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By Jo Nova
Sixty percent of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted since 1985 but today the corals are healthier than ever
In 1985 humans were emitting only 19.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, and now we emit 37 billion tons. In the meantime AIMS have been dragging divers thousands of kilometers over the reefs to inspect the coral cover. These are the most detailed underwater surveys on the largest reef system in the world, and they show that far from being bleached to hell, the corals are more abundant than we have ever seen them.
As Peter Ridd points out, when the reef was doing badly, AIMS was happy to combine the data on the whole reef, so we could lament its demise. But lately AIMS splits it into separate sections and if Peter Ridd didn’t check the numbers, who would know it was a record across the full 2,300 kilometer length of the reef? And that may be exactly the point. As Ridd reminds us, in 2012 the AIMS team predicted the coral cover in the central and southern regions would decline to 5 – 10 percent cover by 2022. Instead the whole reef is […]
By Jo Nova
The Sydney Morning Herald goes full Coral Reef Seer — predicting not just the end of the vast Great Barrier Reef, but the complete loss of the entire world’s coral reefs. That’s a quarter to a half million square kilometers of reef, gone, pfft, destructo, just like that.
The basis for the prophesy is a set of photos taken last week from one point at the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef. Apparently, like tea leaves and chicken entrails, this spot has magical forecasting abilities.
Prophesy by Mike Foley, SMH
The photos that show nothing so far has saved the Great Barrier Reef
Australia’s climate targets must be bolstered to meet the global action needed to prevent the complete loss of the world’s coral reefs, experts warn, after the fifth mass bleaching event off Queensland’s coast since 2016.
So last year for the second year in a row, the Great Barrier Reef was recorded as having more coral cover than has ever been recorded since data started being collected in 1986.
People who actually dive on the reef to research it find it recovers from mass bleaching in as little as 18 months.
[…]
By Jo Nova
18 months ago the coral on John Brewer Reef was dead according to The Guardian, but Jennifer Marohasy, Peter Ridd and Rowan Dean took the risk of going back to the same dead reef to make a short documentary on it and found the same coral, 80 kilometers offshore and it, and the whole area around it, is flourishing.
According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park authority, the area was surveyed in April 2022 and the damage was classed as “severe”. According to them, 60-90% of the reef was bleached. It was so bad that when the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about “500 kilometers of severe bleaching” it was John Brewer Reef that they picked for the feature photo.
Just like The Guardian:
The Guardian
Scientists, apparently, were dreading the damage to come (of the reef that recovered):
If the John Brewer reef was sick, most of the Great Barrier Reef was bound to be sick too, said Graham Readfearn:
“This is one of the healthiest reefs off Townsville and one of the best reefs on the whole Great Barrier Reef. So for these corals to be stressed and damaged … well, […]
By Jo Nova
Whatever you do, don’t let the punters know the corals aren’t collapsing.
Wise Hok Wai Lum
Last year, the Great Barrier Reef had blockbuster levels of coral cover, and this year it’s the same, even though global carbon dioxide levels rose 1%, and China probably installed another 100 coal fired plants. The corals, apparently, don’t care.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) issued a press release, calling this repeat record a “pause”.
“A pause in recent coral recovery across most of the Great Barrier Reef” — AIMS
Last year only 3% of Australians knew the Great Barrier Reef was in record good health, and AIMS seemingly wants to keep it that way.
If this survey showed the reef was in record poor cover for a second year, would they call it a pause in recent damage? The lies-by-omission are still lies. AIMS is deceiving the taxpayers who pay for AIMS.
AIMS
It’s a disaster, again. How will scientists get research grants to manage a reef that looks after itself?
Peter Ridd is scathing:
“The fabulous condition of the reef demonstrates that the public has been systematically misled by many […]
By Jo Nova
Only 3% of Australians know the true state of the Reef!
Ten years ago, coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef hit record lows. The news has been full of dire reports of bleaching ever since, but quietly, a phenomenal recovery was blossoming across the full 2,000 kilometer span of the reef. Last year coral cover hit a record high — better than any year since records began in 1986. Corals are thriving but Australians are spending half a billion dollars to save them?
I’m a Director of the Australian Environment Foundation, and after this new record, I worked with fellow Director Peter Ridd to arrange surveys to find out whether Australians had heard the news. What we found was a nation mis-informed.
