The Reef took 6000 years to form. Suddenly it is bleached white, but the media are not putting it on page one. Oh the gnashing of teeth!
Peter Hartcher Sydney Morning Herald –– Tony Abbotts Harmful Legacy
‘…the news of its most severe bleaching didn’t even rate in the top five news topics.
‘Why? “It’s only a hypothesis, but I think there’s been a peaking of interest or concern” in matters related to climate change [says iSentia’s Patrick Baume.]
Peak Climate? Yes, please…
“It’s seen as something a bit from the past, as if getting rid of the carbon tax meant we’d got rid of climate change. It’s a funny one.”
Or maybe people are bored of climate ghost stories? Maybe people realized climate change is always here.
The reef survived the Holocene Horrible Warming Period. (Formerly called The Holocene Optimum 😉 ). Things were even hotter then and seas around Queensland were 1 – 2 whole meters higher. Apocalyptic stuff, yet somehow the reef made it without a single carbon trading scheme.
The last 8000 years of sea levels off Queensland
 Source: S Lewis et al Quaternary Science Reviews 2012.
Now tide gauges show seas are rising at 1mm a year. (See this sea level study too — 1mm). There’s only 1000 years to go to get back to the sea levels the Great Barrier Reef already knew for thousands of years.
There are no ice cores available in Queensland, but there are in Greenland and we can see the weather did a lot of changing. These are the same years the Great Barrier Reef formed and thrived in its current incarnation. Current temps might be similar to the Medieval spike. Not unprecedented.
This is what the temperature in Greenland was doing while the Great Barrier Reef formed.
Who gets the credit for this outbreak of climate-calmness?
This is partly an achievement of Tony Abbott and the climate change sceptics and deniers who were among his most fervent supporters.
We all say thank you :- )
Australia had a bipartisan consensus on climate change under John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull. The consensus was that climate change was real and that pricing carbon through an emissions trading scheme was the best way  for Australia  to respond.
Bollocks. “Australia” never had a consensus. The academic-eco-elite had a consensus:
Abbott shattered the consensus. He rode to power a conservative reaction against climate change action. He used it to destroy Turnbull’s leadership and then Rudd’s and, finally, Julia Gillard’s.
Exactly — the voters choose the man who offered them what they wanted — quote, Hartcher:Â “a reaction against climate change action.”
Together with his footsoldiers in politics and the media, he succeeded in muddying the public’s understanding of climate change in the process. The conservative reaction intimidated some scientists, news editors and commentators.
Yes the ABC is quaking in their boots, interviewing skeptics every day, week, once a year. And the commentators bravely arguing for the exact same position as the small oppressed groups called the UN, World Bank, and EU are so intimidated they stopped calling people petty names —Â denier… oh wait.
Which part of the public’s understanding got muddier, exactly?
REFERENCE:
Lewis, S.E., et al., Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian margin: a review, Quaternary Science
Reviews (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006 [abstract] (paywalled).