Great Barrier Reef: 5% bleached, not 93% says new report “discrepancy phenomenal”

Great BArrier Reef, Corals, Flynn Reef, Wise Hok Wai Lum. Wiki.In a nutshell: a government funded group finds some bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef, and repackages the stats to come up with the apocalyptic statistic that only 7% of the reef is not bleached!  The SMH reported that “93% of the corals” are damaged. The reef is 2,000 kilometers long. Did anyone really think about these headlines?

Then in a development that “no one” could see coming, local tourism is damaged, potentially costing a lot of jobs.

“And the loss of these tourists could cost our tourism industry a whopping $1 billion a year, a report out today by The Australia Institute warned.”

This inspires local dive operators (who possibly know what the reef looks like) to pay for a two week expedition to survey 28 sites. They find about 5% damage and describe the difference as phenomenal. Indeed, they say the reef is pretty much just like it was 20 years ago when they last did a survey.

We know that both sides have an interest finding a healthy or unhealthy reef. The problem starts with self-serving taxpayer funded scientists who are paid to find a crisis. But they would not get away with it if the media didn’t let them. Blame sloppy gullible journalists like Tom Arup (SMH), and Stephanie Smail (ABC) who should have asked some hard questions, and protested at the surreal headlines. Will the job-destroying ABC report the new survey?

 

 Great Barrier Reef only 5% bleached, Cairns Post

Teams of divers in a joint two-week expedition sponsored by Mike Ball Dive and Spirit of Freedom surveyed 28 sites on 24 outer shelf reefs along a 300km section of the hardest-hit part of the reef from Bathurst Head to Raine Island.

 Mike Ball Dive Expeditions operations manager Craig Stephen, who conducted a similar survey on the remote reefs 20 years ago, said there had been almost no change in two decades despite the latest coral bleaching event.

“The discrepancy is phenomenal. It is so wrong. Everywhere we have been we have found healthy reefs.”

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority estimated a mass coral white-out of between 50 to 60 per cent, on average, for reefs off Cape York under the world’s biggest-ever mass coral bleaching event.

Scientists with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies reported about 35 per cent mortality but warned “the final death toll” on some reefs may exceed 90 per cent.

h/t  Graham D.

Image: Wikimedia, author Wise Hok Wai Lum: Flynn Reef 2014.

UPDATE:

Some media given the brief,
To report on the Barrier Reef,
Find that bleaching is harming,
The whole Reef, most alarming,
In line with the warmist belief.

 — Ruairi

 

8.6 out of 10 based on 104 ratings

142 comments to Great Barrier Reef: 5% bleached, not 93% says new report “discrepancy phenomenal”

  • #

    Truth and a good story?

    313

    • #
      Ursus Augustus

      Never let the facts or the truth get between a churnalist’s byline and a headline.

      242

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      Albert

      I wasn’t surprised as we had an elNino and warm waters, SOME bleaching was to be expected. The end of a laNina event will also leave some bleached corals

      81

    • #
      Bulldust

      Speaking of a good story… the ABC is running one now saying human induced climate change started 180 years ago … no, I kid you not:

      http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-25/climate-warming-'started-about-180-years-ago'/7773270

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      • #
        Dennis

        This latest nonsense is also published at The Australian newspaper.

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        • #
          Ursus Augustus

          Peter Hannam over at Fairfax is very excited too.

          Of course it is actually better evidence that it woz the Sun all along what with the Dalton Minimum and all.

          I note they don’t bother going back as far as say 1000 AD when there was otherwise reported warming but start their data plots in the Maunder-Dalton Minima period.

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          • #
            Ursus Augustus

            PS

            Dear Mod.

            Was it my play on words with sounds a bit like Fairfax wot got me snipped this morning?

            Just curious.

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          • #
            Ursus Augustus

            Just found the Nature article and looked at the Supplementry Information pdf
            at:-

            http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v536/n7617/extref/nature19082-s1.pdf

            Lo and behold for the NH ‘Ensembles’:-

            1 Jones 1998
            2 Briffa 2000
            3 Mann Jones 2003
            ..
            9 Mann 2008

            LOL.

            The SH ‘ensembles’ are basically anonymous. I suppose they would want to be in that company.

            All sounds like someone elses “Nature Trick” not so much to “hide the decline” but to tease the msm a bit of “incline”.

            I imagine this stuff is like porn to the true believers not to mention the media muppets.

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      • #
        Albert

        According to ABC propaganda just a few years ago, I should be typing 20 metres under water, glug, glug…

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    • #
      Ozwitch

      They’re not ‘lying’ of course they aren’t. There is 93% damage – in a tiny bit about 0.005% of the total area of the Reef.

      It’s like those adverts you read: “Contains 100% fresh juice” which means they stuck in a little bit amongst all the other garbage that goes to make up a juice carton these days.

      31

  • #
    Ursus Augustus

    Talk about ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’.

    I wonder what the psychology of those responsible for such fabricated evidence is. I wonder if a certain well know professor of psychology will dig deep into such a mysterious area of the human psyche.

    213

    • #
      PeterS

      There are lies, damned lies, statistics and leftist propaganda.

      312

    • #
      el gordo

      Fabricated evidence, the Guardian and SMH are running this story.

      ‘New research led by Australian scientists has pegged back the timing of when humans had clearly begun to change the climate to the 1830s.’

      51

  • #
    Peter Wilson

    “the final death toll” on some reefs may exceed 90 per cent

    Just what could they mean by final death toll. When is final? Are they saying that eventually 90% of corals will die and remain dead? Because if he is he is displaying a degree of ignorance, of both biology and history, which is frankly inconceivable in someone describing themselves as Scientists”, at a “Centre of Excellence” no less.

    What they really mean is please be alarmed, even though there is no reason to be. Activism, not science. Shameful.

    463

    • #
      sophocles

      a “Centre of Excellence”

      … which only means “our lies are better, our damned lies are superior and we produce The Best statistics.
      How would you like them? Published? Peer Reviewed and Published? Plated? Plated and Passivated? Plated, Polished, Passivated and Published?

      The most superior and Best are Plated, Polished, Passivated, Peer Reviewed and Published but, of course, those are the most expensive.
      Oh, and are there fries with that?”

      141

    • #
      ianl8888

      Activism, not science. Shameful

      Noble Cause Corruption has no shame … that’s its’ point.

      While people go on expecting this non-existent shame to surface, no change is possible. As the MSM has no shame (Noble Cause Corruption is extremely strong in the MSM vanity mindset), no change will occur.

