Accidents do not "happen".
They are caused.
However whether they can be foreseen and planned for is another thing.
BUT there is always a reason.

Typical ACF propaganda.

It is surprising that the author does not call for all boat/ship traffic to be banned from the Reef, given that humans are known to cause accidents.

The author is no doubt celebrating the fact that South Australia became the first state to reach zero emissions yesterday.

Certainly all boat and car engines and farm fertiliser should be banned and removed from Australia's eastern seaboard.

Oh the reef needs to be saved. In the 1970's we were told it would not exist by 2000. Yawn. What a waste of tax payer money. I take it that the ACF are on the gravy train.

Will any of these people ever grow up. Obviously this clown, Basha Stasak has never seen the reef, or he could never write this garbage.

Well, lets say no honest human with any knowledge of the reef could write such garbage. I guess such people are in short supply around the Australian Conservation Foundation.

I spent many years running tourist reef experience trips, & also many taking southern fishermen out for a few days fishing. I know some of it as well as the professional fisherman know it, & that is a damn sight better than any of Townsville's researchers, or noisy activists from rip off merchants like the Australian Conservation Foundation.

I also spent years cruising many of the Pacific islands & atolls, & building jetties on the reefs for plantations & villages.

There are dozens of lovely little reefs in the islands, but nothing that equals the scope, grandeur or overall quality of the Great Barrier Reef.

Of course in over a thousand kilometres of reef, formed by many hundred individual reefs, anyone can find a few spots under strain. Inside any lagoon you will be able to find patches to provide pictures that show some poor coral, but over all our reef is in great health.

It really is time these people were charged with conspiring to defraud the Australian public with this rubbish.

For the last 50 years I have been hearing "the reef is doomed". I have dived all around the New Guinea and the Pacific. Reefs that were totally wiped out by a cyclone were flourishing a few years later. The great barrier reef is no different. Areas I dived on that had been damaged were fine on my next visit. It is time that these ignorant, lie peddling, so called conservation groups and rent seeking marine biologists were told where to get off. They are foolish in the extreme thinking we can control the climate and the vast forces of nature.

Australian Conservation Foundation attention to coral damage on the Great Barrier Reef should be on point sources of sewage and land use nutrient pollution, instead of on the narrow keel of a ship scratching the bottom of the GBR lagoon.

The ACF and Greens Party for some political reason, blatantly ignore southern city and town sewage nutrient waste being dumped daily and transported NORTH within the Australian east coast sediment dispersal system.
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2112/08-1120.1

Times have changed in the past 15-20 years and so has health of coral worldwide.
Live coral exists amongst dead coral.
It's not as though whole coral reef is dead, though some big areas are dead or severely damaged.
Point is, dead coral is being almost immediately covered with algae and that algae remains and has to be fed in order to remain.

Nutrient overload pollution is the problem, not heat, not acid, not silt.
Heat or 'carbonic' acid (LOL) would devastate whole reef.
Silt does not reach the actual GBR because silt settles before spreading far offshore where the GBR is located.

Apart from upwellings, nutrient pollution is travelling in surface waters like rain clouds travel at suited altitude in the sky.
Sometimes a water surface nutrient cloud is overloaded with nutrient and invasive algae or algae blooms occur, whereas a cloud in the sky sometimes produces rain that sometimes results in too much water for crops - e.g. involving fungus or soil eroding flood.

I respect all people who have experience in ocean waters but there is need to take a fresh look at what is actually what has happened in recent years and what is continuing to happening now, and is worsening.

My assessment of the article on this thread is that money collecting 'conservation' business interests are again attacking political parties instead of addressing the real cause of waterway coral and ocean damage.

I suggest note the situation worldwide and consider algae instead of marketing and emissions spin.
Don't wait for ABC government funded cronies to report news of widespread algae in Australia or elsewhere:

http://www.surfermag.com/blogs/agents-of-change/secrets-of-the-ooze/#zdZqIt0MOFvHrc3R.97

and:
http://www.ecowatch.com/algae-blooms-climate-change-2017383600.html

Some of that is getting to be a bit of ancient history JF AUS.

Even as a kid in the late 50s I could see the difference between the nutrient affected western side of Magnetic Island, just off Townsville, & the unaffected eastern side, a little further off shore. Today the inshore western areas are much improved, despite Townsville's rapid growth. We are doing something right with sewerage.

