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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