Coral reef [image credit: Toby Hudson / Wikipedia]
Corals can adapt to changing conditions, once again confounding the serial climate doom-mongers. The full article tries to link in references to ‘carbon emissions’, ‘climate change’ etc. which have no definable reference to the actual findings. The point is, nature can be adaptable, contrary to some alarmist expectations.
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Coral reefs in one part of the Pacific Ocean have likely adjusted to higher ocean temperatures which could reduce future bleaching impacts of climate change, new research reveals.
A Newcastle University-led study focused on the Pacific Island nation of Palau and has shown that historic increases in the thermal tolerance of coral reefs are possible, says Eurekalert.
The results demonstrate how this capacity could reduce future bleaching impacts if global carbon emissions are cut down. [Talkshop comment – corals are in the sea, not the air].
Drawing on decades of field observations, the scientists modelled many possible future coral bleaching trajectories for Palauan reefs, each with a different simulated rate of thermal tolerance enhancement.
They found that if coral thermal tolerance continues to rise throughout the 21st century at the most-likely historic rate, significant reductions in bleaching impacts are possible.
. . .
The findings reveal that the thermal tolerance of corals in Palau has likely increased at a rate of 0.1 °C per decade since the late 1980s. This increase suggests that natural mechanisms, such as genetic adaptation or acclimatization of corals or their symbiotic microalgae, could have contributed to the enhancement of coral thermal tolerance.
Study co-author Prof. Peter Mumby of the University of Queensland and Palau International Coral Reef Center reflects that “some of the upcoming challenges will be to disentangle which mechanisms have driven these potential shifts in tolerance, and to understand the possibility of continued future increases in thermal tolerance.”
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
[…] Pacific coral reef shows historic increase in thermal tolerance […]
Or perhaps the corals have had this bleaching tolerance all along…
Corals adapt, given the alternative is extinction it’s a good choice.
For many years I caught my dinner diving on coral reefs. This from the southern Great Barrier Reef through many of the pacific islands, including Kapingamarangi atoll, just 66 nautical miles from the equator.
I sighted & ran Great barrier reef tourist cruises from the Whitsunday Islands, & I harvested coral for the Hook Island under water observatory. I am sure I have spent much more time up close & personal with native coral than any of our marine scientists. I am a BSC so have some observational abilities.
My experience is coral likes the warmer water more than the cold. It is a pity most of our Marine scientists haven’t traveled far enough from their shore based laboratories to learn this.
I mean seriously. If things can adapt to change, change will be fine.
That’s actually their hypothesis?
New Scientist talks up coral reef problems. Netzerowatch knocks them back.
New Scientist: How worried should we be about climate change?
Wednesday 23rd August 2023
In order to illustrate how dire things are at the New Scientist, the once respected science journal cherry-picks bad news from last March and ignores good news from just a few days ago.
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A knee-jerk reaction to the weather events we have seen can result in poor articles that don’t give a fair and accurate overall picture of what is really going on.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/new-scientist-how-worried-should-we-be-about-climate-change/
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Conclusion: NS doesn’t want to know about any coral reef positive news, or any other conceivably positive news about the climate either.
I believe coral may be a little tougher and worries over a couple of degrees are idiotic.
From http://www.bikiniatoll.com/BIKINICORALS.pdf
In the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands, 23 nuclear tests with a total yield of 76.3 megatons (TNT equivalent) (PS – the Hiroshima bomb was rated 15,000 tons of TNT) in the case of were conducted across seven test sites located either on the reef, on the sea, in the air and underwater between 1946 and 1958. Five craters were created, the deepest being the Bravo crater at 73 m depth (Noshkin et al., 1997a) (Figs. 2, 3). Post-test descriptions of environmental impacts include: surface seawater temperatures raised by 55,000 C after air-borne tests; blast waves with speeds of up to 8 m/s; and shock and surface waves up to 30 m high with blast columns reaching the floor of the lagoon (approximately 70 m depth)
The results of our 12 year long nuclear war on coral. After less than 50 years, a total of 183 scleractinian coral species were recorded, compared to 126 species recorded in the pre-bomb study.
There are more species now than then.
And from http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N7/EDIT.php
And in reporting the results of a study of a large brain coral that lived throughout the 17th century on the shallow seafloor off the island of Bermuda, Cohen and Madin (2007) say that although seawater temperatures at that time and location were about 1.5°C colder than it is there today, “the coral grew faster than the corals there now.”
Other studies have shown earth’s corals to be able to cope with climate-induced warmings as well as cooling. In a study of patch reefs of the Florida Keys, for example, Greenstein et al. (1998) found that Acropora cervicornis corals exhibited “long-term persistence” during both “Pleistocene and Holocene time,” the former of which periods exhibited climatic changes of large magnitude, some with significantly greater warmth than currently prevails on earth; and these climate changes had almost no effect on this long-term dominant of Caribbean coral reefs. Hence, there is good reason to not be too concerned about long-term changes in climate possibly harming earth’s corals. They apparently have the ability to handle whatever nature may throw at them in this regard.
An unofficial spokesman for the Allied Coral Species Association is thought to have stated – We have survived nuclear war, climate temperature changes of over 10 degrees, planetary magnetic shifts, CO2 levels of 15,000 PPM, giant undersea lava flows and plate tectonics for over 400 million years. We are personally more worried about you.