      Reef reality has no look-in as the large majority of the population will never see it, live thousands of km from it and take their information from the MSM. Cassandra suggests that if some fact is not reported by the MSM or the ABC, a large number of people will not believe it ever happened, even if they actually experience it. Such is the power of propaganda.

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  • #
    gnome

    At least it’s a worthwhile discrepancy, not like the piddling hundredths of a degree that are going to see us all boiled in our own juices before the end of the decade.

    See, not all climate scientists are nit-pickers.

    173

  • #
    Binny

    As always, key word ‘some’ reefs. No doubt after exhaustive searching, a (small) area that had 93% bleaching was found…

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    • #
      Glen Michel

      I spent 6 weeks around Tully( mission beach) and further north around Cooktown in late July/August 2016 fishing reef and pelagic species.Nothing I saw – and I emphasise that , indicates any widespread reef denudation.Shallow reefs,as usual showed the effects of bleaching;same areas that I saw in 1974 with the added threat of crown of thorns starfish.All the “hands on” locals that I spoke to were adamant that it’s all happened before and that the reef will recover.Political elements at JCU will dictate to the ABC.

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    • #

      Binny, I think it was more in the spirit of 93% of reefs having at least one dead coral…

      171

  • #
    Leigh

    And this is what Hunt and Turnbul should be highlighting to those rentseekers that are trying to have the reef placed on the UNESCO endangered list.
    Instead of giving hundreds of millions more to them to “observe”.
    Spend a couple of million on getting these bludgers in UNESCO who are threatening the government out on the reef with the tourist operators. Who do “observe” on a daily basis, to actually show them the crap that’s being served up to them by these “concerned scientists”.
    The 93% would quickly be exposed for what it is!
    As with global warming or lack of, this simple observation says more than what the taxpayer funded self interested scientific community would like you to know.
    “Mike Ball Dive Expeditions operations manager Craig Stephen, who conducted a similar survey on the remote reefs 20 years ago, said there had been almost no change in two decades despite the latest coral bleaching event.”

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  • #
    KinkyKeith

    So much for ACCOUNTABILITY in public office.

    Little wonder that Australia , and much of the West, is going to hell in a hand basket.

    In the space of 45 years we have turned a working country with an education system available to even the poorest citizen, and the best in the world, into a government employed nation with a very high suicide rate.

    People no longer know what is real anymore; everything they see or become involved with is a fabrication, a distortion or outright MANIPULATION.

    The new type of World War is more subtle than sending men “over the top” for the glory of the Empire.

    You don’t even realise you are “going” over until all your neighbors are on the dole and your children can’t get meaningful work and the nation has a collective federal government debt (please add for your own State debt) of $13,000 per man woman and child..

    Is this really advancement or ‘fairness’?

    KK

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    • #
      Sceptical Sam

      It’s even worse than that KK.

      Australian Federal Government Securities on Issue = $431,640,000,000

      http://aofm.gov.au/

      This year’s projected Federal Budget (2016-17) deficit = $37,100,000,000

      http://budget.gov.au/2016-17/content/glossies/budget_repair/html/

      Total = $468,740,000,000

      That, on the basis of an Australian population of 25,000,000 = $18,750/head.

      That’s in excess of 30% of GDP.

      Greece here we come.

      161

      • #
        Spetzer86

        Pikers, that’s what you are! Here’s some real debt – over 19 Trillion and more every day! http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/02/the-us-debt-just-exceeded-19-trillion-heres-how-we-got-here/

        We’re well over $154,000 USD/person and climbing.

        111

        • #
          KinkyKeith

          An interesting read.

          President Obama has a place in history alongside the many Professor Brian Coxes of the scientific community and the wider framework of world government at the EEU and U.N.

          For each of those smiling faces like the Pres and the Prof there are hundreds lurking with a straw stuck in the arteries of government and draining the work effort lifeblood of the poor voters who think they have some control.

          Who said slavery was eliminated from America, it has just morphed into a more sophisticated form.

          I, along with many others was cheered by the Brexit experience and the Australian cliffhanger election and the USA _ Trump revolt.

          In truth it isn’t the enemy at our borders that’s the danger, it’s the freeloaders in our governments who govern only for their own benefit.

          KK

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      • #
        Kratoklastes

        You have missed the biggest set of obligations that the vermin of the political-parasite class have imposed on current and future generations – the cost of unfunded future liabilities for pensions and health-care.

        Unlike private enterprise, the government does not perform ‘accrual’-based accounting for known future liabilities – even when those costs can be known with some precision. If private companies fail to make accruals for known future liabilities, there are significant fines (and nobody will sign off on an audit of your accounts).

        Taking the US as an example: the ‘headline’ total government debt is ~19 trillion. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, not when it’s compared with the ~200 trillion in unfunded future promises.

        Exactly the same situation exists in every economy that has a government. It’s the most important way that these pseudo-human tapeworms hide the fact that they parasitise on their host populations (in a way that has absolutely zero symbiotic effect: government failure dwarfs putative market failure by orders of magnitude… up to and including the travesty of war, which only governments do on important geographic scales).

        I compare it to what family life is like if the individual who is ‘managing’ household finances, turns out – when they leave – to have a massive, growing, unpaid debt about which the household was not informed.

        Everything seems manageable while they’re there, because they do enough to stop the inevitable ramifications of the undisclosed debt: they take the calls from the duns; they divert resources to service their debt (not to an extent that stops it from growing, though). Everyone in the household thinks “We’re doing OK. The mortgage is large, credit cards are worrisome… but we’re getting by. Another decade or so and we should be almost out of debt.” And then – in the aftermath – the hammer falls.

        That’s what citizenries face from the ‘under the waterline’ activities of their ‘public servants’ (the most disgusting term in the entire grab-bag of political fake-namery). And propaganda works a treat on the ill-informed – people still think that Reagan was a fiscal ‘conservative’, despite the fact that the US Federal Debt went gangbusters on his watch.

        20

      • #
        Rick Will

        “Greece here we come”
        That statement is not accurate.

        On a per capita basis Australia actually nosed ahead of Greece around 2010:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_debtor_nations_by_net_international_investment_position_per_capita
        Each Australian now owes the creditor nations USD29.5k compared with each Greek citizen owing USD26.7k.

        The federal government debt in Australia is not a key consideration, as a country with its sovereign currency must run up debt so there is money available for increasing savings of an ageing population. If every Australian over 60 had enough savings to live on for the rest of their life, total savings of the retiring group would amount to about AUD5Tr. Those savings come either from federal deficits or current account surpluses. The key concern is the net borrowings offshore and that is a serious concern for all Australians.

