Essay by Eric Worrall
But we might need a few extra tenths of a degree global warming to see the effects.
‘Tipping point’ threshold reached for world’s coral reefs, report suggests
By environment reporter Peter de Kruijff
In short:
The latest Global Tipping Points Report suggests the world’s coral reefs are at risk of mass dieback.
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The first “tipping point” for the Earth has been reached, according to an international report from 160 scientists in 23 countries.
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The world’s warm water coral reefs are the first of 25 vulnerable Earth systems to have reached a tipping point, according to the Global Tipping Points Report.
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Tim Lenton, a University of Exeter professor and climate modeller who led the report, said tipping points could no longer be talked about as a “future risk”.
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Dr Obura stressed we had not yet gone past the upper limit of the tipping point threshold for coral reefs, which is 1.5C.
“Unless the right actions are taken globally, urgently, on climate drivers … the increasing climate pressure means that all reef regions will approach their tipping points, and some may cross them.”
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About 84 per cent of the world’s reefs have bleached in the fourth global bleaching event since January, 2023.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-10-13/tipping-point-reached-for-coral-reefs-globally-study/105874456
The tipping points report is available here.
Back in 2023 the Great Barrier Reef experienced record coral cover;
Of course this was still touted as a crisis;
Now there have been a few bleaching events, coral scientists are claiming that unlike previous bleaching events, the coral won’t grow back – though maybe we need the full 1.5C global warming to experience the failure of coral to grow back.
Watch out folks. The asteroid which killed the dinosaurs failed to destroy the coral reefs, as did the 5-8C of rapid warming the Earth experienced during the PETM – but a few tenths of a degree of additional anthropogenic global warming will achieve what the greatest mass extinction event in the last hundred million years failed to accomplish.
We don’t even need to look to the extremes for examples of coral thriving in warm conditions. Most of the Cretaceous, which ended 66 million years ago with the death of the dinosaurs, had far higher CO2 levels than today.
Obviously anthropomorphic warming is more evil than natural climate change because it is man made. Natural climate excursions which failed to kill off the coral just didn’t carry the same punch – even when that punch was delivered by a six mile wide asteroid.
I guess it would be rude to point out that reefs like the Great Barrier Reef span a substantial range of climates, from high tropical heat to subtropical, that the juvenile form of coral is highly mobile, that even over the last 10,000 years reefs relocated significant distances in response to changing sea level and conditions, and that there is thousands of miles of cold water shoreline for juvenile coral spawn to colonise if the equatorial hot end of the Great Barrier Reef ever became too warm.
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