In the early 70s, places like the northern area of Cid Harbour, on the western side of Whitsunday Island had huge weed & algae growth, compared to the eastern side. This like Magnetic Is, was on once thriving coral reefs. I could have been wrong, but I was just green enough to blame this on the sugar farmers of Proserpine, & their fertiliser run off.

Today fertiliser is so expensive that farmers have developed techniques to minimise its use, & feed only their crop. Perhaps this is why that Cid Harbour area has much less weed growth. Of course it could be just a natural cycle, too long for a simple human to see in it's entirety, but I think it is to some extent, us cleaning up our act.

I very much doubt that with our south going east coast current, that nutrients from Sydney & Brisbane ever get to the Reef. Hobart is more likely destination, but I guess that is no reason not to clean up our cities effluent.

More Henny Penny antics from the ACF to get their CEO's and middle management to pay off their BMW's and Audi's no doubt. A known fact that most donations sent to 'aid/conservation/save the gay whales etc organisations' are gobbled up in administration fees and paying advertisers, hangers on. If the $$$ actually went on "saving the reef" then I might believe something was really being done to save it.

Hasbeen & Sparkyq...dead right, I went back recently to dive on a channel (blasted by RAN divers in 1970) through an outer reef to allow copra boats access to a small island off Manus Island where I lived and dived as a nipper. No surprises - the reef had grown back to a point where it takes several weeks every year for the locals picking away at it to maintain the channel opening.

The Parramatta River in the 1950's to 1970's was a moving cesspit, offal floating down stream from the abattoirs at Homebush, the dioxin residues from Union Carbide at Rhodes and other similar plants around Clyde, notably the oil refinery. All of which meant a very polluted waterway. I rowed these waters in my high school days (early to mid 1970's) and remember the smell. Today you would still probably be risking it by eating fish caught from there, but there is a vast improvement in the species and variety of fish, crustacean, bird and animal life along those same waterways.

Just like Joycey's mate Tony Abscess whose famous quote: "Sheet happens..." we can only deduce that to elect the Liberal/Country/National into government we can expect a series of accidents/happenings, not only on the Reef, but anywhere else they may happen to roam ?

Hasbeen,

Yes the ancient history. LOL.
An ex pearl diver mate referring to present day condition of the GBR, said to me a few years ago, "we were lucky to see it as it was".

Yes there appears to have been a lot of improvement.
No longer are waters brown with sewage.
And I think soap manufacturers have modified formula.

These days the sewage arrives at 'treatment' plants and the pipe opens onto a curved slightly downhill concrete ramp that rolls off lumps.
Undigested tomato seeds and the occasional diamond ring are filtered from the liquid.

Sewage 'treatment' in the most modern country in the world provides example of lack of sewage nutrient reduction. The US is onto it but Australia has the subject suppressed and gagged.
http://www.circleofblue.org/2016/water-quality/epa-announces-national-wastewater-nutrient-pollution-census/

Most of the brown has been taken out of some sewage but not enough nutrient, or any at all at most 'treatment' works.

Less weed or seagrass growth in the Cid Harbour - Whitsunday region, is according to evidence of substance, directly linked to northerly flow of nutrient from southern cities and towns on Australia's east coast.

People not knowing about direction of that streaming and impacting alongshore current flow is evidence of suppression and gagging.

The southerly flowing OFFSHORE current that reaches Tasmania is the East Australian Current.

The NORTHERLY flowing current transporting city and town sewage nutrient pollution northwards is the alongshore or longshore current that is driven northwards AGAINST the coast by prevailing S and SE winds.

I once asked CSIRO why that alongshore did not have a name and they replied it's a current too insignificant to be named.
Well, I have evidence of substance, for example indicating the Australian east coast alongshore current is the current that once transported natural nutrient that naturally fed and shaped the significant Great Barrier Reef.
That’s why the Swains Reef to the south is big with the overall GBR becoming smaller as it extends northwards.
Abundant natural and fresh nutrient flowed from the south.

Continued………

Cont’d……

Heavy sand and suspended solid matter and dissolved nutrient flows northwards in alongshore current that also transports the sand that sometimes blocks coastal river entrances.

An estimated 500 cubic metres of sand washes north past the Gold Coast each year.

Tweed River and Gold Coast seaway sand pumps are situated on southern sides to pump sand northwards.

Obviously if a coastal current transports heavy sand it can transport lighter suspended matter, including fresher water that tends toward the surface.

Prevailing winds drive surface water against the coast.
Importantly, nutrient is bonded to the fresher water until taken up.