        Japan has the highest level of government debt per capita but also has one of the highest net investment position per capita of USD22k. The high government debt simply reflects the high savings of the ageing population. The government needed to run up debt so money is in the system for the private savings otherwise they would have even greater offshore lending which now exceeds USD3Tr net.

        The net international investment position is what matters in terms of how well a country is functioning from a financial perspective and Australia is well out in front in the race to the bottom of the pile; now a good nose in front of Greece. Greece also has a slightly different problem to Australia because Germany provides their money – There is no sovereign currency meaning the Greek government does not create their own money.

        40

    • #
      john karajas

      There’s an awful lot of soft authoritarianism going around these days KK. Government regulations to the max, rent-seeking by anthropologists, environmental scientists, biased taxpayer-funded journalists, etc, etc. As an ex-CEO of an ASX-listed company I can vouch that there is a huge amount of red tape, black tape and green tape to contend with these days. Net benefit to the environment or to indigenous Australians? Five eighths of diddly-squat.

      211

      • #
        KinkyKeith

        As you point out John, what is so obvious is the ineffectiveness of so much of these “tape” laws and regulations.

        Pure Tokenism at best and in reality very damaging and dispiriting for those working in the real world.

        KK

        81

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    • #

      Two thoughts after reading this below. How big would the stink smell be if 93 percent of the reef bleached and can a very low tide also cause bleaching?
      The Katoomba Daily Fri 30 Jun 1933 Page 4 PLEASURE CRUISE
      Heron Island was one of the most
      interesting places we visited on the
      cruise. It is surrounded by a coral
      reef, completely uncovered at low-
      tide, which enabled the party to
      walk over it and collect coral and
      shells., and to watch the brilliantly-
      coloured small fish dart for cover at
      the first ripple caused in their pool.
      While on the subject of coral, I
      might add, that though coral is of
      various colours iu its natural state,
      it bleaches white after being taken
      from the water. No matter what Die
      colour may be, it invariably goes
      white in time, and so the coloured
      coral so often admired is really
      artificially tinted. Also, I may say,
      that while coral is bleaching it has
      the most yile smell I have ever
      known. There is nothing I can com
      pare it with, and . how some of our
      fellow-tourists slept with large
      pieces of coral in their cabins is be
      yond me. My steward advised me to
      leave mine on deck, and that was
      certainly good advice.

      120

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        • #
          el gordo

          We can surmise that when the zooxanthellae leaves home the remainder stinks, also a drop in sea level has the potential to bleach the whole GBR.

          30

          • #

            el gordo
            The coral would grow up to a water level. Then as the 1933 article describes be out of the water during a very low tide event. A very low tide during heavy rain would give it a nice fresh water shower to to meet your above condition as well as being out of the water when the rain stops. Was this so called event at the right time of year for a very low tide? Did it rain?

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            • #
              Ted O'Brien.

              Did this happen this year?

              30

              • #
                el gordo

                According to Chris Jones (skipper of Calypso)

                “We’ve had a very still summer and then a huge amount of fresh water dumped on top of the reef recently which could cause a lot of what they’re seeing form the air.

                “When the fresh water mixes in with hot salt water it causes the coral to stress out.”

                40

              • #
                el gordo

                Off the top of my head a very negative Indian Ocean Dipole warmed the northern section of the GBR and coupled with a strong El Nino produced the bleaching.

                Anecdotal evidence suggests there was quite a bit of rain about too, but none of this has anything to do with AGW.

                31

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              • #
                Peter C

                The idea that coral bleaching is caused by slightly warmer water never made any sense to me. But give it a bath of Fresh Water instead of Sea Water and that might cause some stess.

                20

              • #
                el gordo

                Coral bleaching is predictable if all the actors are in play and this includes the influx of freshwater from rivers as in 2008 thru to 2011.

                Its all perfectly natural and has been happening over millions of years.

                20

              • #
                PeterPetrum

                Did it happen this year?

                According to the article it was 1933. I don’t think operators n the Reef today would allow people to break off and remove coral.

                10

  • #
    TdeF

    Polar ice extent, healthy coral, el nino, hurricanes, droughts, decadal oscillations even wildlife populations. These are all cyclic events which follow established patterns, routine if not exactly predictable in time. In the most recent long Australian drought, we had a single villain, Global Warming and Carbon dioxide. Our fault the per capita worst ‘polluter’ on the planet. So it was all our own fault, apparently even though 98% of CO2 comes from overseas.

    Now Carbon Dioxide is established as the worst greenhouse gas and the sole villain, causing bushfires and hurricanes and killing coral. All due to coal and cars and Western Democracies who must be made to pay for their wilful increase of CO2 levels. Even the Chinese want compensation for ‘historical pollution’ despite their role as the biggest emitter of CO2.

    So apart from the complete lack of any logic in this, the only thing not suffering utter devastation from Carbon Dioxide, the greatest threat in our generation and the cause of Global Warming and consequential Climate Change, is the actual global temperature which has refused to budge for 20 years now. Odd that.

    213

    • #
      TdeF

      As my son would say, good story. Needs more dragons.

      102

    • #
      KinkyKeith

      TdeF, you seem to be describing a new religion there.

      Perhaps we could learn something from our Pagan forebears and sacrifice a few politicians to the new God of CO2?

      Perhaps, with enough sacrifices we could control CO2 to acceptable levels.

      Even if that didn’t work we may have a side benefit of reducing government spending on baseless new religions.

      KK

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      • #
        TdeF

        Yes, but the politicians are the druids or the Aztec rulers. It is the people who get sacrificed.

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      • #

        Willie Nelson was pagan enough! The blond Texas ladies were so fine! I found one that competed in barrel racing. So nice, so comforting. She could still kick your nuts off in a millisecond; if you really pi*sed her off! 🙂

        20

        • #
          KinkyKeith

          Well I’ll be doggone.

          We here in Australia don’t have barrel racing, and I suspect that I don’t want to hear a description.

          11

          • #
            Binny

            She races a horse around 3 barrels set in a triangle pattern – and yep our girl do it to (keeps them slim and fit…you don’t want to mess with a barrel racing gal)

            20

          • #

            KK, pls listen!
            Barrel racing is a southern US horse riding sport for only trained ‘cutting horses that can turn on a dime, and give you 7 cents back!. These RODEO barrel races are done in an arena, with barrels, such that the fastest going round without disturbing location of said barrel, but severely nudging such from exposed knees was the winner! The ‘men’ cowboys, could not compete with the lighter, smarter ladies.
            It was the exceptionally gifted ‘cutting horses’ that really understood all of that! 🙂
            All the best! -will-

            20

          • #
            BL of CQ

            Actually, KK, we do. There’s a sheila just down the road & around a couple of corners a bit that is quite adept at it – gets her name in the papers, she does.

