Huge Increase in Coral Produces Third Year of Record Highs on the Australian Great Barrier Reef

Global Warming & Climate Change News Desk - Massive increases in coral across the Australian Great Barrier Reef have been reported for 2023-24, making it the third record year of heavy growth. Across almost all parts of the 1,500-mile-long reef, from the warmer northern waters to the more excellent conditions in the south, coral is now at its highest level since detailed observations began by Chris Morrison

The inconvenient news has been ignored in mainstream media, which, curiously, has focused on a non-story in nature that claimed “climate change” poses an “existential threat. “The science tells us that it is in danger – and the science should guide us,” Professor Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong told Victoria Gill of BBC News. The existential threat is “now realised”, reported by the Guardian.

Travelling back from the reality inhabited by the Guardian, it can be reported that last year’s gains were significant. The Northern hard coral cover leapt from 35.8% to 39.5%; in the central area, it rose from 30.7% to 34% and went from 34% to 39.1%. The report results from monitoring hard coral cover reefs from August 2023 to June 2024 by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). The percentage of hard coral cover is a standard measurement of reef conditions used by scientists and is said to provide a simple and robust measure of reef health. The AIMS has published similar reports over the last 38 years.

The narrative-driven mainstream media ignored the recovery story for the first two years of record coral growth. But this year, the suspicious might contend, something had to be done to blunt the sensational news of the stonking rises. Help has come in the form of a paper just published in Nature, which uses proxy temperature measurements and climate models to suggest temperatures around the vast reef area are the highest recorded in 400 years. This period is the blink of an ecological eye-lid given that coral has been around for hundreds of millions of years during periods when temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide have been markedly different. Nevertheless, this poses an existential threat even though sub-tropical corals thrive between 24 °C and 32 °C and seem to grow faster in warmer waters.

When the coral expels algae and turns white, natural bleaching can occur with temporary local temperature changes. Still, evidence from many years of scientific observation suggests that corals often recover quickly. Long-term changes in water temperature – tiny compared to coral’s optimum conditions – pose no threat, but alarmists concentrate on the bleaching events to warn of possible ecological collapse. The Guardian noted a recent fifth mass bleaching in eight years across the reef, driven, it claimed, by “global heating”. So far, its readers are wondering how this squares with the recent record growth.

A decade of mass bleaching, relentlessly catastrophised in the interests of Net Zero by activists in the media, academia and politics, does not appear to have done much harm to the recent growth in the Northern GBR.

Or the central area.

Or even in the south where the water temperatures are slightly cooler.

To read the latest AIMS report is to read the best possible spin on the story that the reef is heading for disaster. And, of course, it is all down to the unproven changes in climate that are said to be caused by human activity. It is claimed this will cause more frequent and long-lasting marine ‘heatwaves’, a product no doubt of a climate model. It is generally suggested that these heatwaves and mass bleaching were rare prior to the 1990s, although how anyone can know this is a mystery. Detailed GBR observations and temperature recordings barely stretch back a few decades.

As is often the case with publicly-funded operations, the political message is never far from the surface. Thus, we learn that “enabling coral reefs to survive these stressful conditions requires a combination of a reduction in global greenhouse emissions to stabiliser temperatures… and the development of interventions to help reefs adapt to and recover from climate change”. No doubt, this last proposal requires large amounts of money from the taxpayer to cover the costs of such worthy work.

Not everyone goes along with the coral fear-mongering. The distinguished scientist, Dr Peter Ridd, has studied the GBR for 40 years and notes that coral numbers have “exploded in recent years. He says all 3,000 reefs in the world’s most extensive system have excellent coral. “Not a single reef or even a single species of reef life has been lost since British settlement,” he reports. The impact of bleaching is “routinely exaggerated by the media and some scientific organisations”. In his view, the public is being deceived about the reef. “How this occurred is a serious issue for the reef science community, which has embraced emotion, ideology, and raw self-interest to maintain funding,” he observes.

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