Anthony Cox
The alarmists never rest. Despite UNESCO
giving the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) a clean bill of health alarmist scientists have increased their
doom and gloom propaganda. Members of the James Cook University centre for
excellence for coral reef studies, Andrew
Baird and Terry Hughes have declared the reef has been all but destroyed by
man-made global warming. When professor Hughes advised his students of the
parlous state of the GBR there wasn’t a dry eye in the lecture theatre.
This current bleaching has been a bad one. The El Niño which
has caused it was as big as the 1998 event. This 2016 bleaching event from the
El Niño was expected.
Despite this coral extent on the GBR has been increasing
in most areas:
|
Coral
cover
2012
|
Coral
cover
2015
|
3yr
change
(Gross)
|
3yr
change
(%)
|
Whole GBR
|
16.6%
|
19.8%
|
3.2% increase
|
+19.3%
|
Northern GBR
|
24.4%
|
19.6%
|
4.8% decrease
|
-19.7%
|
Central GBR
|
14.0%
|
17.2%
|
3.2% increase
|
+22.9%
|
Southern GBR
|
14.4%
|
27.5%
|
13.1% increase
|
+90.1%
|
Baird and Hughes and fellow hysteric Hoegh-Guldberg have
been sweating on such an event to justify their professional pessimism for some
time. In their definitive 2003
paper the group stated:
Projected increases in carbon dioxide and temperature over the next 50 years exceed the conditions under which coral reefs have flourished over the past half-million years.
This is not true in a number of respects. Firstly the models
which the alarmists rely on to generate such doom and gloom predictions have
been proved to be wrong and inadequate.
Secondly, recent past conditions on the GBR have been shown to be
warmer than current conditions.
Two papers which were published immediately
before the alarmists’ 2003 paper plainly show that in the 1700s temperatures
around the GBR were 1.5ºC higher than today’s temperature:
Hoegh-Guldberg and his
fellow alarmists should have been aware of this historical perspective.
Instead
they have resorted to base alarmism which as usual the MSM have lapped up. So
instead of a natural cycle we have the imminent death of the GBR caused by
humans and their CO2.