            20

  • #
    ROM

    Not the Great Barrier Reef but another example of straight out lies and deliberate mis-information by so called scientists and how Nature has shoved it once again up the those scientific “expert know it alls”.

    Who as it turns out in the example below were not only grossly alarmist without apparently knowing much about coral reefs and their ability to always adapt to the situations in the oceans despite being reef scientists and who in the end turned out to be rather ignorant of the life of coral species and the reefs they build and inhabit that they were purportedly “experts” on.
    .
    Via the GWPF site.

    GIANT CORAL REEF THAT ‘DIED’ IN 2003 TEEMING WITH LIFE AGAIN

    In 2003, researchers declared Coral Castles dead. Then in 2015, a team of marine biologists was stunned and overjoyed to find the giant coral reef once again teeming with life.

    On the floor of a remote island lagoon halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the giant reef site had been devastated by unusually warm water. Its remains looked like a pile of drab dinner plates tossed into the sea. Research dives in 2009 and 2012 had shown little improvement in the coral colonies.

    Then in 2015, a team of marine biologists was stunned and overjoyed to find Coral Castles, genus Acropora, once again teeming with life. But the rebound came with a big question: Could the enormous and presumably still fragile coral survive what would be the hottest year on record?

    This month, the Massachusetts-based research team finished a new exploration of the reefs in the secluded Phoenix Islands, a tiny Pacific archipelago, and were thrilled by what they saw. When they splashed out of an inflatable dinghy to examine Coral Castles closely, they were greeted with a vista of bright greens and purples — unmistakable signs of life.

    “Everything looked just magnificent,” said Jan Witting, the expedition’s chief scientist and a researcher at Sea Education Association, based in Woods Hole, Mass.

    Global climate change is wreaking havoc on corals worldwide. Coral bleaching has caused extensive damage to regions extending from the Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean and nearly everywhere in between.

    “Threats to tropical coral reefs worldwide have escalated to a level that imperils the survival of these complex, diverse and beautiful ecosystems,” Janice M. Lough, an Australian researcher, wrote in a February opinion piece in Nature.
    &
    No one actually knows what drives reef resilience or even what a coral reef looks like as it is rebounding. In remote, hard-to-get-to places, our understanding of coral is roughly akin to a doctor’s knowing only what a patient looks like in perfect health and after death, Dr. Rotjan said.

    And on and on with the alarmism.
    And some scientists are rather naively beginning to wonder why the public is now beginning a big turnoff from so called science and scientists according to an increasing number of survey results.

    And where the public perceptions go, there also eventually go the politicals.

    With the Barrier reef getting a good bill of health in its northern reaches there is going to be a lot of egg on the red faces of a lot of alarmist reef “scientists” [ ? ] and the rabidly green watermelon brigade who have never ever let a supposed disaster go by if they think they can get some grossly exaggerated “end of the world and humanity” and “we must do something” aspect out of it.

    If they can’t see a way to get something out of the disaster then they will lie and invent their way to some duly alarmist and disastrous claims about the supposed disaster and the “end of time” that it will bring down upon our always ever so guilty heads.

    For the science and scientists of many disciplines the future is beginning to look rather sour and pauperous and it is all entirely their own work as the public begins to turn of from the straight out lies, misinformation, deliberate deceit and gross exaggeration that so many so called “scientists” are now indulging themselves in.
    All in an apparent personally enhancing attempt to gain ever greater personal recognition and a superior status and ever more funding for what are often just mealy mouthed, barely fringe science pursuits of little or no conceivable value to man or beast.

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    • #
      sophocles

      Propaganda 101:

      1: If you can get your story into print first, then that’s what does the rounds and is believed.
      0: The more outrageous it is, the faster it circulates.
      1: No amount of rebuttal will quash it as rebuttal circulates at the speed of a racing snail.

      41

      • #
        Kratoklastes

        That was literally the ‘go to’ approach of George H.W. Bush’s press secretary – a guy called Peter Teeley, who went on to become one of those professional ‘charity vampires’ who sits on the board of a charity and flies (first class, of course – like Tim Costello) from event to event.

        Teeley did an interview (with Newsweek, if memory serves) and it was put to him that Bush lied during a Presidential debate. It wasn’t a ‘little white lie’ either: Bush claimed that Mondale and Ferraro had said that the Marines who died in the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut ‘died in shame’.

        When pressed on this, Teeley said the following –

        You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it. If it happens to be untrue, so what. Maybe 200 people read [the correction] or 2000 or 20,000.

        That is the psychotype of the people in politics. Every man jack of ’em: by the time you get to a position that has your name on a ballot paper, you’ve seen enough of what goes on behind the scenes that you would not be prepared to participate if you were a normal human being. There are no vegetarians who work in abbatoirs, and likewise there are no non-parasites who work in political life.

        Partisans always delude themselves that ‘their’ guy is a vegetarian working in an abbatoir.

        20

      • #
        ROM

        Note another item from those James Cook University reef “scientists”. [ ?? ]

        Quoted from the GWPF posting;

        “Between 60 and 100 percent of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef,” Terry Hughes, the lead coral reef scientist at Australia’s James Cook University, said in April.

        Hughes’ research was based on aerial surveys of 911 reefs, and found 316 reefs were “severely bleached.”

        So a real world look at the claims of the JCU reef “scientists” [ ? ] based on my 50 years and some 3000 hours of flying experiences.

        Now an aerial survey of this type would have involved flying along the reefs at a probable minimum height of a 1000 feet [ 300 metres ] or so to maintain a safe height and to give the pilot time to react if there are any engine or other problems particularly way out in the ocean where some or a lot of the reefs are located.

        They will be flying at about 100 knots [ 180 kph ] if it was a single engined light aircraft and quicker if it was a twin engined aircraft; ie; about 3 kilometres a minute or a kilometre every 20 seconds.

        And if you or you know anybody other than these JCU reef “scientists” who are apparently good enough to assess every kilometre of a reef and do it at a rate of a kilometre of coral reef bleaching assessment every twenty seconds then you are an outright genius or a visual savant, in this case more likely an id**t savant.
        Or you are just plain lying through your nether orifices.

