Scientists successfully breed corals to improve their heat tolerance

>Probably not quickly enough. Ecosystems can adapt if given enough time, but the recent rise in ocean temperatures has happened very quickly by evolutionary standards.

Exactly, which I think is always the key point at issue that needs to be raised any time someone says "well earth has been this hot before." Never at this velocity, at least not without extinction events.

Here's the latest data from AIMS, the Australian government agency that monitors the Great Barrier Reef [1]. There are three periods in these graphs:

1. 1985-2013. Climatologists report global warming during this period, but it had no impact on the corals. This fact is already a major problem for the claim that corals are hurt by global warming - if it were true, there should have been declines in this period.

2. 2010-2017. A big drop. This triggered lots of stories about how humanity is killing the corals. In 2019 they were saying the outlook had moved from "poor" to "very poor". [2]

3. 2020-2024. Robust growth to the highest levels ever seen, more than a third larger than the prior stable period.

This time series is incompatible with the idea of a link between CO2 and coral health. Whatever caused this set of changes is unlikely to be human driven, given that the huge growth spurt caught self-proclaimed coral experts completely off guard and they still lack any explanation for what drives these changes. But we can safely say that corals are already heat tolerant. They exist in a wide range of temperatures across the world, which vary by far wider ranges than climate change is predicted to generate, and they have existed throughout history in which natural climate change has created vastly greater differences than seen in the last 100 years.

Unfortunately AIMS don't seem interested in a true understanding of the corals. They are only interested in coral doom. Doom = a call to action = money and social status, whereas corals doing fine reduces them to mere observation of natural cycles, which doesn't have much potential for career growth. From the peak of "the Great Barrier Reef is going from poor to very poor" now they are reduced to saying "recent increases in hard coral cover can be quickly undone" and "The high coral cover reported this year is good news but does not mean all is fine". Their reports give the strong impression that they really wish the corals would do badly, but nature is feeling uncooperative right now. Their next best strategy is apparently to just ignore it and pretend scientists have to save the day anyway.

[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/30/great-ba...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event We live on a planet saturated in one of the most corrosive pollutants (to life that evolved before it). If an anaerobic intelligent life had evolved before the world was conquered by cyanobacteria, in a society with a profit motive for manufacturing sugar, would they have farmed the very thing that would wipe them out?

In nature, you don't necessarily have the needed genetic diversity or controlled conditions, in the right combinations, the way you can obtain them in the lab. And "several decades" is probably not enough time in evolutionary terms to adjust, if I had to guess.

>Also, hurricanes aren't more frequent [2] but there's an argument to be made for intensity.

I checked your source here, and the emphasis of the article is almost completely the inverse of how you presented it. The article is emphatic at the urgency of understanding how much more forceful the storms are, while noting there is not a larger total number of storms. In the article, that latter point is an aside to the urgency of understanding storms are becoming more intense.

It actually explicitly says that storms of greater intensity are indeed becoming more frequent. Your portrayal, however, is to reference the central point in passing while emphasizing a side point and implying something completely at odds with the article. And this isn't just tomayto-tomahto, one point is critical to understanding the intensity of storms and the other isn't.