by Jim Steele August 15, 2022
I would like to thank Dr Alan Longhurst for alerting me to the fear of the BBC. He asked me to address the media’s misalignment of science. Dr. Longhurst (now 97 years old) is one of the world’s leading oceanographers, inventor of the Longhurst-Hardy Plankton Recorder, and served as the first Director of the Western Center for Aquatic Science. South of the United States. National Marine Fisheries Service and Director of Canada’s venerable Marine Ecology Laboratory Bedford Institute of Oceanographyamong other prestigious positions and tropical studies.
(Photos and captions are screenshots from BBC: Mangroves: How 40 million trees in Australia died of thirst.)
The short BBC video begins by showing the devastated mangrove forests that formed the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia after the 2015-2016 dry spell. The BBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) have treated this natural event as a man-made climate change disaster, to perpetuate the myth of a climate crisis.
Dr Norman Duke, a mangrove expert, attributed the 2015 mass deaths to a 40cm drop in sea levels in six months due to El Nino causing the mangroves to “die of thirst”. Duke admits that it is well known that El Ninos naturally caused such a dramatic drop in sea levels in the western Pacific. But there is no evidence, nor any consensus, that El Ninos has been made worse by increased CO.2. However, it is known that El Nino activity has increased over the past 6000 years as the earth cool since Holocene Optimum due to changes in the sun’s orbital period.
Duke estimates that about 7,400 hectares (74 km .)2) mangroves have been lost. That number would be no more than 2% of the total mangroves covered in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Mangroves are salt-tolerant shrubs and trees that grow in warm coastal waters. Areas of severe setback are consistent with zoning contours, where higher elevations are drier and most susceptible to falling sea levels.
In 2017, Duke published, “Massive mangrove death in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria: a severe ecosystem response, coinciding with an unusually severe weather event“. He reports that mangrove die-off “occurs when annual rainfall in the area is low, temperatures are high, and sea levels are significantly lower at the time.” And those conditions correlate with the “El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle for this region”.
Although mangroves are tropical and their expansion is associated with warmer conditions and is known to be reasonably heat tolerant, Duke (2017) has attempted to draw a connection with warmer temperatures. global warming, referring to the exceptionally high temperatures recorded at the time and “coinciding with coral bleaching due to heat stress”. The coral bleaching attributed to global warming is being tearfully pushed by Duke’s colleague Terry Hughes. Hughes’ story of catastrophic global warming is currently being refuted by the rapidly recovering Great Barrier Reef. Such good news could be the impetus for Duke and the BBC to revive a catastrophic mangrove story to protect and support narratives of the climate crisis that didn’t happen.
Duke (2017) documented drought-related mangrove losses and retreats,
rainfall decreases and sea level decreases temporarily. All of those weather conditions, including warmer temperatures due to reduced cloud cover, are associated with El Nino events, when warm tropical waters pour eastward over the Pacific Ocean. Mistakenly, BBC, ABC and Duke are now bizarrely claiming that the mangroves are dying and the El Nino connection has just been discovered.
But others have also reported on the El Nino effect at least five years ago. Lovelock (2017) in Mangroves died upside down in fluctuating sea level “During El Niño, weak equatorial trade winds cause the tropical Pacific to be cut off, and the presence of cool water results in sea levels possibly 20–30 cm lower.” “Because both low sea levels and low rainfall co-occur during El Niño years in the Indo-Pacific region, ENSO intensification in the coming decades together with climate change could be particularly significant. detrimental to the productivity of mangrove ecosystems.”
Still the BBC and Duke have doubled down on the issue of the climate crisis with transparent stupidity and stupidity of the hand. They move from blaming nature seamlessly fall in sea level for dying, to express concern that rise Sea level due to global warming will impede the recovery of mangroves. However, that desperate claim is easily refuted, and has in fact been refuted in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
In 2016 Asbridge published “Mangrove response to environmental change in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria“. That study concluded, “increased rainfall and associated flooding and sea level rise responsible for recent extending to the sea and land of mangroves in this area. “During 1987–2014,” mangroves were observed to have extended into the sea up to 1.9 km (perpendicular to the coastline), with inland intrusion occurring along many rivers and estuaries. trench at high tide. “
But such knowledge has not stopped Duke and the BBC from diving into the depths of their stupidity and calling for paradoxical, futile and costly measures to “save” the mangroves. Duke wants to water the mangroves from the air or from ships to prevent them from drying out and dying. The rationale for such stupidity: mangroves store carbon. They worry that dying mangroves have released “1 million tons of carbon into the air” and the ABC added that is “the equivalent of 1,000 jumbo jets flying back from Sydney to Paris.” But the mangroves had dried up naturally and died before then. It is not surprising that great scientists like Longhurst fear current scientific bias fueled by climate alarmism.
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