        Hughes and his other fellow scientific incompetents would have been looking at a quite steep angle through the plexiglass of the light aircraft windows which are not very good at all for looking through at any close details on the ground / surface due to the quality of the window plastic.

        Plus the cleanliness or lack of the same and the inherent distortions that are small but noticeable in light aircraft plexiglass windows plus vibration of the aircraft engine/s.

        Then Hughes and his other reef scientists would have had to look down through some distorting depth of water to the corals beneath a sea surface that was NOT a nice smooth mirror flat surface but a surface that would have had ripples and waves and wind distorting everything they thought they could see about that coral well down under the sea’s surface.

        They would have been up there for a couple at least or more likely a few hours for each coral assessment flight which of course being very high class “reef scientists” they would have maintained an unblinking, deeply concentrated watch of each and every one of those 911 reefs they assessed from the air during their flight time of ??? hours over a ?? of flights carried out over a ?? number of weeks ?/ days? / months?

        From all of this the JCU reef scientists “scientifically” decided and come to the conclusion and then promoted the complete falsity and lie that “Between 60 and 100 percent of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs”, and that 93% of the reefs maybe / will be bleached and permanently damaged and destroyed by the dreaded and still unseen and un-measured “climate change” or that is what they implied in interviews and press releases.
        ——
        JCU press release ;
        Wed, 20 Apr 2016
        Only 7% of the Great Barrier Reef has avoided coral bleaching

        The final results of extensive aerial and underwater surveys reveal that 93% of the reef has been affected. It’s a mixed picture of very severe, moderate and little damage that changes dramatically from north to south along the 2300km length of the Reef.

        ————
        And the same quality of research and the conclusions promoted in all their falsity could have been carried out in the comfort of the office [ maybe it was in any case but they ain’t telling ] by subscribing to Google Earth’s high quality proffessional use centimetre definition satellite based viewing systems or any of a few other similar high quality centimetre definition, commercial satellite based Earth viewing systems.

        This is Coral Reef SCIENCE as carried out by James Cook University Reek Reef scientists researching incompetents.

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          Kratoklastes

          I don’t see any problem with that, as far as being able to get a result is concerned. Aerial imagery analysis is pretty schmick.

          An ‘aerial survey’ doesn’t mean “Sitting in a plane making notes” – it means scrutinising (usually by software) a hig-res aerial image.

          I’ve been doing the tech side of things on a couple of large projects that assess changes to every house block in a geographical area, using aerial imagery taken by an overflight (ideally, at noon on December 21st: that minimises shadows).

          The ECW (Edras Compressed Wavelet) file we use is taken a resolution of 10cm/pixel – so it can’t clearly identify a tennis ball in your back yard (that would only be 1/3rd of a pixel, so it would only alter the colour of the pixel). However your garden furniture stands out nicely.

          For the whole of Metropolitan Melbourne, the file is ~150GB; Geelong is less than a third that size.

          And the way we go about it is on a ‘parcel by parcel’ basis. Literally every house block.

          So for every house block in the VicMap cadastral data (a set of polygons with spatial and aspatial ‘identifiers), we did the following:

          — ‘extract’ the portion of the 10cm aerial using the property boundary as a cutline;
          — find the orientation of the longest side of the property boundary;
          — rotate the image so that its longest side was vertical;
          — snip the rotated image so as to remove as much ‘no-data’ as possible.

          So for each year, you have ~2 million little images with a minimised ‘no-data’ area (no-data is the largest area in blocks that are aligned oblique to the projection, since extraction uses bounding boxes). Kind of a ‘time series of images’ for every house block.

          We did a bunch of ‘hand coding’ of an aspatial identifier that showed whether or not the land was vacant in a given year; we also auto-detected rooflines (this wasn’t very accurate, but we eyeballed the results and chose a sample of 25000 where the detection was spot-on).

          Then, we trained 2 algorithms –

          — one was given ‘structured’ data that identified past vacant and non-vacant land, and ‘learnt’ to discriminate between the two based on unsupervised feature learning;
          — the other that was given feature-identified data (where the roof outline was done by machine then checked by hand), which learnt to recognise rooflines (and performed better than older methods – Hough lines and so forth).

          The results were excellent, irrespective of things like
          — the lighting conditions on the day of the aerial, or
          — whether or not the year in question results in green or brown lawns.

          The move to the ‘machine learning’ method meant that projects that used to take six months using uni students to peruse stuff on a screen, can now be done in six hours by a machine (with humans intervening to check stuff where the algorithm results lie in a region of ‘certainty’).

          If you give a well-configured SVM or a neural net enough data, those suckers will ‘partition’ your data into the right groups.

          That said: climate nutjobs are not the sorts of people who wrestle with technical stuff very well. As someone who spent the 90s doing large-scale economic and econometric modelling, I have the training to evaluate numerical models, and I have never seen a climate model whose code was not laughably amateurish. Given that’s where they spend the most of their dough, and that’s where their most-tech-capable people are, I would be against the idea that JCU’ climate nutjobs had the chops to properly construct a neural net to assess coral: but it is possible (I could never be involved because I don’t belong to their religion, and they don’t contract out except to ‘safe hands’)

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    Sceptical Sam

    Well, even today the ABC is still permitting fools and subversives to run the dying reef lie:

    Think I’m being alarmist? Well, think about this—off Queensland, more than nine-tenths of the Great Barrier Reef has just been bleached. Perhaps a quarter of it has died and likely won’t come back.

    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/what-will-it-take-for-us-to-pay-attention-to-climate-change/7749086

    This is absolutely disgraceful. It is irresponsible. The tourism industry should be demanding somebody’s guts for garters.

    Yes, on the bloody ABC today, Thursday 24 August 2016. It needs to be taken down immediately.

    Where the hell is the dopey Prime Minister? Where’s the dopey Minister for Tourism? Where the hell is the dopey Minister for Communication?

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      Glen Michel

      Well Beale is a Commie from way back.Deconstructionist big time.

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      el gordo

      ‘The tourism industry should be demanding somebody’s guts for garters.’

      A class action against auntie.

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        KinkyKeith

        The Empire (that’s us) needs to “strike back”.

        But just how do we sue their ABC?

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          I hab many fine honed pitchforks unt vell oiled torches! Excellent prices on large lots. Of course not to be used for any mayhem, only as a symbolic gesture! 🙂

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            Rereke Whakaaro

            Vat aboot som symbolic gesturen of mayheim wit der pitchfork und der oiled torches, und der poken oft der auntie?

