Bleaching in Ningaloo?  I believe this is a first for high temperature-related coral bleaching. People have wondered why these reefs have not suffered from mass coral bleaching.  Unfortunately, that is no longer true. Here is a report by coral biologist, Dr Tyrone Ridgway (Australian Institute of Marine Science)

Posted on 01 March 2011

SEE UPDATE here.

Coral bleaching has been reported on Ningaloo – a reef system that has not experienced widespread bleaching to date.  Coral bleaching likelihood is largely determined by sea temperatures, and during the 2010/2011 summer, sea surface temperatures across Ningaloo were anomalously warm.

Coral bleaching events are usually caused by long periods (usually 4 to 8 weeks) of warmer than average summer sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and SST estimates from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch Program show that 2010/2011 summer SSTs around Ningaloo have been about 1°C to 3°C warmer than the long-term averages for the region.  As a result, Ningaloo was on Bleaching Watch for much of the summer and reached 4 Degree Heating Weeks (DHW)¹ in mid-January 2011 (Figure 1A).  In situ temperature loggers (~ 6 m depth) at Bundegi in the Exmouth Gulf and 14-Mile Beach on Ningaloo (Figure 1B) confirmed that actual water temperatures had been above seasonal averages since mid October 2010.

Continue reading →

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Continue reading →

Michael Mann, a professor in Penn State’s meteorology department and director of the university’s Earth Systems Science Center, claims that Ball defamed him when he said that Mann “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State,” for his alleged role in the so-called climate gate email tussle.

Mann says that Ball and the Centre refused to issue an apology and published the words with the “purpose of harming the plaintiff and exposing him to hatred, ridicule and contempt, lowering the plaintiff in the estimation of others, and causing him to be shunned and avoided.”

It’s not the first time Ball’s been sued by a climate scientist for defamation.

In February, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria sued Ball over an article published by the Canada Free Press, in which Ball allegedly accused Weaver of cherry-picking scientific data in his work with the UN’s intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Mann seeks punitive damages and wants the article removed from its electronic database. He is represented in B.C. Supreme Court by Roger McConchie.