Alan Jones, interviews Peter Ridd, James Cook university professor of physics about the state of the Great Barrier Reef
The coral reef recovers.
Peter Ridd: Coral Reefs recover — “the scientists make hay when it dies in a spectacular way but they are quiet when it recovers.”
On symbionts — “There is a large variety of symbionts and some allow coral to grow faster but are more sensitive to bleaching.”
All the corals on the Great Barrier Reef live and grow much faster in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where the water is much hotter than it is on the reef and the corals just juggle these symbionts. 4:20
Corals have a little thermometer built in them, when you take a core of them from many years ago we know what the temperature of the water was back when Captain Cook sailed up the coast, it was actually about the same temperature then. It was colder 100 years ago, but it has recovered from that. The temperatures on the reef are not even significantly warmer than average on a hundred year timescale.
Corals that bleach in one year will be less susceptible to bleaching in following years.
On the failure of modern science:
Peter Ridd: We can no longer rely on our science institutions. This is a very sad thing.
We are like a ship upon the ocean when our science fails and we need to do something about it. … This science is almost never checked.
Alan Jones: All these things [bleaching, crown of thorns] have been around for millennia, I love this line, as you write “long before scientists got hold of any scuba gear.”
Peter Ridd: These things only became a problem when scientists pop up on the scene.
Scientists are trying to close down, or affect adversely the sugar cane, the cattle, and the coal industry, and they are also telling the world the reef is dead which affects the tourist industry in Queensland.
Like a bushfire… It [bleaching] looks terrible when it happens but it grows back.
On the future:
Peter Ridd: There needs to be a properly funded group of scientists who sole job is to find fault in the science with which we are basing expensive public policy decisions ….
h/t Jim Simpson.