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While you bring forward interesting data, I believe your view is uncharitable of the motives behind people wanting to protect coral reefs also you don't account

While you bring forward interesting data, I believe your view is uncharitable of the motives behind people wanting to protect coral reefs also you don't account for your own hindsight. Maybe a more charitable interpretation is that nobody really understood why there was such a massive drop and climate change was the most likely explanation so they went about warning about it given how important they are to their ecosystem ? Also I think you are wawing off climate change too quickly. Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ?

mike_hearn 2y ago
The incentives here are pretty straightforward and plenty of people within academic fields are willing to admit what kind of distortions they create. Look at any HN discussion on academic fraud and you'll find discussions from people who are or were scientists where they tell similar stories. Climate change wasn't the most likely explanation for the big drop. To make that explanation work you have to hypothesize a lot of hidden variables and/or unknown processes, because CO2 emission is a slow steady process. If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response in the absence of evidence, fine, but at that point anyone can make up any explanation they like and it's just as compelling. There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years. There are probably natural cycles at work here which might be interesting to investigate, or there might even be some sort of human cause that's not climate related (chemicals being washed into the sea or whatever). AIMS is supposed to figure that out but they don't seem to be doing that, they just keep crying wolf. So it's reasonable to point out their incentives. > Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ? Anything is possible in principle, but that doesn't help us much.
- cassepipe 2y ago
  Thanks for the elaboration. That part left unconvinced though: > If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response [...] There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years I am actually realizing that you are probably talking about the effects of C02 levels in the oceans while I was actually thinking about the global rise in temperature which IIUC has seen a kind of cliff-edge change. And IIRC, ocean warmth is what I have read is threatening coral reefs, so I am bit lost here.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    It was much hotter in the past than it is now. Look at any attempt to reconstruct temperatures from proxies. The underlying science is unreliable but everyone agrees the distant past had average temperatures far hotter than today. It was actually warmer even in the recent past. There's archaeological evidence that it was warmer in the Roman and middle ages than it is now. This was once uncontroversial and if you read archaeology papers you can still sometimes see discussion of this fact. But they don't highlight this because they don't want to pick fights with climatologists. There's hasn't been any cliff edge rise in temperature. Look at graphs of global temperature but be aware they're heavily manipulated. A graph of 20th C temperatures published in 1999 looks very different to the same graph published today.

mike_hearn 2y ago

The incentives here are pretty straightforward and plenty of people within academic fields are willing to admit what kind of distortions they create. Look at any HN discussion on academic fraud and you'll find discussions from people who are or were scientists where they tell similar stories. Climate change wasn't the most likely explanation for the big drop. To make that explanation work you have to hypothesize a lot of hidden variables and/or unknown processes, because CO2 emission is a slow steady process. If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response in the absence of evidence, fine, but at that point anyone can make up any explanation they like and it's just as compelling. There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years. There are probably natural cycles at work here which might be interesting to investigate, or there might even be some sort of human cause that's not climate related (chemicals being washed into the sea or whatever). AIMS is supposed to figure that out but they don't seem to be doing that, they just keep crying wolf. So it's reasonable to point out their incentives. > Isn't it possible that we were lucky enough that the coral just adapted quickly to environmental change ? Anything is possible in principle, but that doesn't help us much.

cassepipe 2y ago
Thanks for the elaboration. That part left unconvinced though: > If you want to posit some sort of cliff-edge response [...] There's no reason a-priori to believe that climate change kills corals given that they've survived hundreds of millions of years I am actually realizing that you are probably talking about the effects of C02 levels in the oceans while I was actually thinking about the global rise in temperature which IIUC has seen a kind of cliff-edge change. And IIRC, ocean warmth is what I have read is threatening coral reefs, so I am bit lost here.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It was much hotter in the past than it is now. Look at any attempt to reconstruct temperatures from proxies. The underlying science is unreliable but everyone agrees the distant past had average temperatures far hotter than today. It was actually warmer even in the recent past. There's archaeological evidence that it was warmer in the Roman and middle ages than it is now. This was once uncontroversial and if you read archaeology papers you can still sometimes see discussion of this fact. But they don't highlight this because they don't want to pick fights with climatologists. There's hasn't been any cliff edge rise in temperature. Look at graphs of global temperature but be aware they're heavily manipulated. A graph of 20th C temperatures published in 1999 looks very different to the same graph published today.