Fancy that - the Great Barrier Reef is in "bloody brilliant shape"

As Ben Cropp noted a couple of years ago - he's noticed no change in the Reef in 50 years of diving there. When well meaning people who do care for the environment realise just to what extent they have been lied to by environmentalists and activist scientists, there is going to be hell to be paid. But as someone who feels passionately that true science is the answer to our problems and the guarantor of our future, I am angry and dismayed at the likely consequences for the standing and reputation of science as it becomes more commonly known that whether it be about the Reef or climate change generally, large parts of the scientific establishment have deliberately exaggerated and distorted their findings to fit within a predetermined narrative of impending doom and progressive degradation. Again, as always, this isn't to say that there are not challenges facing us in caring for the natural world. There are. And yes, we do face challenges from a climate that is doing what it has always done: change. The following reports from today's press highlight yet again another crucial point. Nature is not fragile. The idea that it is would have to be one of the most spectacularly stupid ones ever to come out the deracinated inner-city hippies who make up the core of support for the Greens and company. Life hasn't survived for over 3 billion years, facing in that time cataclysms and calamities almost beyond our imagining, by being fragile. It is tenacious and adaptable. It hangs on, and it surprises us again and again. Here's a report from this morning's The Australian: A SENIOR marine researcher has accused Australian scientists of “crying wolf” over the threat of climate change to the Great Barrier Reef, exposing deep division about its vulnerability. Peter Ridd’s rejection of the consensus position that the reef is doomed unless greenhouse emissions are checked comes as new research on the Keppel group, hugging Queensland’s central coast, reveals its resilience after coral bleaching. Professor Ridd, a physicist with Townsville’s James Cook University who has spent 25 years investigating the impact of coastal runoff and other problems for the reef, challenged the widely accepted notion that coral bleaching would wipe it out if climate change continued to increase sea surface temperatures. Instead of dying, the reef could expand south towards Brisbane as waters below it became warmer and more tolerable for corals, he said. His suggestion is backed up by an Australian Institute of Marine Science research team headed by veteran reef scientist Ray Berkelmans, which has documented astonishing levels of recovery on the Keppel outcrops devastated by bleaching in 2006. As The Weekend Australian reports today, some of the corals on the Keppel outcrops are more thickly covered in coral than before bleaching in 2006, raising hope the living heart of the reef can acclimatise to spikes in water temperature through a remarkable process of algal shuffling… “People say the reef is dying,” Dr Berkelmans said. “The Great Barrier Reef is 2000km long, with 3000 reefs. Are you telling me all of it is going to die?… Professor Ridd said scientists who predicted corals would be mostly extinct by mid-century had a credibility problem because the Great Barrier Reef was in “bloody brilliant shape”. Elsewhere in the same issue: How the reef became blue again   The loss of the 3000 prize reefs collectively known as the Great Barrier Reef is feared by some scientists but research shows their living coral are far more diverse and resilient than they've been given credit for Andrew Bolt points the finger at one of the most notorious alarmists: PROFESSOR Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of Queensland University, is Australia’s most quoted reef expert. He’s advised business, green and government groups, and won our rich Eureka Prize for scares about the Great Barrier Reef. He’s chaired a $20 million global warming study of the World Bank. In 1999, Hoegh-Guldberg warned that the Great Barrier Reef was under pressure from global warming, and much of it had turned white. In fact, he later admitted the reef had made a “surprising” recovery. In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s great Barrier Reef could die within a month”. In fact, he later admitted this bleaching had “a minimal impact”. In 2007, he warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were again bleaching the reef. In fact, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network last week said there had been no big damage to the reef caused by climate change in the four years since its last report, and veteran diver Ben Cropp said this week that in 50 years he’d seen none at all. And even Hoegh-Guldberg’s claim that the shells of shell-fish would have trouble forming has now been debunked. Accountability time.

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