No different to The Great Koala Scam

Scaremongering has indeed become a proper little industry. There are those who like to do the scaring, and those who like to be scared. It will never end.

The only battle we seem to be having is obliging, selectively blind and deaf, recalcitrant intrangicents to look at the evidence!

The first of which is, we shouldn't be experiencing climate change replete with record heat waves and extreme weather events! When we are deep in a waning phase of that, which controls all normal cyclical climatic conditions, the solar furnace in the sky.

Currently deep in a waning phase (NASA), and since the mid seventies. When associated normal cyclical climate change should have seen cooler weather across the entire planet along with advancing ice etc/etc.

Yes coral is tough but not invulnerable, as testified by dead reefs the world over. And in some cases because they're loved to death by hordes of tourists! When tourism (the mindless green mantra) is left as arguably the only economic activity that earns essential export dollars.

Yes, we can limit toxic runoff from primary production by laser leveling and ponding of cropland.

But what we can't seem to prevent, is effluent being pumped from urban and tourism development out onto the reef which is overwhelmed by the excessive nutrient load/turbidity. Which spawns the very weed infestation that is the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

As for coal and petroleum. Well the crisis we're currently facing is inevitably caused by the carbon load in the atmosphere, not rouge radiation from nuclear power stations which produce far far less than coal or fracked gas! TBC

"Move when you have to" is no longer general policy. Eating out the natural local food and polluting your own dunghill can now be overcome with transported food supply, piped water and sewage systems.

And so cities become bigger and bigger with more and more nutrient overload pollution dumped daily into river and ocean ecosystems of this planet.

Nutrient runoff from farms only occurs following rain and running rivers. Sewage from cities and towns is dumped daily, every day.

Why blame or point the finger at farmers, especially if there may be another source of nutrient overload/pollution?

Coral has never ever survived for 500 million years under impact of over 7.3 billion humans, whose leaders are too ignorant or selfish to deal with solutions

The resident con artists think everyone is just like them and judge all others on their highly flawed, inevitably inherently dishonest standards?

A flawed problematic mindset that alone enables them to avoid looking at the inescapable, irrefutable evidence, that proves them and their business models! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

You see, decarbonising the economy is not only, the only way to reverse climate change, but massively boost our economic prospects into the same bargain!

Because, thorium promises everything fusion promised, but couldn't and probably never will deliver? In my kid's or their kid's lifetimes?

Whereas, we've already successfully tested thorium in a LFTR. And while there are a few, not insoluble technical difficulties with using thorium as a fuel?

Most of them would seem to be using thorium in solid fuel rods and conventional reactors? When few if any of the alleged difficulties, seem to present in FLIBE or, molten fluoride, lithium, beryllium and thorium.

As for coal and petroleum? Why can't all we use need or want or export? Just come/go via Darwin and just avoid the reef altogether?

Too simple?

And be supported by long overdue rapid double decker rail freight? Or better yet, an inland canal that culminates at lake eyre. Which would then be permanently full, used as a central Rapid rail, roll on roll off, hub?

A dual lane, self flushing, lock gated canal, would not only keep it full. But serve as a limitless source of water for the adjacent thorium powered, deionization dialysis desal plants? That would as a planned combination! AFFORDABLY transform central Australia!

[Much of the predicted route(s), already just above or just below sea level! Unusually high northern tides, literally flushing shipping in and out!]

And ensure our very best, most productive days, are still in our future! Not our past, [where the thinking of this particular (as thick as two planks) author belongs!]

Never ever dependant on coal, oil or gas, or indeed problematic, price gouging, tax avoiding, profit repatriating, foreign investment!
Alan B.

Great article Viv.

Alan you need to get out more. Sitting at a computer googling only gives you access to the garbage put out by these same academics, Greenpeace, WWF, Wikipedia & other such sites, mostly disgorging the same garbage.

Clowns mucking about in a large fish tank at AIMS, the Marine Park Authority, or James Cook learn about 2 pennies worth of stuff all about the reef. Conducting experiments to confirm their theories is about as useful as tits on a bull, & siting their pronouncements as evidence of anything is even less useful.

Yes immediately post war, when fertilisers were very cheap, & governments subsidised farmers to throw the stuff about, farm runoff combined with urban runoff did have real effect to close inshore reefs. Today the stuff is so expensive that no farmer can afford to waste even a few grams. The runoff from town gardens would be greater than that from agriculture.

When I was sailing around the Pacific islands, I had to learn to navigate like the Polynesians or Captain Cook. If I wanted to get through the fringing reef somewhere there were no sectored light houses, or channel markers, hell even some coastlines were dotted lines, I had to find a river. You see we knew fresh water, more than sediment, nutrients or any other factor of man kills coral. Rivers mean a passage through a reef, on uninhabited islands or in Oz.

In the same way that atolls grow outward, & the lagoon has little live coral, a factor of low salinization during the wet season. So called scientists will never learn such simple facts while they play around in fish tanks, adding chemicals at ridiculous rates to make a case for their next grant.

We took 1250 tourists to Hardy reef a week, & marine activists who looked very hard had to admit there was no difference between the 300 metres we used, & the 30 nautical miles of the rest of the atoll circle of reef.

God I get sick or garbage served up as fact.