As word of the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef spreads, the inevitable rationalization from alarmists appears. In response to a tweet thread by Bjorn Lomborg, we have the following:
Originally tweeted by (((TheTracker))) (@IdiotTracker) on August 7, 2022.
Sigh. Internet law of bullshit asserts itself. You know this is going to be bullshit, but proving it is going to be a real chore.
So, coral cover did hit a high point, in the context of four mass bleaching events in the last seven years:
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/great-barrier-reef-coral-cover-2022-record
It was mostly a fast-growing, frail variety of coral. So perhaps what we’re looking at here is the bleaching events having killed off some of the more sturdy, long-lived corals and this fast-growing stuff is flourishing like scrub bushes after a wildfire.
There is no truth to his suggestion scientists are trying to downplay or conceal these numbers. I found stories about them everywhere: Axios, the Guardian, the Washington Post, etc., etc.
Originally tweeted by (((TheTracker))) (@IdiotTracker) on August 7, 2022.
I did my part of the social media dance.
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It so happens to be the dominant reef building coral … acropora sp.
The damage to the reef was very recent.
ONLY a fast-growing coral species could have been re-established in that time frame.
Do alarmist “scientists” even understand rudimentary logic?
Absolutely not! If they did they couldn’t possibly BE alarmists.
Just like land species succession, from grass to shrubs to fast-growing trees to mature forest, coral reefs to the same thing. How is this a surprise to these purposeful idiots?
Surely you don’t mean that that all forms of vegetation have good seasons and bad seasons?
Heaven forbid!!!!
The alarmists will take their fraud with them, to their grave !
As soon as possible, I hope.
Back in 2016 the alarmist Rowan Jacobsen wrote an obituary for the GBR, it’s pathetic, lying about the real world for political and financial gain.
“Climate change and ocean acidification have killed off one of the most spectacular features on the planet.”
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/obituary-great-barrier-reef-25-million-bc-2016
The legacy media also spun it as the “most coral cover in 37 years” without mentioning that is the total period the coral has been measured
Most coral cover ever would be correct, but not fit The Narrative.
Had it been an extreme weather event it would have been reported by the BBC as being in the ever recorded or just ever categoty. I doubt this will appear anywhere on the Bbc
Oh, but they’re all to quick to do the reverse, saying temperatures are the “highest ever,” when by “ever” they mean ” during the instrument temperature record,” a geologic eyeblink.
Interestingly enough, I was in the British Virgin Islands in June. A place where I have vacationed regularly for over 10 years. Anecdotally, I have never observed so much new coral growth. This included colonization of rock surfaces which had not been colonized in the past. Plus new colonization on older dead corals. It was quite impressive.
Of course, just one person’s anecdotal observation ….
Common sense says … 1 – Corals love warm water, and 2 – Corals grow better with more CO2 to build more colonies.
How could “Carbon pollution” do that?
/sarc.
The carbon in the water is what they build the reef with…who knew
Chalk up one more tally on the side of “carbon fertilization” being a benefit to the biosphere.
Coral needs calcium in the water to build the mass we think of as coral. CO2 in water dissolves calcium, making it biologically available.
“Common sense” apparently doesn’t understand basic carbonate chemistry.
I’ll bite.
How far below the ocean surface is the carbonate compensation depth in the vicinity of the GBR?
How far is the GBR above the CCD?
Please show your maths when you explain carbonate chemistry to us.
We have another member who has never bothered to familiarize him or herself with basic carbonate chemistry! Do please read the link I provided,.
Did all the shell-forming sea creatures dissolve last time CO2 was over 500ppm?
Lol is it your impression that the risk to corals is supposed to be that they will simply dissolve?
It was mostly a fast-growing, frail variety of coral. So perhaps what we’re looking at here is the bleaching events having killed off some of the more sturdy, long-lived corals and this fast-growing stuff is flourishing like scrub bushes after a wildfire.
