Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Reef scientists claim to be worried coral bleaching will destroy the reef. But they neglect to mention a few key facts.
Rescuing the Great Barrier Reef: how much can be saved, and how can we do it?
Graham Readfearn @readfearn Email
Sun 5 Apr 2020 06.00 AESTLast modified on Sun 5 Apr 2020 07.33 AESTAs global heating makes coral bleaching a regular event, scientists are urgently seeking ways to help the world’s biggest reef survive.
When coral scientist Zoe Richards left the Great Barrier Reef’s Lizard Island in late January, she was feeling optimistic.
Richards is a taxonomist. Since 2011 she has recorded and monitored 245 coral species at 14 locations around the island’s research station, about 270km north of Cairns.
In 2017 she saw “mass destruction of the reef”. Back-to-back mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017, and cyclones in 2014 and 2015, had wreaked havoc.
But in January, she saw thousands of new colonies of fast-growing Acropora corals that had “claimed the space” left by dead and degraded corals. In a three-year window without spiralling heat or churning cyclones, some corals were in an adolescent bloom – not mature enough to spawn, but getting close.
“It was an incredible recovery,” says Richards, of Curtin University. “But I knew if it was hit again, it would be trouble – and that’s exactly what happened.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/05/rescuing-the-great-barrier-reef-how-much-can-be-saved-and-how-can-we-do-it
The “incredible recovery” is the clue. Corals are highly mobile, highly adaptable and resilient organisms. The larval form of Coral is a free swimming organism, which can actively seek a location to settle. Reef coral has repeated demonstrated its resilience, by surviving multiple mass extinctions including the event which killed the dinosaurs.
The Great Barrier Reef is only 6-8000 years old. 6-8000 years ago, the age of the Holocene Optimum, sea levels were 2m higher than today. Since the Holocene Optimum sea levels have dropped as the polar ice sheets expanded, yet the reef endured, continuously shifting to more favourable sites, as it has always done in response to changed circumstances.
Even if global warming does eventually kill off part of the Great Barrier Reef, this die off will be balanced by an expansion of the colder Southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, as warm water corals successfully invade cooler waters made habitable by global warming.
The reef does not need “rescuing”, any more than the weeds in your garden need rescuing.
During the last ice age, only 11 thousand years ago, the current GBR location was 140 m above sea level.
Ago
Notice the ‘global heating’.
That’s the thing I’ve been waiting for over the past months. We could do with some here in Livferpool.
The question should be, does it need rescuing? After all, it has been there a long time. I would say no.
Nobody rescues the reef. It’s all about swanning about in boats with scuba gear on the taxpayer dime and to keep it coming dooming sells. When Peter Ridd virtually pointed that out with some real science it was a very bad career move and he has to be expunged by the enviro-industrial complex all the way to the highest Court in the land. Sound familiar?
The doomsters might have a problem down the track though. You see even before Covid19 there was a bit of a pushback from the tourism industry to tell them to ease off with the coral bleaching and the outrageous dooming as some folks were starting to believe there wasn’t much to see with a dead reef. Now Covid19 lockdown and no international travel has turned places like Cairns into something like mining towns that have run out of ore with a shutdown. Not hard to see how the doomsters won’t be popular opening their gobs at all once the lid is lifted on Covid19 and a broke desperate tourism sector wants to sell sell sell. That will be very interesting to watch.
I head ya all the way down here in Syd. Doomsters better watch out for the backlash. Nah, won’t happen, TV is still on…
It overlooks the real reason for coral bleaching – certain parts of the reef are exposed during low tide.
However, they can not tell you that because a key tenet of the religion is that we are experiencing catastrophic rises in sea level.
Also when the ocean temperature data was falsified upwards, the actual temperature of ocean water did not change.
Surprised no one posted thus link given the story subject
Still one of the funniest reads
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/07/Clive-James.pdf
The last time I was diving on the GBR, I thought to myself: “Can we rescue the Guardian?”
The Great Barrier Reef may not need saving but all those bureaucrats do.