I am honored to issue the report below. Please forward it on, send letters to the Editors and tell the world. Consider joining the AEF to help us get more science into environmental debates.
— Jo
_________________________________________
Great Barrier Reef in record coral cover but 97% of Australians don’t know it
Australian Environment Foundation (AEF)
23 April 2023
[…]
By Jo Nova
It’s a miracle. It’s only six months since they were elected but the Labor says Great Barrier Reef is OK now.
However UNESCO is still threatening to list it as “in danger”, despite record coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef for the last two years running. The “danger” label would scare off some tourists, so the Minister is lobbying the UN to stop it.
But follow the reasoning. The Minister is admitting that the UN listing is not about the reef itself, it’s about whether they have paid enough money for UN causes or adopted the right “NetZero” liturgy.
Barrier Reef in danger? The fight’s on again
Lydia Lynch and Jess Malcolm, The Australian
Ms Plibersek [Environment Minister] and her Queensland counterpart, Meaghan Scanlon, sought to distance themselves from the report’s findings, arguing they were the result of the former Coalition government’s failure to act on climate change.
“The reason that UNESCO in the past has singled out a place as ‘at risk’ is because they wanted to see greater government investment or greater government action – and since the change of government, both of those things have happened,” […]
The new AIMS annual survey is in with the shocking result that not only was last year a record, but this year is even better. There is more coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef than ever recorded. We’ve had four bleaching events in the last seven years, and record hottest ever heat, the highest CO2 levels recorded since we invented ways to record CO2, and yet, despite all that, the reef is thriving.
AIMS, Coral Reef Survey
AIMS, Coral Reef Survey
In 36 years of measuring coral cover on the reef, it’s never been better.
Record coral cover for Great Barrier Reef: Australian Institute of Marine Science
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
The Great Barrier Reef has set a new record for hard coral cover over two-thirds of its 2300km length, results of the Australian Institute of Marine Science official long-term monitoring program show.
AIMS program leader Mike Emslie said the results were “good news” and showed that the Reef had “dodged a bullet” in bleaching this year.
“But the fact we have had four bleaching events in seven years is a major concern and highlights […]
Join Peter Ridd, Jo Nova, Walter Starck and Alan Moran for the Great Barrier Reef Webinar
Tuesday March 1: Sign up here: AEF Webinar: Is the Great Barrier Reef Dying or Thriving?
Photo: Wise Hok Wai Lum
One side of politics has just spent another billion dollars to “save the reef”. The other side of politics may spend even more. But how much is our national policy set by scientific data and how much is controlled by scenic-disaster-shots? Do Australian academics and media activists craft a false notion of a fantasy Reef-Nirvana where bleaching never occurred, where cyclones were gentle, and where corals are supposed to live in aquarium-like conditions with constant pH and temperature 24 hours a day? Is the reef really in worse condition now than thirty years ago when half of our man-made emissions had not been emitted?
Walter Starck wants to know why we have one the largest fishing zones per capita in the world but most families struggle to afford to eat Australian fish?
A STICKY POST. Details below.
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The oceans were supposed to be swallowing up the islands
Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.
The Howick Group of islands is north of Cairns Australia. Three scientific expeditions mapped out them out in 1928 and in 1974, and again in 2021, and lo, they have grown, especially in the last four decades. That makes them like most of the 709 islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans that were studied a few years ago. Satellites showed that 89% of those islands had grown.
It turns out warmer more carbon rich world makes mangroves happy. Who could have seen that coming, apart from every biologist on Earth?
From the commentary in the video below:
“We’ve seen some really dramatic changes. Some of the things that we’ve seen are advancing fronts of forests. Forests that were mapped to small patches on the windward part of the reef flat are now occupying a much larger section of […]
The coral cover as sampled by AIMS across the entire Great Barrier Reef is not just good, but better than it has ever been in the 36 years they have been studying it. If the reef is in danger — it’s from being overgrown with coral. Climate Change, such as it is, has caused no trend at all.
If anything, in the spirit of modern-media-science, climate change causes record coral growth.
Tonight the UN scientists decided not to list the reef as “in danger”. The ABC and every Green group who normally follow UN scientists slavishly said that was “only because of lobbying”.
Record Coral Cover on the Great Barrier Reef.
