Sadly, Tony Burke accepts what the reef alarmists have to say, and will act accordingly. The Barrier Reef waters will become the most underutilised fishery in the world.

I'm in my 50s and my earliest memory of television news is of a bulletin about how the crown of thorns would shortly destroy the reef. The reef's demise has been the staple of media stories ever since. As a result, my only thought about the reports on the survey dissected by this story was that the environmentalists were really ramping up the scare stories.

However, I did not realise the survey was not much more than green agit-prop, as shown by teh story in general and this quote from it in particular, cited in the story. "Global warming is also increasing rainfall variability resulting in more frequent intense drought-breaking floods that carry particularly high nutrient and sediment loads."

That's a change from what we were told before the floods. Brisbane got flooded in early 2011, just as it got flooded in 1974. Two back to back la ninas hit eastern Aus but this has happened before. There was no indication of any real difference. In any case, its directly contrary to what we were assured, on good greenhouse authority, would happen just before the floods - that the drought of the time would be ongoing, and we'd best build desalination plants; the dams had been built in the wrong places, and so on.

Nor have the global warmers learnt from this. the current, mild La Nina effect has given them an excuse to return to dark warnings about droughts. Time for another La Nina.

Reducing management is an excellent suggestion. Managers produce nothing, only consume resources and hinder those who do produce. See Donald Meyers' book on managerialism strangling universities like a plague of crown of thorns starfish. It's free on line at
http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/

Research should not be reduced but redirected to the basic fundamental research on which western civilisation rests. And only for those who are good at it.

The author is wrong about nitrate and phosphate being oxidised on the ground. Neither will oxidise except under extreme conditions not available from the environment.

Getting rid of the crown of thorns starfish is as simple as stopping the flow of phosphates and nitrates to the reef.
The crown of thorns starfish need fertilizer, in their embryo stage, to grow up into algae eating, reef destroying adults.
[Coral survives in a symbiotic coexistence with the alga, which gives them their various colours.]
We send trillions of tons of fertilizer out to sea every year!
Moreover, we currently import around 80% of our oil as Middle east sourced and twice refined petroleum products, which produces in total, four times as much carbon, as the light sweet crude locked up in the untouchable reef.
["Stupid is as stupid does"!]
Australian traditional sweet light crude, leaves the ground as virtually ready to use diesel, that only requires a little in situ chill filtering, to produce a superior sulphur free diesel.
And there are very reasonable prospects of finding enough in/near the reef, to earn us in excess of a trillion per, for at least the next 30-50 years.
Given there are the huge reserves indicated. It will only ever be a matter of time, before someone too big, rich and powerful moves in and acquires or takes these resources?
Well, beggars can't be choosers; and, we don't seem to want or need them, or the extreme wealth they could still produce for us in an energy starved world, even one struggling through the throes of yet another great depression?
We could stop the crown of thorns epidemic in its tracks, by simply starving them of start up nutrients!
We could do this by using any and all nutrient laden water to create algae based bio-diesel.
Algae use very little water, can even grow out in seawater, or other salt laden sources!
Algae absorb 2.5 times their bodyweight in carbon!
Under optimised conditions double that body weight and carbon absorbing capacity every 24 hours.
What are we waiting for and why?
All that's missing is the political will and or, the intellectual acumen, or both!?
Rhrosty.

Where do you get this rubbish Rhrosty, that old furphy was debunked years ago, just another greenie myth to try to attack farmers.

I have seen COT star fish on Willis island reef, half way between the Solomon Islands, & Cairns. Do you reckon our cane fertilizer gets out there? Lots of crays too. The eating is good at an isolated reef.

As with almost everyone else I do not have the technical expertise or competence to assess either the competence of the various scientists who have promoted this thesis, or of the authors criticism of it.

But that having been said this is exactly the kind of essay that Quadrant specializes in. Quadrant and all of the usual right-wing so called conservative suspects are of course completely commmitted to the paradigm that Rene Guenon pointed to and described in his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.

They sometimes and even justify their world-view and applied politics by appeals to their self-serving tribalistic entirely cultic Judeo-Christian "God". Never mind that Jesus was never ever a Christian, or even a Jew for that matter.

How does a black duck perceive and respond to the Living Divine Reality?
How would a black duck thus describe Reality to a human being"?

Interesting to see that just one thread, seems to high-light the catastrophic global disaster,s just waiting around the future,s corner, and just typical of human nature to just ignore it. *8* billion people on the planet, and all will fine lol....its just a matter of time before gen Y world will only be seen in archives of history.

PLANET3

Great to see Walter Starck is still in the game. My personal observations showed that COTS explode in one area & just quickly leave another. I'm no scientist & I don't really see the need of having to be one to realise that the occurrance of COTS is a natural periodic event on the reef. Repeat NATURAL ! Stop worrying about. Take the tourists to another section for a while & let them ruin coral with their sun screens. 400 to 500 litres of sun lotion washing over the coral every day is what has most impact in the bleaching of coral.

