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Open letter to Jane
Lubchenco, the incoming head of NOAA
From:
Thomas Goreau <goreau@bestweb.net> Subject: NOAA and coral reefs Dear Jane, Congratulations! NOAA could not have someone better in charge! NOAA's credibility among serious coral reef professionals has been destroyed in the last 8 years by the blatant politicization of all its activities involving coral reefs, and a total restructuring of all its coral reef activities is critically needed. I know you are being inundated with advice, so I won't elaborate in detail here. Very briefly, these fundamental institutional problems include: 1) Global warming. We invented and developed the HotSpot method for predicting coral bleaching and I presented the first data showing that coral bleaching could be accurately predicted from NOAA satellite SST data alone to Al Gore's Senate Hearing in 1990. Our efforts to publish the data as a NOAA Technical Report, working with NOAA satellite specialists, was blocked by NOAA under orders from the George Bush Sr. White House. Our efforts at the time to prepare a research strategy for dealing with bleaching were approved by NOAA but suddenly we were excluded from the very meetings we had proposed, and they were turned over to selected individuals who concluded that there was no evidence that temperature was linked to bleaching, or indeed that coral reefs were even deteriorating. Since then NOAA has spent a fortune to "prove" that bleaching was caused by any factor OTHER than high temperatures. It is now clear to everyone from the success of the HotSpot bleaching predictions that temperature alone is at least 95% of the story, and all the other factors are at best of secondary importance. But decades of obfuscation and denial has allowed most of the corals to die from heat shock while serious action on global warming was prevented. In the last months two volumes that I was editing for the UN on innovative technologies for sustainable development and climate change adaptation for small island developing states were specifically banned for publication due to very high level pressure from the George Bush Jr. State Department. 2) New coral diseases. These are now the number two killer of corals worldwide (after high temperatures), and our group has identified the pathogens causing more coral, sponge, and algae diseases than any other. However there still is no funding to systematically identify the pathogens or do the field work needed to identify the factors responsible for their rapid and alarming spread (there is now no reef anywhere in the world where I don't see them). This is a rapidly escalating crisis and we have no idea what to suggest what managers might do, due to inadequate scientific studies (whereas all the other factors killing corals are long known, as are their solutions, but policymakers and funders refuse to act on them). 3) Coral reef restoration. A fisheries, tourism, and shore line protection crisis is underway worldwide, and only large scale reef restoration of degraded habitats can reverse them. Our group has developed the only methods known to increase coral growth rate 2-6 times faster than normal, vastly speed up injury of damaged corals, resulting in 16-50 times higher survival from severe high temperatures, and recruitment rates 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than previously reported. We have done coral reef restoration projects in around 20 countries despite NO funding from any government, international agency, or large funding agency, using small donations locally raised in poor communities who desperately want their reefs back. Large scale expansion of these efforts with community based management efforts is critically needed, because we will lose most of the little coral we now have left in the next years that have record high temperatures (statistically next year, intrinsic variability aside). We are currently growing 80% of all the coral genera and around half the species on our Biorock coral arks, but these efforts are a drop in the bucket and we need to grow all of them, since these may soon be all that is left. Because we can't restore them all does not mean we should not restore all we can. Yet NOAA has systematically refused to fund any serious coral reef restoration projects, even though there are no undamaged reefs now left anywhere. Their efforts have simply repeated proven failures and ignored known solutions. 4) Top down versus bottom up management. NOAA's coral reef management has spent large amounts of money on setting up marine protected areas, yet every place they manage is now full of dead or dying corals. Their performance seems to be based on the amount of glossy PR brochures they produce, while the corals they "manage" continue to die from factors that they cannot control, indeed that they will not even try to control because they will not admit their importance. This is especially true in developing countries and island nations where almost all of the reefs are. Funding has gone to expensive top-down efforts based on foreign "experts" that collapse as soon as the initial funding ends, because of a refusal to empower local bottom-up community based management. This needs to be urgently changed. 5) Denial of historical knowledge. Instead of listening to what the old hands who have been diving all around the world have been saying for over 50 years, NOAA has simply ignored all of the most experienced researchers and claimed that "nothing is known" about reef deterioration, as an excuse to shower money on selected cronies to "find out for the first time" if there might be a problem in reefs. This has wasted decades in pointless repetition of what was long known instead of actually doing something to reverse the known stress factors, reinventing the wheel over and over again while allowing coral death to escalate. Having personally dived for 52 years all over the Caribbean, Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia, and having the world's largest collection of underwater photographs from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, it has been shocking to see the contempt with which NOAA has ignored all previous knowledge. 