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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
What looks, acts, and smells like an unelected World Government telling us what to do?
The Australian government bragged about getting a six month free-pass from the global UNESCO naughty corner but in reality they were craven patsies to an absurd unaudited, unaccountable foreign committee.
The UN was threatening, as it always does, to lumber The Great Barrier Reef with an “In-Danger” sticker, despite the coral on the largest reef in the world being healthier than it’s ever been since estimates began in 1986.
To avoid the dreaded sticker of reef sin, apparently Labor saved the day by putting in a 43% emissions cut which will kill eagles and bats with wind turbines, plaster the wilderness with high voltage towers, infect the alpine lakes with feral pests and threaten whales with off shore wind plants. (That’s just for starters).
The price to appease the UN apparently includes spending another $1.2 billion to “protect the reef” (which will expand the bureaucrat class) and twisting the thumb-screws of regulation on fishermen and farmers (thus punishing the workers). The UN gave the Australian government a pat on the back for canceling the Urannah and Hell’s Gate dams. Since when […]
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
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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
Dr Peter Ridd compiled the statistics on coral reefs around the world, and even though China has installed a million megawatts of coal fired power in the last twenty years, there’s no evidence that corals are suffering significantly.
Statistics on corals barely existed before 1980, and didn’t get semi reasonable until 1998 or so. But with twenty years of data there is no evidence suggesting we need to send in the SWAT teams with floating shade sails, giant fans, breeding teams, or sunscreen for staghorn coral.
We do however need to send in the SWAT team to rescue our universities.
Hard Coral around the world is not suffering a mass die-off due to climate change, GWPF
Bleached is not killed
Academic shaman have implied (tacitly) that bleached coral is like dead coral, but instead bleaching is more like home redecoration and the corals recover surprisingly fast. But amongst all this noise of loss and recovery, and with such short term data it’s been hard to see the big picture.
The uncertainty bars on early coral studies expand like an emergency flare. But notice that there is no significant, distinctive response from corals despite CO2 being […]
by Jo Nova
The remnants of a long gone coral reef are not in the water here, but on top of the cliff. This is what real climate change looks like:*
The whole coral reef is now 100 m out of the water | Bahnfrend |
The Nullabor Plain.
It turns out the high plateau desert called the Nullarbor was once a coral reef. It’s a thousand kilometer stretch without a tree that’s now about 100m above sea level. Obviously it’s a wilderness that’s begging to be restored to its true Miocene glory. The question is whether we can put on enough solar panels to save this reef, or if we can melt the Antarctic and raise the oceans…
Researchers looking at satellite images spotted a suspicious looking dome and ring (below) . They figured out it was not a meteor crater but probably made of coral atoll. It’s about one kilometer across and corals built this (probably) 14 million years ago. Tectonic shifts lifted the land out of the ocean. If only the polyps had put in a carbon tax?
The Nullarbor is a bit special because the surface is well preserved. There is not […]
It’s like a team of obsessive compulsive scientists turned up to capture a magic show in slow-mo
They descended on Palmyra Atoll in 2009 and kept going for ten years, taking 1,500 photos across eighty plots of corals. They looked at all the living things on the ocean floor, and not just the hard corals, but the algae, the microalgae, and the turf. They followed plots where waves crashed and plots that were calm. Then they went through the photos with detailed digital-tracing and image analysis and tracked them — not just through one, but two full bleaching cycles and what they found was recovery. Stability!
In May this year their 10-year study of Palmyra Atoll was finally published
Palmyra is an isolated atoll, 1,300 km south west of Hawaii, with a tiny population. It’s about as pristine as anything can get, unaffected by human pollution, except of course, for CO2 — that fertilizer from the sky which is everywhere. If it was a problem, this was a good place to find out.
In 2015 a savage pool of warm water arrived that bleached not just ten or twenty percent of the corals but blitzed right through ninety percent. It […]
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 […]
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 […]
Peter Ridd writes that a new paper uncovers rare lithographs of corals underwater in 1862.
One hundred and fifty year old pictures of corals are rare enough, but these ones had the unmistakable pure white cauliflower look that marks them as totally bleached. But in 1862 the first coal fired power plant was still twenty years away from starting work as a coral destroyer, and carbon dioxide levels were a perfect 286ppm.
This is the spot (below) in the Northern Red Sea just at the end of “The Little Ice Age”. Perhaps the seas were too alkaline then, and were yet to reach the perfect pH nirvana they must have struck the year before humans started scuba diving en masse.
Bleaching in 1862, twenty years before the worlds first coal fired power plant was built. Ransonnet 1862 | Tomas Cedhagen 2021
We can see why scuba diving was not popular in 1862.
The first underwater camera had a little man inside?
Somehow the great marine-psychics of the world know that corals didn’t bleach in the early 1960’s even though, or perhaps “because”, there was almost no one down there to see it.
From Peter Ridd:
[…]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
9.7 out of 10 based on 92 ratings
If only coral researchers read skeptic blogs, they’d know that corals have been getting bleached and wrecked by cyclones for millions of years. They have adaptable genes, honed by 500 million years of natural selection, plus epigenetic tricks, and with safe zones to seed recovery. The Great Barrier Reef spans 2,000 kilometers and five degrees Celsius from 27 to 32°C and we’re still finding reefs we didn’t even know about. The pH swings on a daily basis, and fish do better when it does. One coral has adapted to ocean “acidification” in 6 months. Other fish remarkably adapted from salt to freshwater in just fifty years. As Peter Ridd says: Of all the ecosystems in the world, the reef is one that’s best at adapting to climate change.
So once again, corals have recovered — and yet the “experts” who wear their dogma covered glasses didn’t see it coming.
‘Teeming with life’: New hope for the Great Barrier Reef as island shows remarkable coral growth
By Melissa Martin and Erin Semmler, ABC
One Tree Island was lashed by Cyclone Hamish in 2009, destroying much of the island’s coral.
In the five years following the […]
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