The Great Barrier Reef isn't dying, it's absolutely thriving scientists now admit.
We are supposed to be in the midst of a 'climate emergency', said to be the sixth mass extinction event for all life on earth. Children are now taught this as 'fact' in schools, whilst it dominates every government policy however unrelated it may be.
When David Attenborough was asked by a parliamentary committee for examples of climate change the 96 year old TV presenter offered up The Great Barrier Reef as exhibit A. The 1,500-mile coral structure off the coast of Queensland, was dying because of warming seas. It was reported to be suffering a ‘mass bleaching’ caused by the rising temperatures in the region. Nobody questioned Attenborough who is seen as an authority on the subject right up there with sainted Greta, or that in 1970s in an episode of Life on Earth he asserted that it was pollution from ships that was the cause of the Reef's bleaching.
The Great Barrier Reef has become the poster-child for Climate Change. Perhaps even more so than the injured polar bear we are all so familiar with. Attenborough made another documentary about the Reef in 2015, complete with scary predictions and ominous music.
All of this proved to be embarrassingly and spectacularly wrong. The latest survey of the reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, which was undertaken in May, reveals that coral cover has not only recovered but across two-thirds of the reef it is now at its highest levels since records began. The blaze of colour that stretches 1500 miles can be seen from space, whilst the wildlife the reef supports are also thriving. in response to the news Attenborough all but vanished from public view, whilst his paymasters, the BBC, have ignored the findings as they don't fit the narrative of a climate emergency.
The Reef had been reported as dead by the world's media, even receiving an obituary published in the environmental magazine Outside. News of its death wasn't just premature, it was an outright lie. The reef goes through a natural cycle where it increases and decreases over prolonged periods, when it was in its 'dormant' period it was claimed to be dead, now that it is in a growth period it is ignored, perpetuating the Climate Change myth.
The news has yet to feature on the BBC climate page and won't ever of course. The Corporation employs numerous environment correspondents, but the only report on its news site had a Sydney, Australia byline and appeared on the general science page. Curiously there was a similar absence of reporting earlier this year, when it was learnt that the South Pole had recently had its coldest six month winter since records began.
For the last three days solid, the BBC has been leading its climate coverage with a pile of emotional tosh arguing that scientists are not taking seriously enough the possibility of catastrophic climate change outcomes, “including human extinction” but can only offer up hot days in summer, and a few instances of arson as their proof. Now that the GBR has proved to be healthier than it's ever been they have to point to more and more unlikely events to continue the lie.
Reservoirs running dry is the latest misdirection. Reservoirs running out of water has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with 20 million more people in the country since the last time one was built.