It was a custom, according to some beginning with the mistake of Noah in sending the Dove out of the Ark before the water had abated, to send out some absurd message on 1st April each year, something misleading. A message that is not even hopeful, just absurd.
Traditionally, after the gullible begin to nod, the futile task is exposed, perhaps even before the perpetrator shouts ‘April Fools’.
The tradition doesn’t seem to be as popular as it used to be.
Perhaps because every day the mainstream media, even family and friends, now make absurd statements and send us on meaningless errands.
I laughed then I cried, when I heard a newly appointed senior manager at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority advocating for a low carbon economy.
Doesn’t she realize that what is visible from outer space of this massive reef ecosystem, that the Marine Park Authority is tasked with managing, is the sedimentary rock limestone. This is a vast deposit of carbon because the corals have been successfully hoarding it for some hundreds of thousands of years or at least during the interglacial warm periods. Yes. Hoarding it. The climate does change. As global temperatures increase, the biosphere expands, the Great Barrier Reef expands.
The Great Barrier Reef is arguably the largest coral reef system to have ever existed on planet Earth. A coral reef is layer upon layer of calcium carbonate. It is not pure carbon — it is not graphite or diamond — but it is about 12 percent carbon. For sure, carbon dioxide is produced and destroyed naturally near the Earth’s surface and by the oceans. Fixing it is more difficult, and mostly by biotic means the corals have managed this, especially at the Great Barrier Reef.
The joke is on us that every day in The West the managers, administrators and the politicians — those in positions of power — send us on meaningless errands and tell us nonsense, including about this seventh wonder of the world and including about carbon dioxide that is absolutely critical to life on Earth though it is only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere the corals have managed to hoard it.
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Many thanks to everyone who participated in one or more of my Zoom sessions on Saturday – Saturday variously in Houston, Scotland and at the Great Barrier Reef. I will get a combined summary of the three meetings out, but in the meantime I have been somewhat distracted rereading an excellent new paper not yet published (still being edited) by Ivan Kennedy with myself as a coauthor, and thinking about the many gems in an already published paper by Philip Mulholland, you can find Philip’s work at Research Gate. While I have been thinking about how to extend the Kiehl and Trenberth (1997) global mean energy budget into something meaningful, Mulholland and Rathbone Wilde (2023) have already got on with the job, even if somewhat imperfectly.
For sure, in every session on Saturday there was some discussion about the limitations of temperature as a meaningful measure of the physical climate system and the importance of water, specifically global moisture.