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      Lawrie Ayres

      Sam,
      Last night I caught a few minutes of a David Attenborough programme on Channel 10. Something about the dying sea. He asked an Australian expert and up pops Ove-Hulberg telling us that the reef is buggered and shows a bleached area and his latest experiment. He then goes on to show the audience how he can change the ph of sea water by blowing through it with a straw. Got it from 8.2 to 7.9 with just a few breathes although the sample was only a few hundred millilitres. This proved that the oceans were becoming acid due to human emissions. Attenborough of course lapped it up and called for action lest we destroy the oceans and all those wonderful sea creatures. I have a strong stomach but these guys make me sick.

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        Rereke Whakaaro

        Perhaps we need to lobby the Government to ban all straws? It will be for the sake of the children!

        40

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        john karajas

        Anybody who did high school science back in the 1960’s or before would have been taught about buffering of acidity in solutions by carbonates, well known components of seawater. Mr Attenborough would be well aware of such a process unless prolonged exposure to television arc lights has fried his brain.

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        RB.

        So he showed what a 100 fold increase in CO2 levels would do if it happened in a few seconds. Even a such an increase in the atmosphere over 100 years would not drop the pH that much. The few breaths would have 4-5% CO2 (40 000 ppm) and 2-3 litres for each breath.

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          RB.

          And then there is the saliva that is buffered between ph 6.2-7.4. Because it is buffered, its hard to tell how much is needed to reduce the pH of a small glass of water but I would suspect not much. A pH drop from 8.2 to 7.9 of a 100mL solution of base would need just micrograms of an acid.

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    KinkyKeith

    Accountability?

    Accountability

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    TdeF

    At least the Crown of Thorns Starfish which was supposed to have destroyed the reef in the 1970s is let off the hook completely. You would think it did not exist. The only problems now apparently are the combustion engine and coal.

    At what point do people realise the reef is a huge natural and living system with ups and downs but has been there for tens of thousands of years and weathered far worse? It gets sick. It gets better. It shrinks and it grows.

    Besides, whatever happened to all those dying Polar Bears and hundreds of thousands of missing Caribou who vanished? I think Jo could file this article under “The Sky is Falling”, one of the many time when so called scientists read the auguries of the natural world. The celtic druids have not vanished. They just call themselves scientists now. Send money. The Climate Council needs you.

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    Perhaps our leaders are waiting for confirmation from their usual sources: Four Corners and the ABC harpies.

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    ROM

    Red face here.
    Posted this below in the previous Nuke’s post instead of here.
    ——————-

    The Barrier reef debacle merely reinforces my proposition that one half of the population is below the AVERAGE intelligence levels of the total population.

    As scientists come from exactly the same gene pool as the rest of us, we can assume that one half of “scientists” are below the average intelligence levels of the population.

    We can further assume based on the science being promulgated everywhere these days that the scientists who are of average intelligence or above that of the populace, work in physics, mathematics , medicine, geology and astronomy, electronics and many similar technical scientific pursuits.

    Those of below the average intelligence of the populace and going by the questionable quality of most of their scientific output, work in climate change research, data changing and data manipulation research if they are in climate science, psychological analysis of skeptics, environmental sciences such as reef research, flatulence research for cattle, carbon emissions papers writing [ no science qualifications neccessary for anything to do with the dreaded carbon! ] dead kangaroo research and etc.

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      Analitik

      In the immortal words of the late, great George Carlin

      Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that.

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        Mark D.

        The problem is when I was 19 years old I was smarter than most. As I get older I realize that I’m slipping towards average……..

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      Kratoklastes

      As scientists come from exactly the same gene pool as the rest of us, we can assume that one half of “scientists” are below the average intelligence levels of the population.

      I have some sympathy with the idea that the median graduate is not up to much. I go further than that – regardless of the discipline, a non-elite student is not up to much. I won’t go to a doctor or dentist who didn’t get a First.

      That said, what you wrote is exceedingly bad statistics, and is obviously wrong – because scientists are not drawn at random from the population.

      — Scientists are drawn from science graduates (not everyone who starts a BSc finishes; not everyone who finishes a BSc goes on to become a ‘scientist’).

      — Science graduates are drawn from science-degree entrants (exceptions are noise).

      — science degree entrants are drawn from university entrants.

      — University entrants are drawn from roughly the top quartile of high-school graduates (again, exceptions are noise).

      To the extent that raw intellect is a decent marker of scholastic success (and it is, anecdotes notwithstanding), that means that

      — science graduates are – on average – smarter than the group of people who start a science degree;
      — people who start a science degree are smarter – on average – than people who do degrees that have lower entrance requirements;
      — uni entrants are – on average – smarter than the top 25th percentile of the IQ distribution (roughly an IQ of 111… not that high, frankly).

      It is absolutely true that if the distribution of intelligence amongst scientists is symmetric, half of them will be below the average intelligence of a scientist. It’s possible to wangle your way into a BSc at a second-rate institution while being right at the bottom of the 25th percentile, and ‘climate science’ also requires gullibility (which is not prevalent in the very-smart: some very smart people are naïve, but they’re not gullible).

      My ‘BOTE’ calc says that to get a First at a decent university in any discipline with a TER (or equivalent) in the top 5%, you need a reasonably high-powered brain. Something of the order of top-1%-ish (IQ of 134 or thereabouts).

      To get Hons below that (IIA, IIB, III) requires an IQ in the upper 120s; to get a pass degree requires 115-120 and the rub of the green.

      Shift all of those cutoffs down 5 for a second-rate institution.

      Add 5 points if the student can then get straight Firsts in Masters coursework, but take it back if they stay on to complete a PhD.

      I always say, in response to claims that ‘X is an idiot’ (when X is a decent graduate of a top-tier institution – IIA or better): ‘No, X is objectively not an idiot. X might be a charlatan, but that’s an entirely different thing. X is probably just responding to incentives.’

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        Mark D.

        Kratoklastes:

        I always say, in response to claims that ‘X is an idiot’ (when X is a decent graduate of a top-tier institution – IIA or better): ‘No, X is objectively not an idiot. X might be a charlatan, but that’s an entirely different thing. X is probably just responding to incentives.’

        Good summary and thank you for drilling down into the probabilities.

        As a friendly amendment to your last paragraph I would suggest that word other than “charlatan” could correctly be substituted in certain specific examples of X. Likewise, when it comes to the average propensity of “X to be more or less likely to be a charlatan or honorable or trustworthy your analysis (above) is incomplete.

