Impact of extreme warming in the fall of 2023 on a Barbados coral. Above: Healthy A prolifera in the “Mother Colony” on Vauxhall Reff on April 3, 2023. Below the same A prolifera dead and covered with algae on Jan 12, 2024. No recovery evident in early 2025. The yellow zooanthid at left remains healthy, however.
So reads the headline for a Feb 7 post by Chris Hatch in the National Observer (Canada) Zero Carbon Newsletter.
…despite conditions that should have cooled things down, Earth hit its hottest January in recorded history.
We’ve been on a run of record-setting temperatures ever since June 2023 when global heating suddenly kicked up a gear. Scientists are still trying to figure out what’s happening — why the last two years were so inexplicably hot and 2024 broke through the symbolic figure of 1.5 degrees above temperatures before the industrial revolution. The worry is that all this fossil fuel burning has unleashed an unexpected step change in the climate system.
The article summarizes some of the conclusions of former NASA scientist James Hansen who raised the first big alarms about global warming in 1988. In a new paper, Hansen asks “Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?
Looking ahead to the next couple of decades, Hansen says the international target of 2 C is “dead” and scenarios that purport to keep global heating below that target are “implausible.”
Nothing made the impact of global warming more pronounced to me than
my first visits to Vauxhall Reef over the last week.* I looked for any signs of recovery of Acropora prolfera and the Millepora spp (Stinging corals) from the 100% dieback I observed on my visit last year (early months of 2024) for A. prolifera, and perhaps 95% for the Millepora spp., those related to extreme warming events in the latter part of 2023. *I am a retired biologist, conducted my PhD research in Barbados in the 1960s; since 2015, I have spent 1-3 months in Barbados in the early months of each year (except in 2021 and 2022) and regularly check out fringing reefs in the Holetown area, observations reported on www.versicolor.ca/barbados.
Nada for both in 2025; not even a glimpse of any living Millepora.
Wow. It made me all the more appreciative of the daily good cheer and thoughtfulness of people on this island regardless and their ongoing efforts to address Climate Change.
On a more positive note from below the tides: I have observed some still fully healthy A. palmata specimens in shallow waters…