The tendency of climate science to have it both ways, meaning it predicts everything and explains nothing because no evidence could possibly contradict it and thus none could possibly confirm it, is on colourful display yet again in an AFP “fact check” aimed at Tom Nelson for pointing out that the late lamented Great Barrier Reef is in fact doing as well as it ever has since detailed surveys began in 1985. (Yes, we checked that fact.) The piece flits about evasively like some small and timid reef inhabitant while putting on a bold front more suited to a predator. But the bottom line is that when they said the reef was dying from climate change and it turned out not to be, it doesn’t mean they said so or should be held to it. See, “scientists caution cover is only one measure of the health of the complex ocean structures”. The scientists who say again. But it’s not what they said when “cover” was declining, now is it? So what does it matter what they say now.
The tone of the piece gives a fair sense of what “fact check” means in this context:
“‘Yet another disaster for climate scammers,’ says an August 11 X post by podcaster Tom Nelson – the producer of misinformation-riddled climate film (archived here). Nelson’s post includes a graphic purportedly showing ‘record high’ coral cover in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2026. ‘Last 5 years, Great Barrier Reef coral cover better than ever. But many deeply worried people don’t want to hear,’ adds Bjorn Lomborg, a long-time climate contrarian, in an August 15 post, also on X (archived here).”
To give a sense of the deep and careful quality of their fact-checking research, their links re both Nelson and Lomborg are to the insult- and innuendo-heavy “DeSmog” blog. And they really left out the indefinite article on “misinformation-riddled climate film” so apparently they don’t do grammar checks much.
Now we ourselves take vigorous issue with Nelson on the issue of scammers versus true believers in false things. But when it comes to misinformation, people in glass media offices might want to hold off with the hard missiles. Especially given the actual hard facts, including as they concede as if it were startling given the known villainy of the “climate contrarian”, that:
“The posts draw from a real report published by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) on August 11 (archived here). In it, AIMS states that hard coral cover across all three regions of the reef ‘increased slightly or remained similar to levels recorded in 2025.’ It said this signaled the start of a recovery from record bleaching events that struck the region in 2024, fueled by warmer waters due to human emissions (archived here).’”
Feigning surprise that the study is even real is typical of this kind of sneering. As is the fact that the dogma of human warming is not to be fact-checked, including against the possibly pertinent point that if the oceans have been warming since, say, 1750 it’s hard to pin it on us. No indeed:
“But coral cover trends in 2026 ‘do not nullify the longer-term, emerging trend of volatility on the Reef,’ an AIMS spokesperson told AFP in an August 20 email. The ‘Reef remains under pressure from climate change.’ Independent experts agreed that the report did not prove long-term resilience or recovery.”
Ah, the experts who say as well as the scientists who do. The “independent experts” are of course all on the government payroll, from academics at public universities to, well, AIMS itself (which in its report does the usual woke land acknowledgement except this time it’s water, even calling “Aboriginal and Torre Strait Islander peoples… Australia’s first scientists” in case you thought the scientific method a Western invention) as opposed to actual independent ones who are… um… working on their own, like Nelson or Lomborg.
It really is advocacy disguised as impartiality, a shabby pose. Lomborg retorted indignantly that:
“AFP claims to ‘fact-check’ my post: Great Barrier Reef five-year highest coral cover/ But AFP never fact-checks the data it labels ‘inflated’/ Instead, AFP simply changes the subject/ In unrelated news: AFP part of EU-funded project to debunk climate misinformation/ AFP “Fact check”: https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.C66L7WH/ Member FactCRICIS/EuroClimateCheck, an EU-co-funded program https://afp.com/sites/default/files/afpcommunique/202405/pdf/prafpefcsn30may2024.pdf”
And indeed if one really were in, say, the fact-checking business, one might want to look hard at “the longer-term, emerging trend of volatility on the Reef”. Based on what “longer-term” and what data? As noted, the surveys in question only date back to 1985. And what they show is definitely volatility. Especially the upsurge since 2012. But are coral reefs typically in stasis and thus we’re seeing something unknown in past eons but waving its fronds frantically since climate change began in 1985, or 2012, or 2020, or whenever it seems convenient to claim in order to make even the recovery of coral sound like a scary disaster?
