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Death, where is thy sting?

20 Apr 2022 | News Roundup

Dr. Jennifer Marohasy must be a monster. “It is all over the news,” she sneers, “right across the world: the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching – again. Children can’t sleep at night: it is not only the war in the Ukraine keeping them awake at night, but also our apparent disregard for nature.” And having mocked the nightmares of innocent youth what does this awful woman do? She does what neither journalists nor government-funded reef scientists have bothered to do, she goes to the place where the damage is supposedly taking place, straps on some scuba gear and takes 360 lovely pictures of… the reef flourishing. Not dying. Has she no respect for the scientific method?

The method in question being, in her description:

[While[] the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) reports on coral cover, there are no direct counts of anything. Rather ‘observers’ are towed behind a boat from which they ‘estimate’ coral cover every few hundred metres.

… These guesstimates from the AIMS researchers looking down at corals, while being towed behind a boat, over about 200 reefs, are then tallied up to give a % coral cover for the entire Great Barrier Reef. But, to reiterate, not a single direct measurement is actually made. And there are no photographs or video.

At least there didn’t use to be, but thanks to Marohasy there are now.

If you were to ask climate alarmists what persuades them that there is a crisis, and we seriously recommend doing so because it is a very interesting exercise in understanding different points of view and perhaps even finding constructive ways forward, we expect the top item would be that there is an expert consensus, followed by it having warmed in the last 150 years, and then the weather getting worse, and then not much farther down the list the disappearing coral reefs. But what if these things are not true?

The warming since around 1870 is almost certainly real. And we won’t get sidetracked here into the question whether just because something happened we caused it. Nor will we address the “experts say” 97% thing here as our very popular video on the subject goes into it in detail. As for the weather not getting worse, see our item on the Little Ice Age in Britain here among many other blog items. But what about the extinctions?

The polar bears aren’t going under. Neither are trees, for that matter. And neither is the coral reef. As Marohasy continues, fair-minded but firm,

There was some bleaching, especially around the perimeter of John Brewer Reef – on the sandy sea floor where the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) surveyed and concluded coral cover is never more than 30% – but most of John Brewer Reef is still covered in more than 80% colourful corals. This high percentage is denied by AIMS because they never survey the reef crest.

That sea floor is the source of much colourful propaganda: “This coral reef, John Brewer Reef, has been described as one of the worst bleached by the ABC, The Conversation, and The Guardian. The Guardian uses the same photographs as the ABC which have been sourced from environmental group the WWF.” But to summon Chico Marx to the witness stand, who are you going to believe, those stock images or Marohasy’s own photos taken on April 10?

If you want to get all technical, and she does, “The pink to purple coloration in some of the corals at the reef crest is not from zooxanthellae, which are the symbiotic algae, but rather from increased pigment accumulation from the coral itself as the zooxanthellae are expelled.” So there. But you can also just get kind of basic and say that if enough people say something that is manifestly untrue enough times in the face of enough evidence, you are obliged to stop believing them.

3 comments on “Death, where is thy sting?”

  1. 97%?
    Are you people not up to date on the left’s loony claims.
    It is now 100%!!!
    And one of the authors is the now discredited, your friend and ours, UQ’s Peter Cook!!! Lol !!!

  2. The extremists who lie about a 100% consensus serve the useful purpose of making the extremists who lie about a 97% consensus look like moderates.

  3. As they say, to make an omlette, eggs must be broken, and Leftists seem to relish breaking 'eggs' called truth and reason.

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