Scientist Who Discovered Toll Of Warming On Reefs Was Called "Alarmist" - 25 Years Later, Guess Who Was Right?

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A pioneer of the scientific understanding of coral bleaching, the University of Queensland professor has written more than 400 scientific papers. His work has helped shape the world’s understanding of the risks the ocean’s richest ecosystems – home to a quarter of all marine species – face from global heating. Hoegh-Guldberg was starting his PhD in California in the early 1980s when reports were starting to emerge of coral reefs turning white across wide areas. Was it a disease? Was it pollution? Was it caused by excess sunlight? Were corals reacting to a change in the saltiness of water? “Everyone was sort of speculating, but no one had done the experiment,” he says.

In a series of what he calls “cooking experiments”, Hoegh-Guldberg took coral fragments and subjected them to different conditions in the lab. What he and his colleagues found was that corals had a temperature threshold. Once those temperatures are breached, the corals start to expel the tiny algae that live inside them and give corals their colour and much of their nutrients. He first saw a major bleaching event for himself in 1994 in Tahiti. The reef was so bright, he could see the bleaching from the boat before he got in the water. Hoegh-Guldberg says locals told him they had no term in Polynesian to describe what was happening.

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Rather than having a century or more, the models suggested as early as the 2020s some reefs could be bleaching six or more times a decade – a frequency far too high to give them time to recover. “I thought I must have made a mistake. I didn’t believe it. I talked to the climate people that were giving me the support in terms of the models. And sure enough, no matter what way you cut it, you got bleaching events every year by 2040 ... 2050.”

Hoegh-Guldberg wrote up the results in a paper. “Events as severe as the 1998 event, the worst on record, are likely to become commonplace within 20 years,” he wrote. His findings were met with a storm of criticism. Some of his scientific colleagues thought he had gone too far, and in the conservative media he was branded an alarmist. He got threatening emails calling him a communist and saying they hoped he would die. He was emboldened and confident in his science, but privately it affected him. “It’s almost like you get an ulcer because you’re always on guard,” he says. “That can build up over time and sort of depress you. I’m a really very optimistic person. But it does knock you around a bit, there’s no doubt about it.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/25/prof-ove-hoegh-guldberg-scientist-great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-causes-effects-climate-change-crisis-ocean-heating-warming