The recent news that coral had grown back in record amounts in just two years on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) punctured the 25-year-long scare story that ‘global warming’ was rapidly killing it off. Now the scare seems dead and buried, after a 10-year survey of a remote reef 1,200 kms south of Hawaii has established beyond any reasonable doubt that coral bleaching is caused by natural sudden changes in local water temperature. The decade-long survey found coral quickly recovers when normal conditions return.
The survey was taken at Palmyra Atoll, where there’s little nearby human habitation, and the reefs examined were in pristine condition. Between 2009 and 2018, a group of researchers from the San Diego-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography took copious records across 80 plots of coral. In 2009 and 2015-16, two natural El Niño events struck suddenly, warming waters by up to 3°C. The graph below plots the changes in temperature at Palmyra.
El Niño is a natural weather oscillation arising in the Pacific that causes sudden sea temperature spikes. The 2015-16 spike led to major damage at Palmyra, bleaching up to 90% of the coral. But the researchers found that a year later, only 10% of the coral had died. Within two years, the reefs had returned to pre-bleached levels. The researchers concluded that across the 10-year period surveyed and after two bleaching events, the structures “show evidence of long-term stability”.
In fact, the findings at Palmyra mirror the experience at the much larger Great Barrier Reef. The last decade has been particularly hard on the coral in this area with cyclone damage, starfish attacks and the same two powerful El Niño events. Climate alarmists have had a field day. David Attenborough assured us the GBR was in “grave danger” of disappearing within decades because of human-caused climate change. As late as October 2020, the BBC was reporting that the Reef had lost half of its coral. George Monbiot was one of the first to set the coral doomsday ball rolling when he wrote in 1999 that the “imminent total destruction of the world’s coral reef is not a scare story”. These days, Monbiot refuses to debate climate science, saying he will not “lend his credibility” to sceptics he describes as ‘deniers’. The newspaper he writes for is the Guardian, subsidised by over $20 million dollars by the Gates Foundation, and it is similarly loath to consider alternative views about the science of climate change. Reporting the record GBR growth recently, it claimed that “global heating could jeopardise recovery”.
Some might consider it unfair to pick on the lapses of a handful of commentators when there is a collegiate approach across the entire mainstream media. Interchangeable headlines and copy are to be found everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Times, Sky and ITV to CNN, the Huffington Post and agencies like Reuters, AP and Bloomberg. Elite-sponsored media is united in drowning out any scepticism about a Net Zero project that seems to offer unprecedented opportunities for consolidating power, influence and control. What better scare than climate Thermogeddon to give government and non-government agencies the power to control almost all economic and social activity among unruly populations? In his latest book on the BBC – Is that true or did you hear it on the BBC? – David Sedgwick quotes the U.S. journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald: “Serial deceit is not a liability for a thriving career in corporate journalism, but rather a vital asset providing that the lies are in the service of ruling class policies.”
But much of the climate scaremongering is starting to fall apart. The pausing of rising global temperatures – last eight years and counting – is getting tricky to keep explaining away, thriving polar bear populations are a great disappointment, and even Arctic sea ice seems to be making a small recovery. The good news about coral is proving equally traumatic.
What is difficult to understand is why the alarmists could not see it coming. Tropical coral grows happily in temperatures from around 24°C to 32°C. The GBR temperatures are nearer the cooler end of this scale, around the eastern Australian coast. In the tropics, coral often grows much faster in warmer conditions. All the evidence of the past 25 years and longer suggests that coral is highly adaptable – it has been around in one form or another for 500 million years – but seems to dislike sudden changes in temperature. It often reacts to this by expelling symbiotic algae and bleaching. Gentle warming or cooling periods, seen countless times in the climate record, do not appear to present any danger to corals.
The command-and-control Net Zero political agenda demands ever more scary scenarios, with its proponents doubling down every time a piece of evidence emerges that contradicts their scaremongering. Only by talking endlessly about an existential threat to the planet – claiming we’re in a state of permanent ‘crisis’ – can the economic destruction and societal dislocation of Net Zero be justified. So we have the ludicrous notion that the science of climate change is ‘settled’, the dogmatic assertion that unproven hypotheses are beyond debate, the bizarre suggestion that climate models are gospel IPCC truth and the pompous spectacle of Guardian high priests refusing to debate their reading of the portents with mere lay people. That is why we continue to have our intelligence insulted on a daily basis with increasingly ridiculous stories of climate Armageddon.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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So far I like the cut of Milei’s jib. A breath of fresh air and common sense.
