More attention to reef needed

Coral will dissolve if CO2 emissions don't change

I think that, coming out as it did during an election campaign, this story about new and significant sounding research didn't attract much attention.

I did see it at the time, but forgot to come back to it.  I also thought to myself that Ove Hoegh-Guldberg has long been very pessimistic on everything he says about the reef, so maybe this press release is over-stating it too, but now that I read the detail about what they did, it seems I was wrong. Here's the abstract itself:

Increasing atmospheric partial pressure of CO₂ (pCO₂) is a major threat to coral reefs, but some argue that the threat is mitigated by factors such as the variability in the response of coral calcification to acidification, differences in bleaching susceptibility, and the potential for rapid adaptation to anthropogenic warming. However the evidence for these mitigating factors tends to involve experimental studies on corals, as opposed to coral reefs, and rarely includes the influence of multiple variables (e.g., temperature and acidification) within regimes that include diurnal and seasonal variability. Here, we demonstrate that the inclusion of all these factors results in the decalcification of patch-reefs under business-as-usual scenarios and reduced, although positive, calcification under reduced-emission scenarios. Primary productivity was found to remain constant across all scenarios, despite significant bleaching and coral mortality under both future scenarios. Daylight calcification decreased and nocturnal decalcification increased sharply from the preindustrial and control conditions to the future scenarios of low (reduced emissions) and high (business-as-usual) increases in pCO₂. These changes coincided with deeply negative carbonate budgets, a shift toward smaller carbonate sediments, and an increase in the abundance of sediment microbes under the business-as-usual emission scenario. Experimental coral reefs demonstrated highest net calcification rates and lowest rates of coral mortality under preindustrial conditions, suggesting that reef processes may not have been able to keep pace with the relatively minor environmental changes that have occurred during the last century. Taken together, our results have serious implications for the future of coral reefs under business-as-usual environmental changes projected for the coming decades and century. 

But no, we were probably too distracted at the time it came out by the searing political story about how  Kevin Rudd failed to chat to a make up artist.