by Jim Steele 8/15/2022
I need to thank Dr. Alan Longhurst for alerting me to the BBC’s fearmongering. He requested that I tackle the media’s perversion of science. Dr. Longhurst (now 97 years-old) is likely one of the world’s premiere oceanographers, inventor of the Longhurst-Hardy Plankton Recorder, served as the primary Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Heart of the US Nationwide Marine Fisheries Service and Director of the esteemed Marine Ecology Laboratory of Canada’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography, amongst different prestigious positions and tropical analysis.
(The pictures and captions are screenshots from BBC: Mangrove forests: How 40 million Australian timber died of thirst.)
The BBC’s brief video begins by exhibiting devastated mangrove forests type northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria from a 2015-2016 die-off. The BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Firm) framed this pure occasion as a human-caused local weather change catastrophe, to perpetuate the parable of a local weather disaster.
Mangrove specialist Dr Norman Duke attributed the episodic 2015 die-off to a 40 cm drop in sea stage for six months because of an El Nino that brought about the mangroves to “die of thirst”. Duke acknowledged that it’s well-known that El Ninos naturally trigger such main drops in sea stage within the western Pacific. However there is no such thing as a proof, nor any consensus, that El Ninos have been made worse by rising CO2. It’s recognized nevertheless, that El Nino exercise has elevated over the past 6000 years because the earth cooled for the reason that Holocene Optimum because of adjustments within the solar’s orbital cycles.
Duke estimated that about 7,400 hectares (74 km2) of mangroves had been misplaced. That may quantity to not more than 2% of the whole mangrove lined forests within the Gulf of Carpentaria. Mangroves are salt-tolerant shrubs and timber that develop in heat, coastal waters. The areas of extreme dieback matched zonation contours, the place increased elevations had been drier and most susceptible to sea stage fall.
In 2017, Duke revealed, “Giant-scale dieback of mangroves in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria: a extreme ecosystem response, coincidental with an unusually excessive climate occasion”. He reported that mangrove diebacks “occurred when regional annual rainfall ranges had been low, temperatures had been excessive and sea ranges had been notably decrease on the time.” And people circumstances correlated with “the El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle for this area”.
Though mangroves are tropical, and their enlargement is linked to hotter circumstances, and are recognized to be moderately warmth tolerant, Duke (2017) tried to attract a reference to world warming, mentioning there have been exceptionally excessive temperatures recorded on the time and “coincidental with heat-stressed coral bleaching”. Coral bleaching attributed to world warming was being tearfully pushed by Duke’s colleague Terry Hughes. Hughes’ catastrophic world warming narrative is now being refuted by the quickly rebounding Nice Barrier Reef corals. Such excellent news could be the driving drive for Duke and the BBC to resurrect a catastrophic mangrove narrative to guard and help inane local weather disaster narratives.
Duke (2017) had famous mangrove losses and retreat had been linked to drought,
decreased precipitation and momentary drops in sea stage. All these climate circumstances, together with hotter temperatures because of decreased cloud cowl, are all related to El Nino occasions, as heat tropical waters slosh eastward throughout the Pacific. Falsely, the BBC, ABC and Duke are actually oddly claiming the mangrove die-off and El Nino connection is newly found.
However others had additionally reported the El Nino impact at the least 5 years in the past. Lovelock (2017) in Mangrove dieback throughout fluctuating sea ranges wrote “Throughout El Niño, weak equatorial commerce winds trigger the thermocline to shoal within the tropical western Pacific and the presence of cool water ends in sea ranges that may be decrease by 20–30 cm”. “As a result of each low sea stage and low rainfall co-occur throughout El Niño years within the Indo-Pacific area, intensification of ENSO within the coming many years with local weather change could also be notably unfavorable for productiveness of mangrove forest ecosystems.”
Nonetheless the BBC and Duke doubled down on a local weather disaster reference to clear idiocy and sleight of hand. They seamlessly switched from blaming a pure fall in sea stage for the die-off, to expressing concern that rising sea ranges from world warming would hinder mangrove restoration. But that determined declare is definitely refuted, and in reality has been refuted already within the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
In 2016 Asbridge revealed “Mangrove response to environmental change in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria”. That research concluded, “elevated quantities of rainfall and related flooding and sea stage rise had been liable for latest seaward and landward extension of mangroves on this area.”For the period1987–2014, “mangroves had been noticed to have prolonged seawards by up to1.9 km (perpendicular to the shoreline), with inland intrusion occurring alongside lots of the rivers and rivulets within the tidal reaches.”
However such data didn’t forestall Duke and the BBC from descending into the depths of stupidity and name for paradoxical, ineffective and costly cures to “save” the mangroves. Duke desires to water the mangroves from the air or from ships to stop them from drying and dying. The rationale for such stupidity: mangroves retailer carbon. They nervous that the mangrove die-off launched “1 million tonnes of carbon into the air”, and the ABC added that’s the “equal to 1,000 jumbo jets flying return from Sydney to Paris.” However mangroves have naturally dried and died earlier than. No surprise nice scientists like Longhurst worry the present perversion of science pushed by local weather alarmism.