Nice try but as Peter Ridd points out it was the Acropora corals that was their chief concern with their dooming meme before the recovery-
‘Completely untrustworthy’: Great Barrier Reef data calls coral bleaching events into question (msn.com)
Acropora corals are a primary concern – they are fast growing but frail, much more susceptible to storms and predation.
Green devils are pitiful.
It’s never, ever good enough for the alarmists. EVER. Good news is bad news. Neutral news is bad news. Bad news is very bad news. Never, EVER can there be good news.
What are you saying NNG?
“Its worse than we thought?”
It’s even worserer than that. It’s good news from global warming.
No one is saying this is bad news – people are tempering excitement with important context. Many are interpreting the reporting as, “corals are completely fine and are not facing any genuine threats,” which is extremely inaccurate.
”Tempering excitement”??? You mean the way they “tempered their original predictions of DOOOOOM! for All Reefs – Everywhere – Forever! Because, SCIENCE!” You mean like that? The “we’re all going to die by 2030, or 2050, or ..” folks aren’t well known for “tempering” anything they say. Not even a drooling idiot could fail to see that’s true.
Which peer reviewed publications predict that we will all die by 2030 or 2050?
I’ll wait.
Why is the statement, “corals are completely fine and are not facing any genuine threats” extremely inaccurate?
Because corals are not fine and are facing threats from an increasing frequency of bleaching events, storm risk, and vulnerability to predation. The fact that coral coverage has bounced back is undoubtedly good, but it is not the sole indicator of ecosystem health.
There’s zero money for “Everything’s fine, nothing to see here.” Bad news sells and brings in the grant money. It’s not a complex equation.
Minor correction (They/Them) is the wrong kind of coral. Keep up!
No, it is (They/Them/Others). Please do not discriminate!
I call all coral types f***ers because it is gender neutral.
No no – completely wrong; 2 genders, f***ers and f***ees.
Re: “You can’t replace a dead 50-year coral in 5 years.”
Red herring.
50-year coral is not in significant NEED of replacement.
(Source: Reef Heresy? — Science, Research, and the Great Barrier Reef by Peter Ridd, (2020) pp. 93-4 (“Thus, … total mortality for … corals between five and 40 metres is around three percent.”))
Why can’t you replace 50 years of coal in five years? Who says so?
“We can’t just drill you way to lower prices”… uttered right before we did just that.
Old growth corals are the new “old growth forests.”
Only last year UNESCO issued their report telling the world of the poor state of the Great Barrier Reef. The WOKE media were all over it here in Australia. I am surprised that the same media ran this latest report.
That’s because their cursory admission of the truth about GBR recovery was only the cable attached to a BOATFUL of lies about “climate change.”*
.
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*”climate change” as used by the vast majority of the media means: “meaningful shifts in the climate zones of the earth caused by human CO2 emissions.”
Yes, I think you are right. The new PM has every second sentence with a plug about “climate change”. The media are starting to get the message, from a ground swell of people in opposition to this “mass hysteria”. I am glad to see that the emission reduction target bill of 43% by 2030 has been passed. To me it’s an out of the frying pan into the fire for the new PM, when it comes to delivery.
Peter K said : [Only last year UNESCO issued their report telling the world of the poor state of the Great Barrier Reef. The WOKE media were all over it here in Australia.] China ran that act by UNESCO – another way China was gaming our 2022 Fed Election.
Peter K said : [I am surprised that the same media ran this latest report.] The election was on 21 May Peter – Our dominant greenleft media has PM Albo safely home now. This stunning report can not dent his glorification now.
How amazing that AIMS never leaked a hint of these findings & upcoming report to ScoMo Gov before election.
Indie sources eg Dr Jennifer Marohasy has been telling whoever will listen that her scuba & camera surveys in 2022 were finding coral everywhere she went. You might expect a ScoMo Gov staffer might have contacted AIMS to ask “what are your scientists finding in the face of what Marohasy is finding?” A conversation by a savvy staffer might have lead to discovering AIMS had much survey work pre-publication basically backing Marohasy.
The increased number of polar bears we are seeing are also of a genetically inferior type brought about by… drum roll… Climate Change!
