For the last 50 years, i have ben reading reports in the media as to how the Star of Thorns starfish was going to destroy the Great Barrier Reef. Blazing banner headlines kept telling us how we only had a few years left to do something before the GBR disappeared. Guess what? Last time I checked, the GBR is still there.

A year or two ago, there was a report in The Australian newspaper that there were so may Koalas on (I think) Flinders Island that the NPWS was considering a cull where NPWS staff were going to shoot the excess koalas. Now we are being told by koala scientists that Australia is running out of koalas.

In 1990, climate Scientists assured the world that the Arctic would be "ice free" by 2014, London, New York and Miami would be sinking underwater, ski resorts would go broke for lack of snow, the dams would never fill again, and numerous other predictions that never came true.

My conclusion is this. There are all sorts of scientific and public service departments who have no qualms at all about stretching the truth and creating alarmism to get their sticky hands on ever more public money to build their little empires.

When we hear someone bleating about 'threatened species', we know it's a bid for taxpayer funding for some useless a academic.

Facts do matter! But if you can't get them? You need another method, say the abundance or lack thereof of Koala droppings? The maturity of what can be seen or gathered?

And then give your best guesstimate? Works for me!
Alan B.

LEGO,
I can't comment on the Koala but what I can say is that the GBR is in a sad state.
There's a place that is advertised as one THE best places to dive & charter companies take bookings to go there. I have been the three times in the past two years & let me tell you, it's drastically short of the advertising description.
There's so much traffic through the reef & pollution swept in from God knows where & welling up on the outer reef as are chemicals from the WW2 wrecks in the Coral Sea & sun screen washed off the Lilly-white tourists etc etc. & the run-off from our own coastal towns. But guess who's blamed for that pollution ? You guessed right, the Qld farmers, those very same farmers who do their darnest to produce good clean produce to the very people who blame them.
I have seen quite a lot of new coral growth which makes me think that the pollution is gradually weakening in the area.
Now, if we only had scientists doing water quality research on the drains of Qld Towns there'd be a possibility of making the rcovery of the GBR a little quicker like as in our time !

On the GBR?
Green advocates are quick to blame farmers and farm runoff, not the annual tourist invasion and the annual nutrient loaded effluent for the creeping degradation. It'll be interesting to see what a couple of years without most of that annual invasion and the massivelly decreased effluent outpouring does?
Alan B.

To individual.

With prominent people like former Treasures Costello predicting that Australia will be 1$1 trillion in dept by the time the Kung Flu ends, with absolutely no way of ever paying that immense sum back without some serious thinking, the sooner that the government grows a brain and starts drilling for oil on the GBR and Bass Straight, the better.

Open more coal mines. Declare all assets owned by the PLA and CCP officials in Australia as war reparations for their deliberate infliction of the Kung Flu virus into Australia. Get back Darwin port and the 10.4 million acres of prime farmland that the Chinese government owns in our country. Build some bloody power stations, either coal or nuclear. Buy 6 nuclear Virginia class subs off the yanks and ditch this idiotic French deal to buy 12 obsolete French subs at twice the price of modern nuclear ones. Put a limit on just who is "aboriginal" and therefore who qualifies for never ending government handouts. Get out of the Paris Accord, which is just a trick by China to handicap the economies of everybody else in the word while they get exempted.

Ignoring our ever rising dept levels is just like ignoring the fact that you have stored 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse. Sooner or later it just goes off and wrecks everything leaving everybody wandering around like zombies wondering what went wrong?

LEGO,
Reducing Public Service Salaries should be the first move & Flat Tax the second & National Service the third !
Too many people are getting too big a slice of the cake by literally doing sfa & not paying proper Tax. Negative gearing must become a thing of the past !
It won't rid us of the debt but it'll make us a better society with more money to pay back the debt.

If it is true that our koalas are not in decline
that is wonderful news. The same applies to the
news that our Great Barrier Reef is not dying.
If only that were to be true.

However, research conducted by the Australian Koala
Foundation strongly suggests the conservation status
of the koala should be upgraded to "critically
endangered". And the same apparently applies to
the research done by scientists on the Great Barrier
Reef.

I respect this author's expertise, experience, and
knowledge. And sympathise with his frustration at the
problems he's encountered. I wish him success in trying
to share his information with authorities in how to
deal with the preservation of our native fauna and flora.
As an experienced forester he needs to at least be respected
and his views need to be heard.

cont'd ...

Facts DO matter!

Foxy,
Jurskis' stuff shows that Research by AKF ain't worth a squirt. Their historical research on numbers of koalas starts from 1888, 100 years too late. Counting droppings sheds no more light on current numbers than either there's heaps too many or there's maybe not.

Dear Little,

That's why I wrote that the man should be respected
and heard.

He is an experienced forester and has published a great
deal on the subject. He knows what he's talking about.

about 10-15 years ago I was speaking to a young American girl at a shopping centre who tried to convince me that kangaroos would become extinct if we did nothing about gw etc. She was working for one of those leech organisations like Amnesty although it might have been some other. She had all the 'facts' like all the failed gw alarmist did. If people don't realise by now that funding is dependent on having the 'right' facts then your eyes are not open. Just ask Peter Ridd or any of the tourist operators at the Barrier Reef.

The facts about Climate change & pollution are that it causes money to be spent on making people more stupid instead of enlightening them !
One just has to read forums with intellectual contributors !