How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?

Written by Ross Clark on August 15, 2022. Posted in Current News

We are, we are told, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth. It is just that one of the iconic victims doesn’t seem to be playing ball.

As recently as May, environmentalists were warning that the Great Barrier Reef, the 1,500-mile coral structure off the coast of Queensland, was being doomed by warming seas.

It was reported to be suffering a ‘mass bleaching’ – where the plants which live on the reef and provide food for it die off.

The blame was put on warmer seas. Worse, this was the first mass bleaching event to occur in a ‘La Niña’ year, when the seas off Australia are supposed to be going through a cyclical cooling phase. A gloomy David Wachenfeld, chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Authority, told the Guardian at the time that ‘unexpected events are now to be expected. Nothing surprises me more’.

Except something now has surprised those foretelling the end of the Great Barrier Reef.

The latest survey of the reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, which was undertaken in May, just as the Guardian report was published, reveals that coral cover has not only recovered but across two-thirds of the reef it is now at its highest level in 36 years of observations.

The speed of the recovery of the coral is remarkable; in 2016 the entire reef was declared dead in an obituary published in the environmental magazine Outside. But, like the stories of people saved from cremation by a slight twitch at the eleventh hour, its death seems to have been exaggerated.

Not, of course, that the environmental movement can quite bring itself to celebrate the result of the latest survey.

The Guardian’s coverage of the report is an object lesson in how environmental news is driven only by misery.

‘The world heritage site still has some capacity for recovery,’ it reports, ‘but the window is closing fast as the climate continues to warm’.

A more appropriate sub-headline, surely, would have been: ‘Great Barrier Reef defies reports of its death as scientists under-estimate its capacity to recover from bleaching events.’ It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the response of the reef to warmer seas is not fully understood.

When you have comprehensive data going back only 36 years it is pretty difficult to understand long-term trends.

None of this is to say, of course, that the Great Barrier Reef might not conceivably be at risk from warmer seas at some point. And there is a worry, too, that diverse ecosystems have been replaced by a handful of dominant coral species, making the entire reef more susceptible to environmental changes.

But for the moment, you might think that the climatic doomsters might be big enough to admit that they were wrong, and that along with Al Gore’s prediction for the end of Kilimanjaro snows by 2020, nature has once again defied their grim prophecies.

See more here: spectator.co.uk

Bold emphasis added

Header image: Mining.com

Editor’s note. It should be remembered that those who study corals say they actually prefer warmer water, and Peter Ridd was fired from James Cook University for saying the GBR is not dying and is in fact healthy.

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