Coral at the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) faces another year of exile from the climate scare headlines with news that the record levels reported in 2021-22 have been sustained in the latest annual period to May 2023. A small drop in the three main areas of the reef was well within margin of error territory, with the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reporting that regional average hard coral cover in 2022-2023 was similar to last year at 35.7%. Most reefs underwent little change during the year.
Coral at the reef has been bouncing back sharply for a number of years, with a record 36-year high reported in 2022. But the news of this spectacular recovery has been largely ignored in most media since it had previously been a go-to poster scare story for collectivist Net Zero promoters. But connecting the fate of tropical corals to global warming was always a difficult ask since they grow in waters between 24-32°C. Short boosts in local temperatures can cause temporary bleaching, but it is scientifically impossible to pin it on human-caused climate change, although pseudoscientific ‘attribution’ computer models try very hard.
In the latest year, there was a short local temperature rise, but little bleaching was reported during the 2023 summer. No cyclones hit the reef and crown-of thorns starfish attacks were limited. Nevertheless, natural stresses will always affect the eco-system and AIMS states that these paused the growth of hard coral on some of the reefs.
Like most state-funded scientific bodies, AIMS is fully signed up to climate extremism and delivering politically correct messages to promote the Net Zero solution. Despite reporting what is now a substantial multi-year recovery, it notes that the future is predicted to bring more frequent, intense and enduring marine heatwaves, alongside the persistent threat of crown-of thorns starfish outbreaks and tropical cyclones. More frequent mass coral bleaching is a sign that the GBR is experiencing the consequences of climate change, it claims. However, in a different part of its latest report, AIMS accepts that the recent substantial recovery occurred despite two mass coral bleaching events in 2020 and 2022. There is an acceptance that this underlines that “widespread coral bleaching does not necessarily lead to extensive coral mortality”.
But pockets of extremist catastrophism remain in the mainstream media, notably in the Guardian, fighting to keep the coral destruction story going. A year ago, the newspaper reported that the GBR still had “some capacity” for recovery, but the window was closing fast as the climate continued to warm. Of course the Guardian has form as long as your arm on this score. Back in 1999, George Monbiot told its readers that the “imminent total destruction of the world’s coral reefs is not a scare story but a fact”.
In last year’s Guardian report, Dr. Mike Emslie, who leads the AIMS monitoring service, said he felt a “couple of bullets” had been recently dodged. While the recovery is great, “the predictions are the disturbances will get worse”, he suggested. “The naysayers can put their heads in the sand all they like, but the frequency of disturbances is going gangbusters,” he claimed. Dr. David Wachenfeld from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority claimed “global heating” of 1.5°C is considered a “guardrail for reefs”, after which the bleaching comes along too quickly for strong recovery.
Coral reefs have been around in one form or another for hundreds of millions of years. Current global temperatures are towards the lower end of the paleoclimatic record. One might wonder how corals manage to survive temperatures up to 10°C higher in the past?
Back in the real world, we can see how the recent solid recovery was sustained across the three main areas of the GBR.
The recovery in the northern GBR actually started around 2017. Last year the coral declined slightly from 36.5% to 35.7%, and was easily within the margin of error calculated by the AIMS. Typhoon Tiffany passed through at the end of the previous reporting season, and could have been responsible for some loss.
In the centre of the reef, the strong recovery of hard coral cover to 32.6% last year eased slightly, but again, as the AIMS noted, it was within the margin of error.
The southern end of the GBR has generally had higher coral cover than elsewhere, but has shown greater variability over the observed record. Last year’s cover was 33.8%, compared with 33.9% the year before. Some coral was reported to have been lost due to starfish predations.
The GBR is the largest reef system on Earth and runs for over 1,400 miles down the eastern side of Australia. It is also the most surveyed reef in the world and the results of scientific endeavour are widely distributed. While this work is often politicised, it is clear that recent evidence shows that temporary spikes in temperature, which occur naturally in the oceans, can cause bleaching. However, this bleaching process can rapidly go into reverse when local conditions stabilise. These findings have been confirmed elsewhere, notably in the remote Palmyra Atoll, 1,200 kms south of Hawaii. A 10-year survey recently observed sudden changes in temperature up to 3°C on two occasions, leading to substantial damage to the coral. A 2015-16 spike led to 90% of the coral bleaching, but the researchers found that within a year only 10% of the coral had died. Within two years, the corals had returned to pre-bleached levels.
