Saving the Great Barrier Reef

If you have never visited the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia, you should definitely put it on your bucket list. Fortunately, you do not need to rush out and to do so tomorrow, because, climate alarmists notwithstanding, the Great Barrier Reef is not falling victim to global warming.

If you read the Guardian you will have learned that the Reef’s exquisite coral configurations are being subjected to mass bleaching, the result of higher water temperatures.

Nothing short of banning all fossil fuels will save the Reef. So the experts tell us.

But now, Chris Morrison at The Daily Skeptic has collected some information that refutes this argument. 

Natural bleaching, when the coral expels algae and turns white, can occur with temporary local temperature changes, but evidence from many years of scientific observation suggests the corals often and quickly recover. Long term changes in water temperature – tiny compared to coral’s optimum conditions – pose no threat, but alarmists concentrate on the bleaching events to warn of possible ecological collapse. The Guardian noted a recent fifth mass bleaching in eight years across the reef, driven, it claimed, by “global heating”. So far, its readers are in the dark as to how this squares with the recent record growth.

For the record, climate alarmists believe that a trend, once set in motion, will continue. If the Reef is turning white, through bleaching, it will continue to do so, until the coral all dies.

In truth and in reality, the Reef regenerates itself. Of late it has been producing more and more coral.

… it can be reported that last year’s gains were eye-catchingly large. On the Northern GBR, hard coral cover leapt from 35.8% to 39.5%, in the central area it rose from 30.7% to 34%, while in the south it went from 34% to 39.1%. The report is the result of monitoring of hard coral cover reefs from August 2023 to June 2024 by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). The percentage of hard coral cover is a standard measurement of reef conditions used by scientists and is said to provide a simple and robust measure of reef health. Similar reports have been published by the AIMS over the last 38 years.

And then there is the science. Media have not reported it because it does not fulfill the terms of the prevalent narrative.

And yet:

The distinguished scientist Dr. Peter Ridd has studied the GBR for 40 years and notes that coral numbers have “exploded” in recent years. He says that all 3,000 reefs in the world’s largest system have excellent coral. “Not a single reef or even a single species of reef life has been lost since British settlement,” he reports. The impact of bleaching is “routinely exaggerated by the media and some scientific organisations”. In his view, the public is being deceived about the reef. “How this occurred is a serious issue for the reef-science community which has embraced emotion, ideology and raw self-interest to maintain funding,” he observes.

If you have been losing sleep over the future viability of the Great Coral Reef, you can now rest easy. But we should all take this example as an instance where statistics and facts are being manipulated to sustain an ideology, something that we might even call a new pagan religion.

As I am sure you learned by watching the stock market, a market that is on a clear upward trend is not necessarily going to continue the upward trend.

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