Billing the head of JSO would certainly be appreciated. A pay up or porridge deal should do the trick.
I strongly disagree.
“Security” is an imposition by the state. Its the state that wants to deploy police officers to provide “security” so it should foot the bill itself.
Although, of course, the state has no income. It’s income cones from shaking down the public.
It didn’t take Milei long to act like a hypocrite.
You are total granite Stewart always totally consistent.
JSO can protest and I would not charge them for security, but I would certainly charge them or jail them for damaging art works, buildings etc.—- Damaging things is not legitimate protest. ———I would expect no leniency if I had a JUST START OIL T short on and threw paint at my bank window, and I don’t think I would get any.
Its that thing that the left don’t do terribly well. Consequences for their actions…
I strongly disagree.
“Security” is an imposition by the state. Its the state that wants to deploy police officers to provide “security” so it should foot the bill itself.
That’s not really true. In 2017, there was a G20 meeting in Hamburg. These are traditionally also gathering points of the (so-called) anticapitalist/ anarchist hard left who’ll stage ‘protests’ against them. The city was essentially stripped of police in order to ensure the safety of all the meeting politicians. Because of this, the protestors went rioting in several city districts, smashing up and looting shops, torching cars etc.
Milei’s argument still doesn’t hold water, though: The largest parts of these costs will have been paying all the security-related government employees who would have needed to be paid come rain or shine, ie, regardless of the demonstration. And the actual numbers deployed were chosen by the government for some reason only known to it. People have freedom of assembly, however, should they actually assemble, fines in the order of thenthousands of dollars will be issued to people not guilty of any criminal conduct effectively means There’s no freedom of assembly.
I tend to agree
My starting point would be that the right to peaceful public mass protest is sacrosanct and charging people for it isn’t appropriate. If people are engaging in deliberate obstruction then they should be moved on or arrested. The greyer area is when the obstruction is a natural result of a lot of people being in the same place at the same time. I think it’s reasonable to encourage protestors to choose where they go in order to minimise inconvenience to others without losing the impact of the protest but I don’t feel that coercion is warranted
I like the idea of charging JSO for any damage done, then passing that on to donors. Never happen though
What a Christmas gift, that headline really did make me laugh out loud
Good for Milei, if I’m not mistaken a similar principle applies to football matches and pop concerts, so why not.
If you truly believe in what you’re protesting, you’ll be happy to foot the bill, in the knowledge that you will be safe while protesting and as a taxpayer you will not get further burdened.
Merry Christmas everyone, have a good one.
Yep, we are on the same page Jane.
Have a lovely Christmas
There’s a very real danger that this could end up being the thin end of the wedge. Once a government charges protesters blocking roads during a protest it’s a very small step to charging other protests for the policing costs involved and before we know it protest is the preserve of the well off.
The best solution would be to massively increase the fines given to people who have been found guilty of breaking the law during a protest to help cover the cost of dealing with their law breaking rather than simply charging groups who organise a protest.
“massively increase the fines given to people who have been found guilty of breaking the law”
I largely agree with your comments but the problem is that the legal system is now largely corrupted. JSO routinely break the law with their pathetic vandalism and deliberate road closures. Bill the tw#t funding this crap and things might change. If he doesn’t pay send him down.
Looking forward to the day when Extinction Rebellion are charged for the disruptions they cause. 10,000 motorists on the M25 x £10.42 an hour…. A few days of that will soon drain ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ the George Soros funded twats of funds.
Damn right.
“a heavy deployment of police, paramilitary officers and anti-riot forces, cost 60 million pesos, or about £57,500, at the official exchange rate.”
We should employ Argentinian police. At those prices we could fly them over here to deal with protests and riots and fly them back and it’d still cost less than using ours.
Yes that’s 1,043 pesos to the pound if my calculator is correct.
They will also strip protestors of Welfare. That’s going to hurt.
No. Just those protesters who block streets – if I understood that correctly.
Mind you that also means they expect to be able to identify these people.
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Have a peaceful Christmas everyone.
In order to do this they must be closely surveilling the event and have the technology to trace the protesters they have identified. Its easy to applaud the concept of charging the protesters but the mechanics involved in that process are part of the apparatus of the surveillance state which, I think, most here would be against.
Correct. Trudeau tried it against the Canadian trucker protest during Covid. Not just cutting off welfare payments but freezing their bank accounts. I don’t think many on here would have supported that action.