The researchers concluded that the coral structures “show evidence of long-term stability” – but don’t hold that front page.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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By the time people realise this was a politics from the get go and nothing to do with science, they will have no gas central heating, and will wonder why their heat pump requires them to have 5 pullovers on in October. They will have no affordable vehicle, will be priced out of a holiday, not be able to enjoy a Steak Diane and will generally be impoverished. ———They will then see that nothing much has changed as regards any type of weather event or sea level rise and begin to say to them selves ——“Eh, what was all this for”? ————Maybe they should wake up NOW before they end up cold and poor having not saved any planets.
At some point in the not too distant, we are not going to be able to say anything against The Science™. It will be akin to blasphemy and heretics won’t even be able to get a well done or even a burned steak, pardon the pun, as you so rightly say, varmint. It could be the reverse of Talking Head’s ‘Once in a lifetime’ – and you may find yourself not behind the wheel of a large automobile, and you may find yourself kicked out of a beautiful house, etc. I think we all need to get active in whatever way we can now because to see this potential future coming at us very fast is not an option I wish to entertain. It’s very easy to ignore while there is still food in the shops, cash in your wallet, the sun is shining and the dog needs walking. It’s what I would call the ‘phoney war’ period. Something major is about to happen and they will use this as the pretext to introduce more draconian measures. We must resist at all costs and never ever comply. After all, they are nothing more than well-dressed, coiffured gangsters and they mean to enslave and kill us.
any dissenters will be labelled a “Psycho Killer”
Anti semetic conspiracy theorists more likely
The problem is though that we are “complying”. ——“Heretic” scientists keep their mouths shut or they will be removed from their University or other government funded data adjusting institution. So if the actual scientists cannot open their mouths what chance has the public? Here in Scotland the absurd SNP/ Green commie pincer movement want to bring in laws that force you to get rid of your gas central heating and replace it with a heat pump at considerable expense before you are allowed to sell your house. This is Climate Blackmail. Ofcourse all of this Net Zero stuff in a small country like Scotland or the UK will have NO effect on global climate whatsoever, but do these dimwits care? No, because it isn’t and never was about the climate in the first place. It is the political ideology of Sustainable Development emanating from the UN. Which basically says that the wealthier countries must stop using fossil fuels because we have used up more than our fair share of that finite resource in becoming prosperous. ———-As usual when you mix politics and science what you get is —POLITICS.
It’s only recovering because our beloved scientists and experts haven’t yet applied the appropriate balancing to the historical records.
Now say your penance five times: “We love Gaia, I must trust the science…”.
They will reach back in time and make the reef bigger, just as they reached back in time and made temperatures colder.
Good news, global warming makes coral grow better. Where are the headlines proclaiming that.
Ho well, they can always full back on the polar bears…ho no, they’re doing well also? damn!.. Haha, the ice sheets,.. wot, they’re increasing? Alrighty, global boiling, there, beat that!
We’d better hope that global boiling convinces them or they’ll never believe the world ends a week on Tuesday!
Yes but the seas are boiling masses of acid. Do keep up.
That big ole volcano eruption last year with the water vapour was just down the road from there – wonder what effect that’s going to have that plays into the climagandista storybook?
The lies and deceit just go on and on. Just like with Covid evidence is at best ignored and often well credentialed people who challenge the dogma are smeared and cancelled. The MP for the constituency I live in recently responded to the following question: –
Would you support a moratorium on all planned Net-Zero derived restrictions until a full and open debate including proper costing of Net Zero, which the public has never been given, is undertaken?
With this answer:
Net Zero Costs
The UK’s independent Committee on Climate Change (CCC) found that meeting net zero by 2050 is feasible and consistent with avoiding most damaging climate change. The CCC’s latest estimates put the net cost of achieving net zero at less than 1 per cent of GDP through to 2050 when taking into account the benefits from the falling prices of low-carbon technologies, with scope for the economic effect to be net positive as resources shift from imported fossil fuels to UK investment. This Government enshrined the 2050 net zero target into law and remains committed to it.
What utter drivel, give me strength!
But Net Zero apparently was in both Labour and Conservative manifesto’s so they would argue that the public voted for it. ——But the Net Zero amendment to the Climate Change Act of 2008 which was passed in parliament in 2019 was waved through Parliament with not a single question asked as to cost benefit. ——–The cost is in the trillions and the benefit next to nothing. ——Why would anyone in their right mind do something like this to their own citizens? Because ideology and politics is trumping every bit of common sense and decency that squirming eco socialist politicians in this country maybe had at one time before this UN led phony planet saving garbage got started, but that they have no longer. They are all UN lackeys pandering to globalist politics rather than to the people who vote for them.
It is now some years since the Maldives had been predicted to have sunk beneath the waves of a burgeoning Indian Ocean. Yet they are alive and well, principally I believe, because the land mass has taken it upon itself to rise further above the water level.