If the media wasn't such rubbish, it would be hounding the reef rent seekers and the anything-goes political class over this.

I wonder if we will get an apology from "the-Great Barrier- Reef- will- die" Adam Bandt.

Wow.

There is certainly a heap of having it both ways in this article.

So reef coverage is now “at record levels”, but the study was done by AIMS who are so highly inaccurate “ the 10 per cent minimum cover around 2012 may actually have been 20 per cent.” So is it definitely at record levels or it just might be?

Since “We know that over 50 per cent of published scientific studies are wrong.” but we can now definitively say the reef isn't endangered, in fact “The only thing endangered about the reef ought to be the ideological ‘terrorists’ masquerading as scientists who held it hostage for so long.”

And apparently AIMS is so corrupt and ideologically driven they have been dramatically over-blowing the reef's deterioration which is proven by a report they produced themselves of a large increase in coverage thus exposed those faults.

So the best thing it seems from the author is to land smack bang in the middle and conclude: “This would mean a much more static and less dynamic reef, but again that is good news because it would mean that for 36 years the reef has maintained itself, contrary to the current narrative, and without our help.”

All in all a pretty tortured piece in my opinion.

In my view the reef is a dead horse that the greenies are flogging. That it will follow reefs around the world and succumb to climate change and water temperatures that kill coral. Just a question of time. Regardless of the billions we throw at it.

Money that could and should be R+D into MSR thorium. The cheapest safest power in the world and carbon free to boot. And a must do if we really want to reverse climate change and save not just our reef but life on planet earth. See LFTR in five minutes.

Not sure how much I trust the objectivity of scientists who receive study grants from the fossil fuel industry!?

Mystery oil slicks suggest to me the reef harbours commercial oil and gas deposits, which will earn more for Oz than all the stay away tourists.

The pandemic is far from over and by Christmas could easily be the cause of the greatest number of deaths in our overloaded hospital system with ambulance ramping that's scandalous.

Simply put, we cannot actually live with covid! But need to do what we did with polio and smallpox!

The new variants are created in the unvaccinated and that needs to change. A healthy environment is one where we don't live with covid or record CO2 in our atmosphere. Throwing money at symptoms without attacking causes is insanity!
Alan B.

We cannot keep our hospital systems on permanent overload with just covid patients. AS others wait on heart and elective surgery.

I think my brain just exploded reading this article :)

So did you actually interview experts, like Professor Terry Hughes about this ? Seems like you just talked to a bunch of folks who have no expertise on the GBR ?

and according to you it could have been the easter bunny aka god aka father christmas doing their thing ? and if it was god, which one? there are literally thousands of them, Neptune perhaps ? or you don't believe in that one as it's ludicrous ?

I read here for sensible contrarian views, not the made up wishful nonsense of those you mention in this article, better know as "Confident Idiots", as Professor David Dunning calls them

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sasi/wp-content/uploads/sites/275/2015/11/PS-Nov-Dec-2014-Ignorance.pdf

Yes Alan, it is well known there are large reserves of oil under the reef, but we have over a hundred years supply of shale oil to harvest, proven by the RUNDLE SHALE OIL PROJECT which adjoins the reef reserves. Once the global warming scam is debunked we might just start harvesting it.

SR is back again with the lefty hym book garbage, but who cares.

Here is my personal experience with all three GBR rent seekers.

In 84 I took over management of a largest marine tourist operation in the Whitsundays. We had 2 large international cats, 209 & 324 passenger capacity respectively & ran outer reef trips with either of them daily. I was horrified when I saw the operation, & new we would kill someone if we continued as we were doing. Only very good skippers were preventing a catastrophe.

I knew we must have a terminal out at Hardy Reef, which would be a first for the area. The area was due to be gazetted a marine park in another 16 months, so the Transport Dept. would have nothing to do with any application, the Marine park authority had no authority & no one else was interested.

continued

Continued

I ordered a $260,000, 20 meter imitation sub coral viewing vessel a 50 x 30 meter pontoon & 100 tons of mooring gear, but no one would even talk to me regarding approvals to install it at Hardy Reef. In desperation I wrote to all & any department or authority who could be interested. I would have included SR if I had known how important he is. I received not a single reply, took that as tactic approval, & installed the facility.

