{"id":408738,"date":"2025-10-17T10:24:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T08:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=408738"},"modified":"2025-10-17T10:24:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T08:24:11","slug":"coral-recoveries-and-growth-show-the-hill-is-misleading-about-global-warming-killing-reefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=408738","title":{"rendered":"Coral Recoveries and Growth Show The Hill Is Misleading About Global Warming Killing Reefs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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From ClimateRealism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Linnea Lueken<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Close-up<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A recent article in The Hill, \u201cClimate change is not a \u2018con job\u2019<\/a>,\u201d claims that catastrophic, human-caused climate change is killing reefs via ocean heatwaves. This claim is false. In reality, corals have existed for millions of years, through warmer and colder periods, and in the recent past, coral reefs have recovered from bleaching events and even die-offs, proving to species to be adaptive and resilient in the face of climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hill<\/em> article, from Rebecca Vega Thurber, the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute, is framed by Thurber\u2019s annoyance that President Donald Trump says climate change is a \u201ccon job.\u201d She claims her personal research experience refutes his comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thurber explains that pollution from fertilizer runoff can kill corals, which is true, but goes on to assert that \u201cevery result we have collected, in every one of these well intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades.\u201d She says their efforts to mitigate pollution were \u201coverwhelmed by high water temperatures<\/a> driven by climate change or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thurber claims marine heatwaves in the French South Pacific hampered her work by \u201ctransform[ing] these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In point of fact, one long-term study<\/a> from 2019 showed that rather than a \u201cbarren plain\u201d French Polynesian reefs have an \u201coutstanding rate of coral recovery, with a systematic return to pre-disturbance state within only 5 to 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A second study from 2024, published in Nature, <\/em>sought to understand why reefs bounced back so readily after major heat waves, concluding that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past three decades, there have been five main warming events that have caused mass bleaching around Moorea and Tahiti, in 1994, 2002, 2007, 2016, and 2019. Despite bleaching levels up to 100% for some coral species, reefs experienced as high as ~76% recovery following each event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is currently unknown what controls the ability of coral coverage to recover quickly at these locations. It has been suggested that reefs may develop an increased tolerance to higher SSTs following each bleaching event, and that the increased resilience would allow for a shorter recovery period with less die-off under subsequent SST extremes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, the scientific literature does not support Thurber\u2019s contention in The Hill that coral reefs are dying off in vast numbers. Interestingly, just a few years ago The Hill published<\/a> an article with a different tone, discussing the fact that coral reefs were thriving \u201cdespite warming seas,\u201d but the outlet seems to have forgotten this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Thurber and The Hill also neglected to mention was that recent mass die offs did not just coincide with heatwaves alone. Rather a spate of tropical cyclones and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks occurred over the same period resulting in multiple coral colony declines. Multiple stressors are harder on a species than any of those dangers would be alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thurber mentions that Australian reefs are another part of her area of research, but she does not mention that 2024 was the third year in a row where the Great Barrier Reef had record breaking coral coverage<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, close study of reef die backs barely existed in the early parts of the 20th<\/sup> century and before, so short term records like single-event tied die-offs do not stretch into the pre-industrial period for comparison. As a result it is all too easy for alarmists to assert, for example, that marine heatwaves are unprecedented when there are only a few decades<\/a> of satellite data to work from. Longer term studies, and a knowledge of how coral reefs around the world are built over time, show, in fact, that coral death is part of the reef construction process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coral reefs\u00a0have survived<\/a>\u00a0much hotter periods than today, like the\u00a0Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum<\/a>\u00a0which was 5-8\u00b0C hotter, as well as much colder glacial periods. One reason for this is that coral organisms are not immobile. Even if particular regions became too hot, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes, corals could just migrate poleward,\u00a0as research suggests they did in the past<\/a>. Change like that might be uncomfortable for narrowly focused researchers, but it is part of the Earth\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hill did a disservice to its readers by publishing this article which served no other purpose than was to frighten readers into ignoring Trump\u2019s important point, that bad actors (particularly at the United Nations, where he made the comments) are using climate alarm to promote harmful leftist-favoring policies and enrich themselves. I am sure that Thurber is a \u201ctrue believer\u201d in the catastrophic warming narrative, but it does not help her case when essential facts are left out of the argument and when the multiple sources of data that do exist contradict her claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t

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