Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has more coral growing on it than ever recorded. By Joanne Nova. The scare over the reef is yet another case of the narrative triumphing over facts.
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. …
In the last few hours the Great Barrier Reef barely escaped being labeled as “in danger” by a branch of the China-friendly-UN. Instead UNESCO will leave it at “critical” and decide again in a year if the 340,000 square kilometer reef is in danger of turning into a calcium-carbonate quarry. …
The ABC and every Green group who normally follow UN scientists slavishly said that was “only because of lobbying”.
The annual data on coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, was released on Monday showing the amount of coral on the reef is at record high levels. Record high, despite all the doom stories by our reef science and management institutions.
Like all other data on the reef, this shows it is in robust health. For example, coral growth rates have, if anything, increased over the past 100 years and measurements of farm pesticides reaching the reef show levels so low that they cannot be detected with the most ultra-sensitive equipment. …
But we keep being told in the media that the reef is severely damaged and it’s getting worse:
Occasionally colossal amounts of coral are killed, mostly by cyclones, but also by crown of thorns starfish and bleaching. So the media, with its predilection for bad news, can be fed a regular diet of doom. Our scientists are always happy to oblige. The quiet recovery is generally downplayed or ignored.