It was a great success apart from the bird poo. I had to install an accommodation module for a skipper & his lady to contain the poo & the smell problem.

Some time later I invited people from James Cook, AIMS & the marine park authority for an exclusive run to the authority. I took 148 all up to the reef on a low tide day, so they could see the waterfalls. Hardy reef although 8Ft under water on a spring high is 5Ft dry on a big spring low. 30 nautical miles of reef thus encloses 34,000 acres of water 5Ft above the sea level. This is drained by 3 small channels grouped at the north western end of the lagoon. These are a spectacular sight I have never found elsewhere in my 53,000 nautical miles Pacific wanderings.

Anyone who has an interest in the reef should put seeing this high on their bucket list.

Listening to the people on the trip it was obvious few of them had seen much of the reef. The chair lady of the marine park authority had only been on a boat twice before. How they pick the gravy train riders I don't know, but it sure isn't on knowledge or usefulness.

I dived on ribbon # 5 & # 2 and found it had a little more marine life that the average council kerb. The coral is showing signs of regrowth but sadly the fish life has been so decimated by fishing that it'll be a while yet before they learn how to breed faster than the morons catch them.
Heard a moron say on the ABC that recreational fishing is no longer viable since the fuel hikes of recent.
I truly hope that stops them for some years going out & ruining the marine ecology for "Sport".

Regarding oil on the GBR I recall in the late 70's when an island leader showed me the charts of five (5) oil fields found by drilling on the northern GBR.
Some drilling framework supposedly remained for quite a few years on the reef before saltwater did to the steel what it normally does. He told me once the embargo runs out in 1992 they'll probably go ahead with extraction.
One of these fields would have been crossed by the PNG gas pipe line had it gone ahead.

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This is what the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority reports on its website :

"With recent surveys and environmental conditions indicating the mass bleaching event is ending, the extent of recovery versus mortality following accumulated heat stress can only be estimated once the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) Long-Term Monitoring Program surveys are completed in mid-2023" :

http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/the-reef/reef-health

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Dear hasbeen,

How's it going old cock? Good?

Let's see what you are having a grizzle over now.

"SR is back again with the lefty hym book garbage, but who cares."

What part of my post was lefty? All I did was allude to the fact that it is pretty hypocritical to lambast the AIMS findings and call them highly inaccurate and the result of ideologically driven processes but then go all cock a hoop when their findings show the significant return of coral cover.

What on earth is lefty about that? Look, I know you prefer the information you swallow to be bite sized, palatable and of a form you are able to brush over the inconvenient truths, but some of us are slightly more intelligent that that.

My view indicates there will be widespread coral 'bleaching' on the GBR, during the coming 2022-2023 summe, likely early summer and not due to C02 emissions.

JF Aus,
If we keep un-balancing the ecology by out-of-control fishing then yes, bleaching along with other more closely related effects from over-fishing, bleaching will continue.
As with everything else people do, they simply can not fish in moderation !
I once asked a Qld "recreational" teacher why he had so many fish in his esky he replied "I sell them, I got to get my fuel money back" !
If only we could do something about this mentality by which 97% of the population are afflicted by !

What would it actually take for humans to wreck the planet so bad that it would be completely uninhabitable for humans and other animals?

Like if we set about chopping down every single tree that might work.
- But by the time we chopped them down, much would have grown back already.

If we actually set out to deliberately destroy the planet, we'd be fighting a losing battle.

Maybe if we took all the nuclear waste and dumped it all in our oceans, then maybe that would kill all ocean life and set off a chain reaction, where humans would have no seafood, but maybe then we would have to salt the land as well.

I'll admit if anyone can do it, than humans could.
We can take a perfectly good rainforest ecosystem and turn it into a lifeless desert if we set about doing so.
And many species are becoming extinct because we have poor systems of managing things.
- But to destroy the planet completely would take a level of extreme effort and determination.