So they imply:
“Marine scientists highlight the increased fragility of the Great Barrier Reef over recent decades (archived here).”
Well, yes and no. The actual study is jiggery-pokery, looking at sea surface temperatures over the last 400 years and concluding that they’re higher now than during the Little Ice Age. Which should not surprise anyone because of that thing about “Ice”. But nor should it convince anyone that we did it since presumably until 1850 or so the warming was almost entirely natural, and for the next century at least mostly so.
Then it says of bleaching events that:
“the corals are stressed when water temperatures suddenly rise beyond normal levels in the austral summer. This causes them to expel the colorful symbiotic algae that inhabit their white skeletons, leading to so-called mass bleaching events. Bleaching does not kill corals outright, but it does make them more vulnerable to starvation and disease, especially if events happen frequently enough that algae populations have trouble recovering.”
Which is deeply misleading, as bleaching events are in fact known to be a response to stress not specifically to sudden temperature increases. They also happen if temperature drops suddenly. A point AFP failed to fact-check.
And not them alone. For instance National Geographic has claimed that “Warming oceans – caused by climate change – are typically the cause of coral bleaching.” Which is typical foolishness not least because climate change isn’t a causal force, it’s a description of alterations in weather, so warmer oceans can be an example of it but not an effect. Plus, as they go on to concede, “It can also be triggered by pollution, acidification, sedimentation, and changes in salinity or water quality.” But they never mention that cold does it too.
The line “Coral bleaching is a global crisis, caused by increased ocean temperatures driven by carbon pollution” has appeared online so often that it’s even used to market T-shirts. No fine print about “among a host of other things” though.
Well, a shirt ad is one thing. But a scientific paper is another. More sophisticated in its monomania because in that study here come the computers:
“The research team combined sea-surface temperature reconstructions using geochemical data from coral cores previously collected from the region. They also analyzed climate-model simulations of sea-surface temperatures run with and without climate change. They found that six years over the past two decades were the warmest in the entire 400-year record. In order, starting with the warmest, these were 2024, 2017, 2020, 2016, 2004 and 2022. All the years except 2004 coincided with mass bleaching events. The study concluded that human-caused climate change is to blame.”
Now despite the aboriginals being Australia’s first scientists, we inexplicably do not have data on bleaching events before colonialists with a Western imperialist mentality started doing that thing where you look systematically then write it down. Of course you actually have to read the paper, not just the press release, to determine that all this reconstruction using proxies fed into programs is just about SSTs (Sea Surface Temperatures to you). They didn’t even try to reconstruct bleaching. They just assumed warm water kills warm-water organisms, proved that it’s warmer now than when it was naturally cooler, and concluded that therefore there was less bleaching, making their premise their conclusion with the aid of mathiness:
“This attribution, together with the recent ocean temperature extremes, post-1900 warming trend and observed mass coral bleaching, shows that the existential threat to the GBR ecosystem from anthropogenic climate change is now realized.”
And who in their journalistic right mind would fact-check such a thing, or ask hard questions about what we really know about bleaching, or about SSTs in the 400 years before this 400 years, when (a) everybody knows (b) we’re all going to die (c) the computer said what we told it to? Namely:
“Climate model analysis confirms that human influence on the climate system is responsible for the rapid warming in recent decades.”
So facts don’t matter in a fact check.
Or maybe they do because of that pesky thing about coral being warm-water organisms which, like so much of this rebuttal, is easily discovered by anyone with Google on their computer. The whole idea that if it gets back to the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, the Holocene Climatic Optimum or, oh, say, the entire Cenozoic except the Pleistocene, the very same corals that flourished over tens of millions of years in much warmer water will suddenly croak from heatstroke isn’t science. Nor is regurgitating it fact-checking.