How does one measure a “genetically inferior type”?
Wait … let me guess you make some unsubstantiated assumptions about a gene then you make the claim and as long as you include climate change as the cause it can’t be challenged 🙂
How does one measure a “genetically inferior type”?
They don’t bounce when you push them off skyscrapers to frighten the kiddies? They self immolate like lithium batteries when you’re preparing to push them off skyscrapers? Am I getting warm?
Pretty bloody hazardous measuring any damn thing at all about Polar Bears, I would have thought.
David,
Fridtjof Nansen had a shoot to kill policy regarding Polar Bears. This made them easier to study.
From Farthest north: being the record of a voyage of exploration of the ship “Fram” 1893-96 and of a fifteen months’ sleigh journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen
Well, there’s coral that’s fast and coral that’s marriage material. Respectable coral would never bleach its tentacles.
All I know is that if observations were the other way around, the media would wave bottles of peroxide around like they were manna from the ozone layer. It’s like trying to reason with a two-year-old on a sugar high.
I would be supportive of the JCU academics and the GBR authority spending some of their generous taxpayer-funded grant $$$$s on a study of the Bikini Atoll coral reefs.
Just so they can get a clue about how resilient coral reefs are.
And hopefully save us all from having to listen to more of their never-ending bullshit about how the GBR is on its last breath.
Good point, also WWII was not kind to the ‘fragile’ ocean. One interesting outcome of the atomic testing was the later use of isotopes turning up as markers. Two that come to mind, aging fish and measuring sargassum accumulations. One of the casualties of modern academia perhaps less recognized is history, too much sociology. I wonder if there are not adequate archives on the testing about the recovery, or at least the more immediate effects of radiation. Also how many military moonlighted and even formally studied the reefs. They were dangerous to military operations not only because of structural impairments, but actual toxins.
Out of this came Halstead,’s three volume classic including the history of toxicology-1965-70. Poisonous and Venomous Animals of the World, last updated without the history in 1988. In WWII Sammy Ray, rest his soul, who I knew later as an oyster biologist, collected birds that ended up in the Smithsonian. Others collected reptiles, some very dangerous. And, of course sharks were a problem.
We need to change academic curricula years ago.
Always “its’ worse than you thought/know”. People must be getting use to this method of presenting good news as bad news. It’s approaching 50 years of this propaganda bull shit and people aren’t that stupid.
Remember the children’s nursery story about the little boy who cried wolf, too often?
Umm – reference George Carlin
… but, but lightning…
Meanwhile, in news not being covered because Global Warming™, I mean Climate Change™
June and July are generally the coolest periods in Gabon, but this year is particularly fresh. Unlike previous years when the average yearly temperature is around 30°C, this year it has dropped around 5 to 10 degrees.
Winter in the Southern Hemisphere has brought an unusual cold weather outbreak from Antarctica into South America. Low-temperature records were broken, with snowfall returning to parts of south Brazil after decades.
The GBR is a long way offshore from the Queensland coastline and extends a long way north to south.
I read this morning that Indigenous Australians (descendants of the Aborigines) have been trained as divers to inspect the Marine Park. The report indicated that protecting the GBR is a traditional activity for Australian Aborigines.
I am interested to know how they reached the GBR and what diving equipment they used.
Dunno really. Perhaps you could ask the elders about coral reef dooming on their watch-
Fossil reef found in Aussie outback › News in Science (ABC Science)
Tectonic plates shifting resulted in ancient Australia changing shape, near Albany in Western Australia tourists can visit the place where the Antarctic was once joined to that land and in Northern Australia the Gulf of Carpentaria was once a lake where Australian Aborigines and others camped during the last Ice Age, another earlier migration route was land joined to the now islands of Indonesia.
Dennis, back in the times of “The Dreaming”, the Aborigines WALKED over where the inshore GBR is now.
Noting terribly ancient about any seascapes West of the Continental Shelf.
6,000 years is not a long time in geology or oceanography.
“The report indicated that protecting the GBR is a traditional activity for Australian Aborigines.”