6) International Coral Reef Initiative and US Coral Reef Task Force. These have simply wasted huge sums of money to spout nonsense about reef "resilience", a politically contrived falsehood known to be untrue by all experienced reef researchers, as an excuse to avoid dealing with the real factors killing corals, and to refuse to support restoration of damaged habitats on grounds that this is just not needed. After the Asian Tsunami the countries affected were told that "restoration is neither feasible nor prudent" and that they "should do nothing at all. They should simply wait and the reefs will bounce back all by themselves"! I know the reefs of all the countries affected, and in fact almost all of the corals were long dead before the tsunami, for different reasons in different countries, and the recovery has been negligible (I am just back from reef restoration projects in Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand). Since we have been frozen out of NOAA's coral reef efforts and the US and Florida Coral Reef Task Forces for pointing out that "reef resilience" is a fraud, we have had to use 2 minute public floor comments (our only opportunity to speak) to repeatedly request that the US Coral Reef Task Force ask its own members to live up to the mandate under which they were founded, which specifies that they not engage in or approve activities that damage corals. The Task Force has routinely refused to act on our formal petitions (again in violation of their mandate) on grounds that asking Task Force member agencies to live up to their own mandate was "beyond their competence". We have long known that coral reefs are the most temperature, nutrient, and sediment sensitive ecosystems, yet NOAA has denied that global warming is killing corals (they now admit that high temperature are bad for corals, but not that they are increasing), EPA still flatly denies that nutrients cause algae blooms that kill corals, and the US Army Corps of Engineers denies that sediments kill corals, while these agencies continue to approve projects that kill corals by increasing greenhouse gas emissions, that release inadequately treated sewage to coastal waters, and beach dredge-fill projects right next to the last surviving reefs in good condition in Florida (which have no management at all, since they are in an area where reefs were claimed not to occur). 7) A new focus on corals and science, not politics. NOAA's efforts need to focus on supporting capacity building in developing countries to manage and restore their reefs rather than more international monitoring studies to find out if they are changing (which are serious underestimates because they began after we knew that most of the corals were long gone). NOAA's coral reef efforts need to be restructured root and branch to support communities in developing countries to protect the little that is left and restore their severely degraded reefs to protect the biodiversity, fisheries, tourism, shore protection, and sand production services that only healthy reefs can provide. Island nations are losing their reefs, their fish, and their very islands are washing away, and there is very little time left. We look forward to your leadership in switching NOAA from denial and delay towards providing scientifically sound leadership to reverse the mass extinction of coral reef ecosystems that we are already most of the way through. We will be glad to provide much more information on all of the issues mentioned above whenever serious efforts are made by NOAA to preserve the few good reefs left and restore the vast majority of reefs that are so degraded that they have lost most virtually all their ecosystem functions. Good luck! It is a critical task made far worse by decades of NOAA's deliberate dilly-dallying, making real reform the only hope for coral reefs and the species and people that depend on them. Best wishes, Tom
From: Thomas Goreau <goreau@bestweb.net> Date: January 3, 2009 3:18:13 PM EST To: "Lubchenco, Jane" <lubchenco@oregonstate.edu> Cc: Ray Hayes <hayes.ray@gmail.com> Subject: Re: NOAA SST data and global ocean circulation changes Dear Jane, One further point. We have looked very closely at all the NOAA SST data since the satellites measuring them went up in 1982 and there is far more useful data there than NOAA has allowed to be interpreted or published internally. Besides allowing us to predict the location, timing, and intensity of all major thermal coral bleaching events before they can be seen in the field, Ray Hayes and I have found the NOAA SST data provides for a global "poor person's" analysis of global ocean circulation change. The direct current meter data, at the present rate of collection, would take perhaps 50 years to determine if the major ocean currents are changing (hence the big push for ocean tomography using explosives and damn the whales and dolphins), but we have found the NOAA SST data provides clear evidence of major global changes underway in every part of the ocean since 1982. ALL the warm current areas are getting warmer faster than the global average, indicating they are increasing heat transport out of the tropics, ALL the cold currents are also getting warmer faster than the global average, indicating they are decreasing strength, ALL the enclosed seas with restricted circulation are warming faster than average, ALL the major upwelling zones are warming faster than the global average, indicating that the surface water layer is getting so warm and thick that seasonal upwelling can no longer punch it's way through to the photic zone, causing productivity collapse from the bottom up (which has been blamed on overfishing from the top down, an all too real phenomenon, but concealing the fact that climate change is also wiping them out permanently). On the other hand the centers of all the major ocean gyres are warming more slowly than average, along with the circum-Antarctic current, and this correlates with increased wind speeds in these areas from the scatterometer data, indicating that more wind-driven upwelling is increasing cold water upwelling in these low productivity zones, but the increase in production is insufficient to match the losses in the coastal upwelling zones. These pattern nicely match changes in surface chlorophyll. Indonesia, where I do most of my work now, is warming more slowly than average, almost certainly because the Indonesian flow through is increasing (I have dived in places on the equator where it is 30 C at the surface and 15 C at 15 m depth, with stratification so strong that the thermal schlieren makes everything hazy, and if you hold a finger horizontally one side will be warm and one side cold). Even more interesting is that the data clearly shows dramatic, severe, prolonged, and widespread collapse of several major upwelling sites, the Northeastern Tropical Pacific in 1989 and the Eastern Indian Ocean in 1998. We have published a number of papers on this over the last 15 years. There is incredibly valuable information in this data base that shows that major ocean circulation changes are already underway in all parts of the ocean, affecting local rates of climate change, whose details would be revealed if they were fully analyzed, which has been blocked for political reasons. It is time to analyze them properly. Best wishes in cleaning out the Augean stables! And my best to Bruce and Francis. Tom
Thomas J. Goreau, PhD 37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge MA 02139
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