According to a report from the Nature Conservancy, the coral reefs are suffering this winter in the Florida Keys following a cold snap:

Sustained cold water temperatures in South Florida and the Florida Keys triggered severe coral bleaching and even coral death, alerting resource managers and prompting a coordinated assessment response from the science community. Temperatures in some nearshore areas of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary dropped to 52 degrees Fahrenheit for several days — well below average for this time of year — with fatal results for some corals.

A cold-water bleaching and die-off hasn’t occurred in Florida since the late 1970s.

“The Keys have not seen a cold-water bleaching event like this since the winter of 1977-78, when acres of staghorn coral perished,” said Dr. Billy Causey, southeast regional director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. “But today we are better prepared to document and assess the impacts of stress thanks to numerous partners.” Causey has lived and worked in the Keys since 1971.

On Coral List, Lew Gramer from the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory suggests that the cold snap might have lasting impacts:

Recent reports have surfaced among scientists, resource managers, and the media of large-scale, multi-species fish kills that have been primarily limited to shallow-water environments in Florida and Biscayne Bay.

Coral mortality has been reported from south Florida when water temperatures previously declined to 14 degrees Celsius, or below. While temperatures on offshore reef environments have been > 17-18 deg C (likely due to oceanic influence from the Florida Current), shallow-water and nearshore environments have fallen well below 14 deg C (e.g., 10-11 deg C near Long Key). It is expected that there will be some cold-water bleaching and potential for mortality in shallow-water corals and other reef organisms.

Tom Opishinski from Interactive Oceanographics posted a followup:

Our station at the Smithsonian Marine Lab in Ft. Pierce recorded a low of ~9.25 deg C in the IRL on 1/11.  A bit away from the corals but the record nicely shows the cooling trend corresponding to a 10 deg C drop occurring over a 2 week period.  Data can be accessed/viewed at http://nmnhmp.riocean.com/fp_raw.php – the plot will default to show water temperature then select “2 weeks” for the time period.

I thought this was worth posting (via ABC News): Professor Andy Pitman (lead author on the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports and co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales) thoughts on the ongoing efforts of climate denialists to derail the IPCC:

“Climate scientists are losing the fight with the sceptics”

“The sceptics are so well funded, so well organised. “They have nothing else to do. They don’t have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and [managing publicity] actually isn’t one of them.

“All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think.

“They are doing a superb job at misinforming and miscommunicating the general public, state and federal governments.”

And he says if scientists lose the climate change debate, it would be “potentially catastrophic”.

“If this was academic debate over some trivial issue [it wouldn’t matter],” he said.

“But this isn’t. This is absolutely a fundamental problem for the Earth that we desperately needed full-scale international action on a decade ago.

“We are now 10 years too late to stop some of the major impacts that we will see and have seen as a consequence of global warming. It is not a future problem, it is a problem here today, around us.”

Professor Pitman has accused sceptics of failing to base their arguments on the facts.

“Most of the climate sceptics, particularly those that are wandering around publicly at the moment, don’t base their arguments on science,” he said.

“They have probably never read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report; they aren’t writing papers in peer-reviewed literature.

“They don’t update their arguments when their arguments are shown to be false, so they’ll have no problem at all using this ammunition inappropriately and out of context to further their aims in exactly the same way as people did when they were trying to disprove the relationship between smoking and human health.

Professor Pitman has also played down the significance of the error in the IPCC’s report.

“There are two paragraphs that have been questioned in a 1600-page document,” he said.

“After two years, people have been going over that report with considerable care and have found a couple of errors of fact in a 1600-page document.

“I mean, we ought to be talking about the other 1599 pages that no one has found any problems with.”

Professor Pitman says he has no concerns about the IPCC’s reviewing process.

“We should be very clear on what the IPCC does. It writes a report that is fully open to external review. [Anybody] can each read over individual sections of the report and send in credible comments,” he said.

“So each government tries to pore over each of the statements to find fault with them and at the end of that process, future drafts are produced, again with opportunities for external examination and feedback.

“And you end up with a final report, which in this case some people have found one or two errors with after two years.

“I reckon that is a standard that most organisations would absolutely celebrate.”

The latest slandering of climate science in the press has been dubbed ‘glaciergate‘ – about the Himalayan glacial melt issue (see David Spratt’s response here). I don’t get quite why the denialist crowd seem to revel in non-issues, when there is much else to criticise about the IPCC, and much more obvious knowledge gaps in our understanding of climate as a whole.  Nature has a very detailed discussion of these ‘holes’ in climate science (regional climate forecasts, precipitation forecasts, aerosols and palaeoclimate data). It’s refreshing to see such a well written and open article discussing these gaps and ‘problem areas’ – as one scientist warned recently:

“This climate of suspicion we’re working in is insane. It’s drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science.”

Ever laughed at the deniers who claim that climate scientists are in it for the money? Why not ask this: to what extent are the climate change deniers profiting from pedaling their anti-science spin? Just ask Lord Monckton, when his industry disinformation campaign hits the Australian shores this month:

Mr Smit said getting Lord Monckton to Australia came at a substantial cost and he was appealing to supporters for donations. “We have to fly Lord Monkton to Australia, cover all his domestic travel and accommodation and provide a stipend of $20,000 [£11,500],” he said. “Our aim is to cover these costs from donations from individuals, appropriate associations and corporations. We expect the required total to be about $100,000. We would like to keep the cost of admission to Monckton’s lectures to around $20 to maximise the number of people that will come to hear him. We have already had a number of offers of $1,000 and would prefer donations to be of that order, but of course any amount is very welcome. Should there be a surplus, this, depending on the amount, will be given to Lord Monckton and/or the Climate Sceptics Party which is assisting with this project.” (Read more from the Noosa Journal)

A stipend of $20k? For 14 days work? Profitable! Not bad for a man according to Crikey proclaims to:

… be a member of the House of Lords (well, he once tried to become one), to be a Nobel Laureate (he wrote a letter to the IPCC which won a Nobel Prize, a connection close enough for him to commission his own gold Nobel prize pin), to have single-handedly won the Falklands War (he persuaded the British Army to use germ warfare on the Argies), and to have invented a cure for Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, influenza, food poisoning, and HIV.

Here’s betting that Andrew Bolt will pen a column proclaiming Monckton as Australia’s saviour by the end of January! See Tim Lambert’s blog for a skillful deconstruction of Monckton’s previous climate nonsense.