What? How? Protecting it from what? For thousands of years did stone age Aborigines think the reef was threatened by something? How exactly did they propose to protect it?
Sorry Dennis you seem to be a little mislead. The divers from AIMS who inspect the Great Barrier Reef are normally attached to breathing apparatus and are towed behind a boat in order to cover the huge areas.
Yes, it is growth. Yes, it is recovery. It’s just that it’s not the right kind. Not the wrong kind, just not the right kind to quell our alarmism. 🤷♂️🤡
Similar to the plant fertilization effect of the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration apparent from satellite pictures:
“Rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are driving noxious poison ivy and those annoying patches of dandelion to grow taller, lusher and more resilient …” (LA Times July 2007).
but if they admit that its the weak weedy fast growing coral that die easily and are more affected by crown of thorns etc (even if that is really a problem, next they’ll say cows eating grass tips destroys grasslands) then obviously when a ‘negative’ event occurs it will be these that are affected.
We know from Jen Marohasy’s work that the large porites etc are as healthy as even and seemingly just as numerous in areas the AIMS claim they may not even exist in anymore. Hughes is the next generation of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, so much to say and so little substance or science.
With Jennifer & Peter Ridd “showing up” The Establishment™, it’s quite
apparent they need to put away their models & lab experiments & get out to
see what’s really going on. There are a lot of questions about pH,
temperature, & the biosphere of the ocean, as indicated by the numerous
contradictions to so called facts.
Jennifer included a photo of her laying in the water wearing a black diving
suit with this shot from 120m (400′) above. Can you find her? Are you sure?
Without having seen this photo from lower heights, I wouldn’t have been
able to find her & even then, without positive ID. (I had to reduce the
original photo to 65% to make it comparable to the one in the piece.)
https://jennifermarohasy.com/2022/07/there-are-none-so-blind-part-2-john-brewer-fact-check/
WUWT-
How Gaia and Coral Reefs Regulate Ocean pH
Coral Reefs, Temperature and Ocean pH
Jo Nova-
One vulnerable coral type adapts to ocean acidification in just 6 months
http://landscapesandcycles.net/coral-bleaching-debate.html
And, remember, it’s not actually “acidification,” but slightly less alkaline.
“Acidification” is a human CO2 hustler propaganda term.
Plus everyday fish, crabs and other marine life move from the surface to the depths where the pH is higher then when the pH is higher at the surface during the night they move back to the surface.
This ‘diel vertical migration’ is typically about 500metres and involves a change of about half a pH unit in a couple of hours.
Yet the alarmists fret about a small change of pH of say 0.08 over tens of years. And as you say it is not acidification.
No, if Establishment “scientists” actually got out of their hothouse, it would cost even more money to have them confirm their preconceived “facts”.
Terry Hughes is trying to keep his track record of scientific lying continuing. Hughes is on a par with serial liar Joe Biden. Both are pathetic.
His rant is pure coral “racism”.
The wrong color, wrong sex, wrong age, perhaps. Affirmative discrimination under Diversity, Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) policy.
6th sense alarmist – “I see dead coral”.
Is there a natural reef building progression where fragile fast-growing corals colonize open spaces only to be later overtaken by more rugged but slower-growing species?
From someone who has been on sight for the past sixty years, I have only seen bleaching on one occasion on the GBR , out of hundreds of dives, in 2016.In the last fifteen years or so, divers have been watching for bleaching like hawks without much success. Seemed like mostly B.S. Then we found that “Scientists” had been aerially Photographing the “bleached” corals from fifty metres up. The” bleached” corals turned out to be porites which only bleach when exposed by an extremely low tide . Porites often look pale from the air as they are light colours and a couple of metres of water over them make them lighter in colour still. Grant seeking at its finest.
Answering Paul Johnson’s question “Is there a natural reef building progression … ”
Yes. There are pioneer species. Best place to grow is just below the surface where there is more light, but is more likely to get exposed. The natural shoreline is the same: Ipomoea pes- caprae (goat’s foot convolvulus) grows out down the dune along with spinifex grass, horsetail she-oaks follow.
