Dr Peter Ridd has been researching the Great Barrier Reef since 1984, has invented a range of advanced scientific instrumentation, and written over 100 scientific publications. He has lectured geophysical fluid dynamics, meteorology and oceanography since the 1990s.
THE AUSTRALIAN has more:
The Australian Institute of Marine Science officially has confirmed what we’ve known for a few weeks: this will be another bumper year for Great Barrier Reef coral cover.
AIMS states that two of the three major Great Barrier Reef regions have set new records for coral cover, and the cover in the third has equalled the existing record. When you add up the regional results to get the coral cover for the entire reef – something AIMS inexplicably stopped doing in 2016 – the Great Barrier Reef has more coral in each of the past three years than in any of the preceding 35 years.
This is despite the supposedly catastrophic bleaching in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and this year killing huge amounts of coral.
What is even more remarkable is that the types of coral that have flourished – plate and staghorn coral – are the most susceptible to bleaching. But of course AIMS is still arguing these records do not mean the reef is healthy.
[….]
One therefore has to ask: what does the reef have to do to get the tick of approval? Australia has just won a record number of medals at the Olympics, which everyone seems to think is good. Why is the Great Barrier Reef always close to death no matter how many medals it wins?
The record coral coverage on the Great Barrier Reef across the past three years is not mentioned in the latest Scientific Consensus Statement, just released by CSIRO. Instead it focuses on claims the reef is badly affected by farmers and that climate change is a great threat. The summary of the statement (alone about 100 pages) acknowledges traditional owners, vilifies farmers and claims that freshwater ecosystems miraculously have become an integral part of the Great Barrier Reef. But somehow it could not find room to mention the reef has record coverage of coral. …
The Great Barrier Reef had more coral in the last 3 years, than in the last 35 years.