Sorry individual, you're wrong on this one.

I used to average 900 tourists a week all taken to one location on Hardy reef. Hardy reef lagoon is about 7000 acres, but we had a pontoon moored to the reef, so it was only a couple of hundred meters of the 100 hundred meters wide strip of fringing reef that got all our tourists.

Depending on the tide, Hardy reef varies from about 10 Ft under water to perhaps 4Ft dry.

On a standard day, with say 220 adult passengers, 200 hundred would marvel at the enormity of this one complex, take a ride in the imitation submarine coral viewing vessel, eat lunch, & sleep the return trip. All that fresh air, & sun, is too much for city folk.

On average, just 20 of them would actually get wet.

On a low tide day, perhaps 10% of trips, when they could walk on the dry reef, about half, or a little less would do so. I disliked those days, I needed an extra deck hand to run a boat the 30Ft to the reef, & an extra hostess just to dab Mercurochrome on the coral cuts. Damned if I know what would work to prevent festering now that is banned, [Damn greenies}. On these days perhaps 30 or so would actually swim.

These were worrying days, as a bobbing head a hundred yards away is hard to see, particularly when it is disappearing off down reef at 3 or 4 knots, with a big spring tidal current.

Now I suppose you know the drying reef is mostly dead coral flat, with usually some dead but jagged bits scattered on top. There is not much to damage, but people seem to fall over on it.

Continued

Continued

One of the expert bodies decided that tourists walking on the reef must damage it, & should be banned. We would have loved to see it banned, it was such a nuisance to us.

We accommodated & transported their researchers free for 6 weeks, hoping for a ban, but no such luck. The report stated they could find no difference in the reef adjacent to our instillation, or another bit used by another operator, to the rest of the 18 miles of fringing reef surrounding the lagoon.

That is apart from a small section to the south east, subject to the biggest seas during cyclones, & a bit called the waterfalls, where 3 narrow channels allowed water to run out of the lagoon, when the coral surrounding the lagoon was dry. These waterfalls, & similar channels in the Swains are the most spectacular thing about the reef, unfortunately seen by so few.

So mate, I don't think sunscreen lotion is having much effect on most of the reef, which rarely sees a boat. let alone a tourist. It is fresh water that does most damage to coral. Look at the gaps in the reef around the Fitzroy & Burdekin river mouths, & you will see that.

When I was sailing around areas in the Solomon Islands, & New Guinea, with very doubtful charts, I would look for the largest fresh water outlet, to find a gap in a fringing reef. It was these areas where bleaching regularly occured, even where id did not occur elsewhere.

Just very heavy rainfall during spring tides is enough to dilute the salt in lagoons, & damage coral.

Dr Starck wonders why the Barium peak found in skeleton coral, corresponding to the year 1870, has never again occurred, and why in subsequent decades, Barium content in corals (the reefs near the Burdekin discharge area), have declined, rather than maintaining high levels, as indicators of river catchment soil erosion. A fair question, but regrettably, essentially a red herring, if I may use that turn of phrase.

Several factors come into play, when trying to quantify the scale of erosion / disturbance over time, from the river catchment through to the eventual deposition on the reef. Barium is toxic, but is normally not a problem when absorbed by plants. The rate of Barium uptake by plants tends to significantly increase when soils are acidic - as are most soils in the great cropping regions around Australia - including the Burdekin region. How is this relevent? Land use in the Burdekin region has changed greatly since the late 19th century, when cows were king. Certainly, following on a major drought, the introduction of large cattle herds would have mobilised large amounts of Barium present relatively undisturbed in the previously unfarmed soil. Soil born Barium is generally not very mobile in nature, and minimal plant uptake during the drought, would certainly have resulted in a spike in discharge sediments, when the drought eventually broke.

Now, fast forwarding the calendar to more recent decades, we find that much of the land under discussion here, is host to the largest sugar cane industry in Australia. Sugar is fast growing, and given the aforementioned soil acidity,along with the propensity for enhanced Barium uptake by plants under low pH soil conditions, it is not at all surprising that Barium levels as found in river discharge sediments, are steadily declining.

I confess I havnt read the article, however, I have been sailing the Whitsundays for the past week and was alarmed to what I found.

Firstly, my involvement in the area goes back to my employment days on South Mole Island, in the mis 80's and my wife and I, along with our two children have been a frequent visitor ever since.

What I have noticed during my recent trip.

This is my first sailing trip since the introduction of the controversial GREEN ZONES which have been introduced to protect allocated areas of the reef. Apparently!