Adding to my previous comments:
The percentage of cover in the main part of reefs is well over 100% because plate, spherical and branching species. Could be seen as competition, but more likely to be cooperative competition.
The occasions of bleaching have been blamed on water temperature, but generally this has been lower, especially this year. If the water was warmer, then those of us living next to it would have noticed it. We didn’t.
Cyclones cause damage, yes, but the more powerful the cyclone the smaller its footprint. And we haven’t had a decent cyclone since Yasi in 2011. Stuff that gets busted off drops, piles up, gets reused.
The coral spores are carried around in currents, that move in different directions and at different depths; it is 3-dimensional. The spawning is vast. I can smell it 200m from the beach. Not as bad as Trichodesmium but better to shut the windows.
There was a time some enthusiasts were catching CoT, crown of thorns starfish, chopping them in bits and chucking the bits over the side, where, being starfish, each piece would grow into another starfish. Duh.
Towing people with snorkels behind boats is no way to assess a reef, neither is having a trouser polisher sitting in an aircraft above the reef, and others in their offices. Jen Marohasy has produced a number of transects to show how it is done.
Back in the early ’90s the cane growers themselves started buffering cane fields to prevent nutrient run-off into the Coral Sea. This effort gave rise to the Landcare projects that involved growers, cattle people, local councils, civil engineers, even hippies. Greencorps teams worked on planting programs; none of the usual 6 trees and a photo-opportunity. More like 400 trees per person per day.. The result? The amount of nutrient being washed into the ocean is now so low that it is impossible to measure. Thousands up here in the north were involved, and know that all this alarmism is false. The trouser polishers are finally starting to get worried.
It’s so embarrassingly obvious to everybody that it’s their ideology they worship, not nature.
2022: Climate alarmists: it’s the wrong kind of people ..
Every coral is the wrong kind. The last time these evil entities were left to breed unchecked they built the corruption and depravity we now call Florida. They must be stopped, I tells ya!
Even worse they started to recolonise Bikini atoll some 10 years after the US finished trying to nuke it to death and by 2008 scientists found that 70% of the atoll’s previous species had resettled the lagoon. Pesky coral!
Cue Malcolm Turnbull claiming his shonky $400m ‘donation’ of taxpayer money saved the reef!!!
Coral which has undergone “coral bleaching” is not dead coral!
That seems to be the mistake the alarmists are making.
BS assertions with no links to where this can actually be found.
I keep a close eye on Guardian every day and they have NOT been reporting an increase in coral. They are still screaming about its demise/
There is no truth to his suggestion scientists are trying to downplay or conceal these numbers. I found stories about them everywhere: Axios, the Guardian, the Washington Post, etc., etc.
🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
There is always a clue that things are not playing out for the ecofascist alarmist scum when they stop reporting.
If this was expected it would have been reported when the coral was bleached. The reports would have said that the fastest growing corals will replenish the reef in half a decade or so.
The reports did not mention what has happened. Instead they talked about the end of the Great Barrier Reef.
So the reports were either made by experts who do not actually have any expertise.
Or the reports were made by experts who deliberately misled the media.
Obviously, the experts need to manage this story very closely. It is potentially very damaging to their revenue streams.
If some people are so worried about corals in the ocean, maybe someone should go talk to china about their program in the south china sea, dynamiting and dredge endless reefs to create airfields and military installations all over that area?
Its like with CO2, the climate/insane aren’t pursuing the right people. If the GBR fluctuates up 5%, that is far outweighed by how much china destroys?
Its always china, which is what they want, really.
Weren’t the coral losses Of ‘12 and ‘16 due to low water levels associated with the El Niño events ?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that bleaching didn’t kill coral, it just lost its algae.
The correct species is “greenas democratus”.
The coral which wrecks the reef is “genus conservatorus”.
To know these things, you have to be up to speed with Latin – like me.
old and busted: coral is going extinct!
new hotness: too much coral!