ice lowest in 40 years, but no one knows why — “back to drawing board”

Put it in a history book: scientists are sounding like scientists — admitting they don’t understand

Antarctic Sea Ice set records in 2014, but then in 2016 it rapidly declined and hasn’t recovered, indeed right now as the southern winter peaks, it’s at a record low. The long term trend is still rising, but its now only half the rate it was in 2014. On this blog, Mike Jonas recently demonstrated that the Southern Ocean had cooled, not warmed as all the models predicted. But what matters here is that sea ice covers 7% of the world and we don’t know what caused it.

What is also a record is that most scientists and journalists are showing real restraint and are not blaming this as a climate change event.

Even, bowl-me-over, New Scientist, is showing admirable restraint: Antarctic sea ice is declining dramatically and we don’t know why. This is the first time since starting this blog ten years ago that I have been able to say that. Congrats Adam Vaughan.

Decades of expanding sea ice in Antarctica have been wiped out by three years of sudden and dramatic declines, leaving scientist puzzled as to why the region […]

New finding: Phytoplankton are much bigger players in CO2 levels than realized

Mysterious CO2 activity in New Zealand shows Phytoplankton at work

Tom Quirk both finds a mystery and solves it.

Emiliania huxleyi coccolithophore | Alison Taylor.

Carbon dioxide is a “well mixed gas” yet CO2 levels over New Zealand start rising there each year in March — a whole month before we see it CO2 start to rise over Tasmania. Air over Cape Grim in Tasmania will be blown by the prevailing wind over to New Zealand about five days later. So these two stations should be showing similar numbers throughout the year. Instead some process in NZ is pushing up CO2 early. Levels also peak earlier in New Zealand, and by September, in early spring, some process around NZ is pulling the CO2 out of the sky. Both NZ and Tasmania share large forested areas, so that wouldn’t explain the difference.

Quirk wondered if it had something do with phytoplankton, so he searched for satellite data that measures chlorophyll in the ocean and shows, voila, that there is major activity right around the Baring Head station at the same time as CO2 levels are falling. Indeed, the station is smack in the middle of a mass phytoplankton bloom.

He […]

Far Southern Ocean cools. Kiss Goodbye to polar amplication around Antarctica

A map of the sea surface zone that has cooled since 1979 — from 56S – 72S . It’s a pretty big area. Click to enlarge.

For years the IPCC have said that warming would be amplified at the poles. They warned us things would heat up twice as fast, which would melt sea ice. The oceans surface in turn would switch from being reflective white to a dark absorbing deep blue. Enormous amounts of energy would then flow into the ocean instead of being reflected back out to space. The more it warmed, the more it would warm — unleashing a devastating feedback loop.

As the Arctic warmed, the merchants of doom were keen to tell us how how right they were and this was evidence of man-made warming. But in the Antarctic exactly the opposite trend was taking place.

Mike Jonas has done what the IPCC should have been doing — investigating the trends in the Sea Surface Temperature in the polar latitudes with satellite records. In the latitude band from 56 to 72 degrees south the oceans have cooled, not warmed. The models don’t even have the sign of the trend correct. At the latitudes where […]

Rising seas? Hundreds of Pacific Islands are growing, not shrinking

This should end all the Pacific Island climate claims right here. A new study of over 700 islands for decades shows that even though seas are rising faster than any time in the last million years, somehow no islands with people on are shrinking. This means there are no climate change refugees from any vanishing island. Plus it’s more proof that highly adjusted satellite data is recording sea levels on some other planet.

Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted.

Look how closely these researchers are tracking the shores. Below on Tuamoto, French Polynesia, scientists can tell you that islets 12 and 14 (see pic) have disappeared since 1962. So we can track roving blobs of sand about 20 to 30 meters across.

….

 

No habitable island, none, got smaller:

The researchers reckon that 10 hectares is about the smallest island you’d want to plonk […]