Global nuclear war and a nuclear winter might go some way to helping achieve this kind of mass destruction.

I think that this shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Peter Ridd was correct.

Arnchair critic,
We'd be gone long before the Planet dies !

Totally agree shadowminister.

Great Barrier Reef biodiversity including coral is endangered due to incomplete science and politics.

Damage to coral is continuing to occur from time to time depending on winds and currents transporting a spike in the dissolved nutrient load from southern and local sewage and land use, point sources.

The total dissolved nutrient load is not measured or included in GBRMPA linked science, if it was then the danger would be obvious.

Dissolved nutrient transported within Australian east coast sediment dispersal current streams northwards between the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority boundary and the coast. That boundary is a political boundary.

Dissolved nutrient bonds to fresh water in sewage. Fresh water tends to the ocean surface. Fresher surface water on the Aus east coast is driven mainly northwards against the coast by prevailing S.E winds.
The flow with a spike of bonded nutrient is sometimes driven or drawn eastwards by wind or water currents leading to algal blooms that also impact the GBR .

The total east coast nutrient load and flow was not measured in Gladstone Port works excavation science, involving dumping and resuspension of nutrient loaded estuary seabed spoil.

Without relevant scientific evidence of warning signs, further coastal works and dumping of sewage continues to cause algae blooms and eutrophication and hypoxia.  Impact includes damage or destruction of estuary and bay seagrass nurseries for small fish on which big fish and seabirds and Pacific Islands people depend. 

Nutrient pollution proliferated algae reducing photosynthesis is the problem, not overfishing.

Where are all the seabirds these days, and affordable fresh local fish?
No science on that either, despite mire than $2 Billion leaving Aus annually to import fish.

Solutions should include debate and awareness of high tech-low cost solar pumps to reduce the nutrient load by sending quality wasterwater far inland for grazing and cotton production.

But ego and political obsession with CO2 emissions is a problem.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3946114/

JF Aus,
Agreed but don't let recreational saturation over-fishing off the hook !

Indyvidual,

If mainstream media was reporting evidence of all causes of ocean fish depletion and seagrass and coral devastation, subject of impact of amateur fishing would be irrelevant.

Sewage nutrient pollution and SOLUTIONS should be in focus.

Conflicting reports about the state of the GBR should not exist, truth should be obvious.
How can amateur fishers be held responsible?
During about 2016 the South Pacific Community reported populations of the four main tuna species in the Pacific had reached historically low levels. However this news was not covered by Australian MSM.
Fact is amateur fishers virtually don't fish for the main species of tuna, really because they cannot be caught from shore. Ocean-going bigger boats are needed and not many people have those available.

Also, only about 50 years ago science was reporting humans were too few in number to catch and use so many fish because there were far too many fish in the ocean, and fish were prolific breeders.

Looking at reality instead of incomplete scientific data its easy to see ocean fish depletion is due to habitat devastation, seagrass food web habitat ecosystems can no longer produce enough food to feed wild fish populations. Fish are not immune to starvation.
Even aquaculture industry in Australia is sometimes having to import fish to feed farmed fish in Australia
The billions of anchovies and herring and pilchards that no longer exist were not caught by amateur fishing.

The state of the whole ocean involving ecosystem damage and devastation is a scandal because it continues unchecked, unreported, gagged, and suppressed. Scientists seem frightened to discuss fact its governments that are dumping the sewage.

Look at Florida. Is the GBR unique with coral not impacted by the deterioration of ocean water quality?
http://floridakeys.noaa.gov/coral-disease/

What damage and destruction will occur from now on while sewage nutrient pollution worsens unchecked while emissions spin doctors waste time trying to blame CO2 emissions?
Is that why the impact of sewage wastewater nutrient pollution is being ignored in Australian media news? Consequences of fish depletion involving skyrocketing cost of fresh wild fish are serious?

http://www.analyteguru.com/t5/Blog/Nutrient-Pollution-in-Wastewater-An-Emerging-Global-Problem/ba-p/3193#:~:text=Due%20to%20human%20activities%2C%20large,algae%20growth%20(algal%20bloom).