Changing scientific opinions

Scientific discourse has markedly changed over the past 70 years, evolving away from a negative outlook on the future viability of coral reefs and coral islands. A well publicised, and often repeated quote is that of F.W. Goreau which was used in a briefing to UN climate delegates in 2007, he stated in 1948 that ' Coral reefs are NOT resilient, they are the most sensitive and fragile of ecosystems and we have already lost most of them'. On a more recent timescale there have been many predictions of coral island nations facing economic and humanitarian disasters; ultimately their populations becoming environmental refugees (Pernetta, 1992; Wilkinson, 1996; Mimura, 1999). Wilkinson summarised that some coral island nations could be 'render(ed) ... uninhabitable through contamination of groundwater and increased erosion'.

Emotive accounts support these predictions of submergence. The following video depicts the memories of a old man who states 'When i was a small boy this island was big, as i grew older the island got smaller', whilst this is a direct account of recent events of a the Carteret Islands its reliability is extremely questionable:

These emotive accounts which appose recent scientific investigations by Webb & Kench (2010) tied with prevailing scientific discourse have led to popular opinion becoming favourable towards coral islands being 'doomed', the following video summarises this popular opinion:

Most pessimistic predictions made for coral island nations also revolve around the idea that sea water intrusion is 'polluting' the fresh water lens found in the centre of most coral islands, these ideas stem from problems with rising salinity of the freshwater. However there are some more sceptical climate change blogs have taken a more practically based approach to this problem, namely 'omniclimate' which posted in late 2009; http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/coral-atolls-and-sea-level-rise/. Showing that rising salinity was due to over use of a limited resource, rather than saline intrusion.