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      TdeF

      Perhaps I do not understand this.

      “As scientists come from exactly the same gene pool as the rest of us, we can assume that one half of “scientists” are below the average intelligence levels of the population.”

      That doesn’t make sense? When did affirmative action for stupid people start in mathematics, physics and chemistry?

      About 10% of the population used to enter university. You had to qualify and that was difficult. Flannery did not qualify for a Science course at all.

      In the new millenium it may be 20% now with Hairdressing a university course at a technical school/polytechnic/institute of technology/university. Then of the 10%, only 10% would go into science and few hairdressers. So 1%-2% of the population. Some of these study lizards and psychology and avoid any hard sciences beyond high school. So perhaps 0.5% of all people do hard sciences at a university level.

      Why should scientists be representative of the intelligence spectrum of the human population? It does not mean they can catch a tram or make bread or speak another language or operate a VCR, but scientists should be good at science, far better than average. However they are often much closer to unemployable and practically incompetent and unworldly. If raw intelligence was directly connected to success in a meritocracy, most politicians would be out of a job.

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    Margaret Smith

    Just how are all these tourists expected to get there? Sailing ship? Pegasus?

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    thingodonta

    May I suggest that due to slightly warmer water from global warming, which corals generally love, and a very slight rise in sea level which generally aids growth and circulation, the GBR is in better shape than 20 years ago?

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    Analitik

    Anyone want to forward this news to Josh Frydenberg, Minister for the Environment?
    He still hasn’t responded at all to the 5 page letter I sent to him back in July.

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    Steve

    Presumably, those who carried out the incompetent survey are going to lose their jobs and their employer is goiung to be sued for the losses caused. No? Really?

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      Kratoklastes

      You have failed to grasp the Iron Law of Public Funding: if a publicly funded adventure fails, it means it needs more funding.

      Schools producing illiterate morons? We need to throw more tax money at the third-quartile ‘graduates’ who become schoolteachers, and the bureaucrats who oversee the entire debacle.

      Drug War producing abundant, low-cost street drugs? We need to throw more tax money at the power-hungry high-school underperformers who become rozzers (and the bureaucrats who oversee the entire debacle).

      War on Terrrrrrrrr producing more terrrrrrrr? We need to throw more tax money at the people too dumb to become rozzers, who are forced to become soldiers instead (and the bureaucrats who oversee the entire debacle).

      Never – ever – are policy decisions treated the same way as market decisions… where failure to achieve objectives results in capital destruction and the extinction of failed ideas. You know, t he winnowing-out process that has given us the most productive industrial structures in human history.

      (Caveat: if you’re a putatively-private grubby crony-fest, you can get your bad decisions underwritten by the tax base – NBN, anybody? $12,500 per household before a single byte is downloaded).

      Government Failure is a guarantee of greater budgets. I refer to it as ‘failing upwards’.

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    “We know that both sides have an interest finding a healthy or unhealthy reef”

    Not sure which is the other side? Data is the only differentiator. If data shows that the coral reefs are bleached then I will the first one to raise the alarm because I care about our environment and I don,t have to be paid to do that.

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    Fox from Melbourne

    I wonder if the people that were effected by these stories formed a class action lawsuit against them would having to face legal accountability for the damage their propaganda has done make the other activists think twice or not? Or will they just go on with the sky is fall BS.

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      KinkyKeith

      Maybe we need to fund a public benefit case on behalf of the tourism industry AND taxpayers who are being defrauded.

      I would put in $10 just to see the left squirm.

      The incorrect claims are, no doubt, easily exposed.

      KK

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    Ruairi

    Some media given the brief,
    To report on the Barrier Reef,
    Find that bleaching is harming,
    The whole Reef, most alarming,
    In line with the warmist belief.

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    Roy Hogue

    As I remember this battle over the health of the great barrier reef has been going on for a long time. What seems to be new is the escalation of the fear. They are getting more desperate to make people see it their way. Do not give in to it.

    This same tactic is going on across America too. And I wonder what will happen next, maybe more demonstrations and possible violence. Or will it settle back down a little. We live in interesting and challenging times.

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      KinkyKeith

      Roy, maybe it’s all those Bush fires over your way that is producing all that dangerous CO2 causing damage to our reefs?

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    • #

      “This same tactic is going on across America too.”

      Indeed a choice twixt ‘The Donald’, and the auf Chinese “Hitrery Crinton”. Will there still be a USA come January 20 2017?
      We have that nice Navy base in Cuba for most of washington political stripe. Time to expand the base at Rat Island, (west end Aleutian islands), for the nuevo academic political scientists still promoting CAGW. They should be impressed when the Bering Strait stays frozen over in summer! 🙂

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    Peter Davis

    During the Vietnam war, I could not understand why it was that when I got a report of an engagement direct from the battle field, and a day or two later a media report of the same engagement, the two were completely opposite. It was like there were two wars.

    When I investigated this apparent anomoly, I discovered that there are actually two forms of journalism.

    One form is the conventional journalist who fearlessly searches for and reports the truth.

    The second form is called advocacy journalism, where the journalist, or the media outlet, has a particular point of view to promote, and does so, without informing the public of this fact.

    There is no compulsion, either legal, or ethical, for the journalist or media outlet to inform the public to this effect.

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    tom0mason

    Just publish with easy to confuse words and statistics, and let the bone-heads of the news media grab the wrong end of the stick and run with it. Job done.

    But it does leave some major unanswered questions —

    I wonder if anyone actually did any testing to see what the ‘dying’ corals were suffering with.
    As it is well known that chemicals in some suncream products are toxic to coral, so too is agricultural run-off, some boat paints, untreated sewage, and other pollutants, why did they not do some elementary tests to find out?

    As these complex mix of creatures and symbiotic micro organisms that make up corals, and they are very long lived who is to say this is not a natural event. Maybe an event like this happened just before the last Maunder minimum. A part of the corals’ natural cycle as it flushes out warm climate microbes and starts to gather cooler weather symbiotics.

    Who really knows?

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    Bob Fernley-Jones

    This map of coral mortality from the GBRMPA is rather intriguing particularly around Lizard Island which was early-on reported to be a disaster area. The Island and another nearby reef are claimed to have medium mortality (10-29.9%). However, nearby there are three reefs shown with zero mortality and four at low (0.1-9.99%).

    See ABC report: Coral bleaching on Barrier Reef near Lizard Island worst in 15 years, scientists say:

    Or there is this entertaining piece that claims worst for 30 years and it even has a photo of a white sea anemone complete with anemone fish.