Of course the problem remains that the dead coral is impudently alive. So the AFP fact-check-like object intones:
“One factor is monsoons – a shift in winds that often causes a very rainy season or a very dry season... They have been studied as a natural relief to bleaching events across the globe.”
OK. But what dimwit thinks monsoons are a recent thing? It’s hard to be sure. They quote one of the scientist who say, a postdoc at UBC, that:
“The reef caught a break from the weather. That is a favorable roll of the dice, not evidence of increased biological resilience.”
Bosh. Actually weather is old news, both good and bad, and thanks to this thing called “evolution” that you’d think biologists and journalists alike would have heard of, coral has evolved to be resilient against the bad stuff and opportunistic about the good stuff which is why it’s been around for over half a billion years in one form or another. Think they didn’t have storms in the Cretaceous?
Actually it’s quite hard to know what these people think. Presumably if they are studying lions and zebras they know that what’s good for a lion is often quite bad for a zebra and vice versa, and also that the populations of both go through booms and busts partly because of the natural predator-prey cycle but also because of that dratted weather again, which disrupts ecosystems.
For instance during the hated heated Holocene Climatic Optimum what is now the Sahara was lush, wet and filled with animals that would croak there in a week by the Little Ice Age. But they appear to have no idea that nature is red in tooth and claw, and chaotic and dynamic and resilient.
For instance the iconic Jurassic predator Allosaurus appears to have surged to dominance around 155 mya, scared the heck out of everything, then more or less vanished all in 10 million years. Now if we had credible data on Allosaurus numbers worldwide, or even just in some part of Canada (they didn’t live in Australia as far as we know), how much fluctuation do you suppose we’d see? And what kinds of ups and downs in temperature over decades, centuries or even millennia? And how much of it would be proof that (a) humans were wrecking the place and (b) allosaurus was not resilient, couldn’t stand the heat, was on its last legs and just got a break from a rainstorm?
Obviously rubbish, right? And yet the scientists who say say it all the time about coral. As for instance in that study cited above:
“The magnitude of the recent warming astounded the researchers. University of Melbourne lecturer Benjamin Henley, who led the study, said, ‘When I plotted the 2024 data point, I had to triple check my calculations. It was off the charts, far above the previous record high in 2017. Tragically, mass coral bleaching has occurred yet again this year.’ ‘At least over the past 400 years, the frequent bleaching going on now year to year seems unprecedented,’ said study coauthor Braddock Linsley, a coral specialist at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. ‘It seems to be connected with what is going on with the global climate.’ Helen McGregor of the University of Wollongong, the second author of the study, said urgent action to stem climate change is needed to prevent devastation of the reef system. ‘There is no ‘if, but or maybe,’ she said. ‘The ocean temperatures during these bleaching events are unprecedented in the past four centuries.’ The authors say the research has implications for coral reefs throughout the world, highlighting the link between the long-term trajectory of extreme ocean temperatures and the health and biodiversity of marine ecosystems.”
No key questions are asked including about bleaching events in the HCO, or how they know about bleaching events under Louis XIV, or how much, or how much uncertainty exists.
Which isn’t to say humans can’t harm coral reefs, including by pollution including agricultural runoff, mining them for sand (yes, it really happens, though not in Australia), overfishing especially with destructive nets, and generally pestering them. But humans can also harm science, and fact checks of this sort are a classic case in point.
As anyone who has swum on an ocean beach is aware, the water temperature can vary a lot between different spots and times. The GBR is a large barrier reef, the coral thoughtfully growing in mostly shallow water for the benefit of tourists in glass bottomed boats. The shallows are, as swimmers know, where the water is warmest and where a lack of storm powered movement, will cause the temperatures to rise further. Periods of local calm weather are therefore, far more likely to initiate bleaching events than storms than Guterre "boiling seas and overflowing oceans"..or vice versa.