Mystery and Menace

Vincent J. Curtis

8 Aug 24

RE: Reef waters were hottest in 400 years over past decade. AP article by Suman Naishadham. The Hamilton Spectator 8 Aug 24

This AP article is loaded with mystery and menace.  The menace lies in the claim that the waters around the Great Barrier Reef were the “hottest in 400 years!” and in the implication is that man is somehow responsible, and will be responsible for the death of the reef if it dies.

The mystery is what these temperatures are. The story doesn’t say. All it says its that ocean temperatures were the hottest in 400 years, “warn scientists” who say the reef “likely won’t survive if planetary warming isn’t stopped.”  (One detects a whiff of climate alarmism.) They also claim to have reconstructed sea surface temperatures from 1618 to 1995. (Shades of the hockey stick!)

The lack of numbers calls into question these alarming claims. For comparison, the average temperature of the human body is 37ºC. The optimum temperatures for sea-coral ranges from 23ºC to 29ºC, and some species can thrive in waters as warm as 40ºC. The average sea surface temperature today is around 21ºC.  Coral metabolism doesn’t seem to be the issue.

What these scalding, hot temperatures - said to be lethal to the coral - actually are appears nowhere.  Is ‘hot’ or merely ‘warm’ justified?  The reader cannot judge for himself the validity of the ‘hot’ and ‘hottest ever’ claims made by the scientists.

Sea surface temperatures vary considerably from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and ‘planetary warming’ has many meanings. Ocean currents, bringing warmer or cooler water, are more significant to sea coral than the temperature of the atmosphere above the water.  The reconstructed sea surface temperatures, like air temperatures reconstructed from tree rings, are of dubious scientific validity, fraught with assumptions of constancy, and burdened by claims of absurd precision.  There is no theory connecting the growth of sea-coral to average sea surface temperature. The tree-ring theories determining global atmospheric temperatures were debunked by Ross McKittrick and Steve McIntyre in 2003, and undoubtedly the same faulty mathematical methods they demolished were employed by the sea-coral scientists to ‘reconstruct’ sea-surface temperature.  

I’m certain the study ended with the statement, “more research is warranted.”

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