So having been snorkeling and spear fishing the area since the mid 80's, I now note there are very limited areas where this can legally occur and, the areas that are not in the green zones, but can be spear fished, are literally under water deserts, suffering from total over fishing, yet were great spear fishing locations back then.

So on the one hand the powers to be have protected some areas, but a heavy cost to others.

How can this make sense I ask!

What do you think rehctub;

Unintended consequence of fools not being bright enough to see the obvious result of what they do?

Or dictatorial ratbags, not giving a damn as long as they can force others to their bidding?

I fly twice a week over the northeastern extremities of the reef & I see about one boat every two years at most in that area. I was diving out there about 4-5 years ago & didn't see a single cots but ten years earlier there were many. I'll be out again next week & I'll dive as much as I can & check if there is any damage & report back.
What I did notice years ago was that some reefs were simply blanketed with COTS yet other reefs only metres away were totally pristine. I recall diving at Michelmas Cay, Pixie Reef, Arlington reef, Frankland reefs etc & they were good yet 5 years ago I went back to Michelmas & Frankland & Michelmas was absolute wasteland but Frankland was very good.
I can't disagree with you Hasbeen but neither can I dismiss the impact of tourism.

Has been I know the pontoon you refer to, as I spent time there myself, in fact, I used to help prepare to food stuffs for the reef trips as theynwere known back then.

I was on South Molle, 85 to 87.

As for the green zones, the experts simply do not have the science to back up what they have implemented, however, they went ahead anyway.

How they went about it was deceitful as well, as they consulted locals for a few years, claiming that they wanted to know where the fish were caught, so they could close other portions of the reef.

Surprise, surprise, they lied and closed off most of the fishing spots the locals mentioned.

Evidence of this is in that one such closed spot is a nothing area, just put there to test them out, they took the bait.

Apparently it has been proven that coral trout are territorial and live most of their lives within about 100 m of thier birth place.

Now the only breeders are the larger males and, the smaller ones have to wait for a large dominate one to die before they can breed.

It is therefore suggested that culling larger fish is healthy.

I forgot to say that the pontoon would get moved now and again due to the reef dying around it.

In this times they blamed the diesel fuels and oils.

Rehctub that was probably the sub, [coral viewing thing], crashing into the reef & trying to demolish it.

It was a dreadful thing to drive. Not much faster than the tidal current, steered like a plow, & went sideways with the current quicker than you could turn it.

It was hard enough to find skippers willing to spend most of their time out there, without having to get those with superior boat handling skills to do it.

I had a couple with girlfriends who lived out there with them, but otherwise the young ones were a problem. You'd no sooner get them trained than they would have a couple of days off back in civilization. Some little girl would give them the eye, & they didn't want to go back out there.

They had to live out there to keep everything clean. In just a couple of days with no one there, the whole lot would disappear under a mountain of bird droppings that you could smell from a couple of miles away.

I tried one of those expensive electronic bird scarer on the pontoon. It became their favourite perch.

I would love to talk more about those days, as we certainly shared the same memories.

Feel free to contact GY to get my details.

I remember setting a mate up with a week on the pontoon, nobody ever found out.

He would stay there and be scarse when the boat arrived.

I was the butcher on the island, now there's a laugh, big Artie and co, I was quite good at fixing deals here and there.

Ah the good old days.

But the reality is, this is simply another over regulated part of our country.

Hasbeen & rehctub,
I apologise for this diversion from the topic but since you mentioned the sub I thought I'd better share this with you.
In the mid-seventies I saw those primitive glass bottom boats at Green Island & thought about designing something better. Long story short I took my sketches to the the Cairns Harbour Master to get his opinion on getting my design approved. He said come back in a few days & I'll let you know. A week later he told me that the people in authority rejected the design.
Some time later a major Cairns Company launched a coral viewing boat which looked almost identical to my sketches !!
Back to the Topic.

I remember then Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen responding to claims that the reef was in trouble from fertiliser outflows.

He took a ride in a glass-bottomed boat to inspect the reef and came back with the reassuring news that the reef was in pristine condition - "gleaming white" he boasted.

Unfortunately that's the colour coral goes when it dies.

He was also keen on opening up the reef to off-shore drilling as I recall.

It's a shame that such decisions are left to politicians.

Then again, many may believe the complete and utter destruction of the environment is the price we have to pay for a healthy economy.

So Wobbles, what's the alternative.

We support many who simply don't wish to work.

We support kids having kids, in fact, we even pay them to have these kids, many of which are truly unwanted in the first place.

We support nations that are over populated, yet we don't tackle the very cause of overpopulation, out of control breeding.

We support tens of thousands who arrive uninvited.

So, I say again Wobbles, what's the alternative in your view, other than to rape and pillage our environment.

So Wobbles, as you havnt responded to my question, I guess there is no alternative.