The new AIMS report on Monday showed the Great Barrier Reef had a remarkable recovery, but the graphs were of three different sections of the reef (North, central and South). Peter Ridd obtained all the data and combined it to make one graph and discovered that the coral cover of 2020 was a new all time record high.
Strangely none of the government agencies or paid Professors discovered this. You have to be unemployed to discover record coral growth.
Science and media doomsayers ignore good news on […]
Life bounces back
The Great Barrier Reef has had a good year. 2020 might have been the hottest or the second hottest year on record, but it was a bonanza year for reef recovery.
The reef covers 344,400 square kilometres, survived the Holocene Optimum, the Minoan warming, the Roman warming and the Medieval Warming, and is already recovering from a streak of few nasty El Ninos and a cyclone or two.
But the bottom line is that coral deaths are not easily relateable or predicted by hot weather or high CO2. If sea level changes or temperature volatility are the real culprits, the ocean currents or cloud cover may be the driver, and not the number of cars or solar panels in Australia.
As Peter Ridd has said for years: The Great Barrier Reef has about the same amount of coral as it did in 1985
Coral Cover, Northern Great Barrier Reef.
What a difference a few years makes. Where, here, is there any sign that either CO2 or high temperatures is a problem?
Coral Cover, Central Great Barrier Reef.
The trend appeared to be “all down” in 2011, but neither heat nor El […]
Flynn Reef, Queensland, Photo by Wise Hok Wai Lum
Ever since Australia asked for an investigation into the source of Covid, China has been accidentally-on-purpose sticking pins into our trade deals. Pop went the wine, coal, beef, barley and lobster markets.
Now after concreting corals reefs in the South China Sea and plundering the Galapagos, China is suddenly concerned about the Great Barrier Reef. Overnight Chinese players in the UN have pushed it to the top of a list that had 82 more fragile ecosystems ahead of it. Pop, goes the tourism trade as the headlines ring out that UNESCO says the Reef is “in danger”.
At the moment, the only tourists that could possibly be frightened away are a few New Zealanders, because no one else can easily get around the two week quarantine. But when flights reboot, Australia just needs to send photos of the glorious corals to the world and “pop” goes the UN and China’s reputation.
It’s time the West dumped the UN — it’s just a play tool for Sino power
That would “pop” some of the CCP web of influence. What’s a Veto of a dead committee worth?
How many other environmental […]
Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?
The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.
This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]
The future of the entire 350,000 km2 Great Barrier Reef hangs in the balance — as the coralapocalypse has wiped out 50% of the coral in just 25 years. Lordy! If only we’d built some off-shore wind farms on the reef to protect it! We could cover whole islands with solar panels? What are we thinking!
But as Peter Ridd points out, AIMS (The Australian Institute of Marine Science) surveys around 100 reefs every year — and for the last 35 years — and they find things are roughly the same. See the graph below.
Don’t look now, but corals are doing fine. From Jennifer Marohasy and Peter Ridd.
Somehow Terry Hughes — and the Centre of Excellence for Integrated Coral Reef Studies — gets up to $4 million each year to report on the reef but won’t release the data behind the mass media campaign.
The ABC — which gets nearly $3 million dollars every single day — can’t even pick up the phone to interview AIMS or Peter Ridd and ask one hard question of Terry Hughes’ “Excellent” centre. (We all know why they had to put the word “excellence” in the title, it was the only […]
Jen Marohasy went hunting for bleached coral:
What is the true state of the Great Barrier Reef? … In January 2020, Emmy Award winning cameraman Clint Hempsall, and IPA Senior Fellow Jennifer Marohasy decided to find out. They spent a week exploring the Ribbon Reefs 250kms to the north east of Cairns in search of coral bleaching – the process of corals turning white as a result of warmer water temperature, which climate scientists say is being caused by climate change. Some argue 60% of the coral at the Ribbon Reefs was irretrievably bleached in 2016.
Somewhere among 350,000 square kilometers of coral reef, Jen Marohasy had no trouble finding some happy corals, giant cod, and cute nemo fish.
The IPA and the B. Macfie Family Foundation supports and publishes the video:
Colorful corals of the Great Barrier Reef
Don’t believe your lying eyes. Incandescent light globes are killing the corals one by one, air conditioners cause fish to act reckless, and only more solar panels and windmills can save them. You know it makes sense.