At northern Fraser Island the heavy sand spills over the Continental Shelf but the fresher surface water continues nor-nor westward into GBR lagoon waters.

Depending on tides and wind some nutrient is drawn or pushed into estuaries and bays and taken up by algae and marine plants. Some nutrient must reach Cape York.

During 2000 Gold Coast dredging resuspended nutrient and Lyngbya cyanobacteria seed was transported northwards and was later identified causing damage in inshore waters of the Whitsundays.
An EPA manager with a UQ scientist collected samples from me at the Gold Coast.
The samples came from the Broadwater seabed and when tested were found to contain elevated levels of nutrient. I think they also contained ancient Lyngbya seed or spore.
And that again raises another issue.

If anyone on this OLO site has contact with human health authority of integrity then please pass this warning in relation to asthma and food allergy.
Lyngbya majuscula algae is a toxic cyanobacteria that travels with sand in Australian east coast northerly flowing alongshore current.
Cyanobacteria has
Prevailing winds sweep some of that sand high enough to build Moreton Island.
I think neuro impact linked cyanobacteria algae blows onto beaches with that sand, the Lyngby dries and must become airborne, and there are peanut farms sometimes downwind from Moreton Island.

There is need in many more ways than one to manage nutrient pollution proliferating algae in oceans and waterways of this planet.

Reverse glib or incorrect assessment.

John C Fairfax.

Spent a lot of time on the Queensland & NSW coasts have you JF Aus.

I have, both in Sydney/Brisbane & Brisbane/Gladstone races. I have also done a couple of dozen personal trips from Sydney under sail, & run tourist boats on the Queensland coast for some years.

Just like the global warming scam, the garbage put our by academics is all computer generated, with no basis in facts.

Queensland inshore flow is all tide generated down to Gladstone.

NSW the top 10 fathoms, 60Ft is predominately south, about 90% of the time, with occasional reverses. Down around 20 fathoms you get a counter current north going some of the time, but not that often. This is full salt water, & not mixed with the lighter fresh water from sewerage outfalls. This lower flow carries the sand north, & is what formed Fraser Island.

Try sailing north & south from Sydney heads, the smell will tell you which way the stuff from those outfalls is going. You only have to look at the cray pots marker buoy ropes at most headlands to see what the upper level of current is doing.

Sir James Hardy, when briefing a group of sailors before the start of a Sydney/Brisbane told them to stay right in shore in the bays, to get out of the south flowing current. When asked how close they had to be he said, "If you can't hear the dogs barking, you're too far off".

You could even ask that old bloke, Captain James Cook. He spent 3 days hard sailing just to get past cape Three Points, at the northern side of Broken Bay, such was the south going current, when he cruised these waters in 1770.

Hasbeen,

Most of my life has been spent exploring underwater along the Aus east coast between Eden and Lizard Island way. Plus the Bahamas, Mediterranean and northern Africa/Morocco coast.

We surely passed each other somewhere out there.

I know nothing about sail but have skippered several game cruiser voyages Sydney and Brisbane to Cairns and return.
Plus I made seaworthy and delivered an ex British minesweeper Sydney to Fiji.
I would like to learn about sail.

There was a time when I informed search and rescue they were looking in the wrong direction for people lost off the NSW coast. The official search was down to Gabo Island so I chartered a plane and searched out to Lord Howe Island and into Newcastle, the latter area being where the boat belonging to 4 fishermen was found 3 weeks after they went missing.

I was asked to speak to George Creswell of the CSIRO and later he identified 200 kilometre diameter anti clockwise eddies east off Sydney-Newcastle coast, with speed of up to 5 knots at the outer edge of an eddy. Those eddies spin off the East Australian Current.
Yes, that same current phenomena that puzzled Captain Cook, the latter according to recorded History.

Experience has helped me understand the alongshore current and now something about the warm areas in the SST data that is an anomaly in AGW climate science.

I think you would know the absolute majority of turbid GBR lagoon water exists to GBR lagoon near Cape York. Not much at all exits the channels between reefs. The outer edge of the GBR has the clearest water for diving

I have been towed feet first backwards underwater for a total of about 40 hours at 6 knots, hiding with a camera inside a giant lure to film for the first time, giant black marlin attacking to feed.

Mates crewing the freight barges told me about the Cape exit.

Ex-alongshore current water between Fraser Island and the Swains Gladstone area is flowing north almost constantly as northerly flow behind it keep pushing.

I add the following to the warning in my post on this thread, at JF Aus, Sunday, 2 October 2016 8:56:25 AM.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1367858/