Living coral.
..
Many of the corals grow on vertical formations which are not visible on […]
Fake Warming in Queensland: The BOM says the sites didn’t move, but photos show they did.
The warming at these four sites alongside the Great Barrier Reef is due to site changes, incompetence, poor record keeping and “adjustments”. Map: Terrametrics, Map data Google 2020
All along the coast near the Great Barrier Reef, the BOM has claimed temperatures have warmed in the last 50 years, and they’ve calculated it to a tenth of a degree. To get that kind of accuracy the thermometers need to be carefully placed, and the BOM needs to know exactly where they were, but they don’t.
The BOM keeps long pages of site descriptions and exact dates of moves and equipment changes, but historic photos show the records are wrong. The BOM will solemnly swear a site was in the same place for decades but photographs and archives show the sites were often moved as developments sprang up around them. The BOM didn’t keep the records and didn’t bother to check. If the thermometer moved to a warmer location or it warmed because they replaced the standard 230-litre Stevenson screen with a 60-litre toy one, or no longer cleaned it […]
“Clark et al. (2020) found 100% replication failure. None of the findings of the original eight studies were found to be correct.”
Scientists tried to repeat eight experiments that showed “acidification” would make reef fish get hyper, act like their predators smell nice, and generally swim in the wrong circles, behave weirdly and need therapy sessions. Turns out the fish will be OK, but James Cook Uni’s reputation may never recover. The original junk experiments and press releases came out of the coral reef centre at JCU.
This is the “replication crisis” Peter Ridd warned us about. He was fired from JCU in 2018 after stating that work from JCU’s coral reef centre (ARCCoE) was not trustworthy. He also helped expose manipulated photos of reef fish. Obviously this latest reef research shows he was right to be concerned about quality assurance at JCU. One JCU researcher, Oona Lönnstedt, had already been caught fabricating data in Sweden, and yet JCU “investigated” and sacked Ridd faster than it investigated her suspicious lionfish shots. Indeed, two years on, JCU has not even officially appointed the committee to investigate her potentially fraudulent work. It seems JCU would rather employ untrustworthy scientists than […]
Fifteen years of missing data tells us everything we need to know
Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy are continuing to follow up on the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Strangely, while everyone professes to care, and cry, and Malcolm Turnbull casually tossed half a billion at it, we see the extremely radioactive oddity that no one is worried enough to bother measuring the actual supposed decline of the seventh wonder of the modern world. Fifteen years is a long time to overlook that. Many panicked press releases have gone under the bridge yet apparently AIMS (and all the others) just want to keep quoting the shrinking growth rates, but not keep track of them.
On top of that, Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy have spotted a pretty major flaw in the methodology for that much quoted study that claims growth on the reef has slowed by 15% from 1990 to 2005. If that number is right, the reef will have ground down to a 30% decline by now [in growth rate]. Disaster, disaster. Worthy of a hundred press releases and a thousand grants. So either it just hasn’t occurred to AIMS et al to keep studying the reef they […]
Stone Island is the reef that put Peter Ridd’s career on the road to the high court. Last week Jennifer Marohasy released a mini documentary showing corals around Stone Island that weren’t supposed to be there. It was a bad look for Dr Tara Clark, the expert who had said the corals were gone.
This week Graham Readfearn hit back with “Scientists say rightwing think tank misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study”. Apparently Marohasy must have used a right wing camera or something. (Those corals you saw are not really corals). If only Readfearn had not used a left wing keyboard, where the only truths it could tell were projections of his own flaws onto everything else.
Dr Clark apparently now denies she said the corals were all dead. Saying “We never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012.” Poor Guardian readers, as usual, get spoon-fed thin slices of technicalities and weasel words, never the whole truth.
This picture was taken with Jen Marohasy’s drone, Skido, looking south east towards the edge of Pink Plate Reefon 26th August 2019.
Are you now or have you ever been an Acropora coral?
In reply Jennifer Marohasy just […]
Jennifer Marohasy dives on Beige Reef near Stone Island with Walter Stark, and Emmy Award winning cinematographer Clint Hempsall.
The aim was just to record what was there… don’t believe your lying eyes.
Fortunately, this science is not peer reviewed.
Jennifer’s blog and the IPA.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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