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    Albert

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjlIeQFxdlE&index=5&list=UUoFKzAkUApv5X8u_BbclY7w
    This 4 part short video gives the best explanation of elNino/laNina, it’s essential for a good understanding of weather in our region, why sea levels go up and down and why corals get bleached

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    • #
      Dennis

      WIND DROUGHT IN THIRD DAY – ELECTRICITY PRICES ROCKETING ACROSS AUSTRALIA – NOT NEWS
      AUGUST 24, 2016 WARWICK HUGHES 1 COMMENT
      Electricity prices at AEMO have spiked to over $250 per MWhr across Australia in the morning rush – Nemwatch shows wind through the “National Grid” (excl WA) is under 250MW. The Wind Energy site shows how this wind drought is now in its third day. None of this is news in the GreenLeft main-stream-meedja. Imagine the headlines if coal or gas fired generators were to fail like this? Write your MP’s and Senators – call for a moratorium on wind power – say you will vote to curtail the excesses of the MRET scheme and for sensible electricity prices.

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    Dennis

    Isn’t the present Great Barrier Reef the fifth regeneration?

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    pat

    it’s all propaganda:

    24 Aug: EnergyInDepth: Katie Brown, PhD: Rockefeller-Funded Prize Given to Rockefeller-Funded Writers for Advancing Rockefeller-Directed Narrative
    This week, the once respected Columbia School of Journalism has solidified its role as a shill for anti-fossil fuel interests and bestowed its John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and $5,000, on the Rockefeller-funded InsideClimate News for its #ExxonKnew series…
    For anyone who hasn’t been following this story as closely, the Columbia School of Journalism produced the #ExxonKnew pieces that appeared in the LA Times, which were notably similar to InsideClimate’s series and hit around the same time last year. That’s just the beginning though. The panel of judges includes not only a number of Columbia professors but also Bill McKibben, co-founder of the Rockefeller-funded 350.org…READ ALL
    http://energyindepth.org/national/rockefeller-funded-prize-given-to-rockefeller-funded-writers-for-advancing-rockefeller-directed-narrative/

    Soros connection as well:

    Open Society Foundations: Steve Coll, Global / Advisory Board Member
    Steve Coll is the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, and chair of the Open Society U.S. Programs board. From 2007 to 2013, he served as president of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Previously, he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post, serving as the paper’s managing editor from 1998 to 2004…READ ALL
    https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/people/steve-coll

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    Peter C

    Who Remembers this:
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/reef-whistleblower-censured-by-james-cook-university/news-story/c7aa0e0ac1c1dec1b065273d2e968f6d

    When marine scientist Peter Ridd suspected something was wrong with photographs being used to highlight the rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef, he did what good scientists are supposed to do: he sent a team to check the facts.

    After attempting to blow the whistle on what he found — healthy corals — Professor Ridd was censured by James Cook University and threatened with the sack. After a formal investigation, Professor Ridd — a renowned campaigner for quality assurance over coral research from JCU’s Marine Geophysics Laboratory — was found guilty of “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution”.

    So much for academic excellence at James Cook University!

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      PeterS

      was found guilty of “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution”.

      Well they got that right. Academic institutions these days are becoming more and more like centres of excellence for leftist propaganda BS so Peter Ridd failed to follow such academic spirit. If only there were many more like him.

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        Dennis

        You will all think like we do comrades, we believe in freedom of speech, you are of course free to repeat what we say.

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    jorgekafkazar

    It’s a bit amazing how quickly “investigative journalist” has been turned into an oxymoron.

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    DonS

    Hi Jo

    I know your not a great fan of the ABC so you might have missed the exciting story currently being run on ABC News 24, over and over again. Apparently a new ANU study has once and for all found that human emissions of CO2 have been changing the Earths climate back to the 1830s. Seems a study of things like coral, tree rings etc.(sounds somehow familiar) has shown a clear link between the industrial revolution and climate change i.e. global warming.

    How they can tell the difference between the natural warming after the little ice age and the relatively tiny human emissions at the time by looking at bits of coral is beyond me, I only studied Earth Science not climate science you see. Anyway our ty-dyed scarf wearing new age hippy climate scientist excitedly declared that this is proof that climate change has been happening even before the last 100 years. And here’s me thinking that the planetary climate was in a solid state of happiness for the 4 billion years before evil humans started to find better ways to improve their lot in life a few hundred years ago!

    I’m not sure what worries me more, the fact that they want to use this junk to set future emission targets i.e. to pre-industrial levels in line with Green ideology, or the fact that these low grade intellects are actually paid by us to teach science at universities. If I was a student of these types I think I would want my money back.

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      crakar24

      If you were a student of theirs you would be too stupid to realise you qualified for reimbursement let alone the process (what forms to fill out)of how to get it.

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      john karajas

      The thing is Don, there’s an awful lot of information in the public record that refutes the arguments of these tossers but, hey, where’s the news or entertainment value in dredging up the work of some boring old farts from before the 1970’s? After all, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute told us in 1979 that there is irrefutable proof that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are having an irreversable effect on earth’s climate and, hey, are we going to disbelieve a NASA scientist? They put men on the moon right? How can they be wrong?

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    Peter

    If they conduct a survey of 11944 coral reefs, then after discarding those with no bleaching they can find 97% of those that do have some bleaching are bleaching because of excessive warmth..

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      tom0mason

      “…some bleaching are bleaching because of excessive warmth..”

      This may or may not be, was the temperature measured at any of the bleached coral sites over an extended period to verify this claim?
      Did they test for any contaminates or pollution in the waters where bleaching was noticed — if so where are the records? In particular —
      Suncream residue.
      High nitrate from agricultural run off, or sewage spills.
      Certain types of coral toxic boat paint.
      Salinity at the coral and the immediate locality.
      ¯
      Yes some corals have bleached in some areas. Are they the same types, or related types of coral?
      Is the bleaching truly that unusual, or has it only really been noticed in the last 50 years or so. Maybe massive bleaching is a natural phenomena, one of those once every 200 year events, how can we judge?

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    pat

    not a lot of “climate” scientists among the signatories, but plenty more wanting to sign on in the comments, so expect the number to rise.

    among the “names” – Flannery, Steffen, Hoegh-Guldberg and Charlie Veron :

    25 Aug: The Conversation: Andrew Glikson: An open letter to the Prime Minister on the climate crisis, from 154 scientists
    https://theconversation.com/an-open-letter-to-the-prime-minister-on-the-climate-crisis-from-154-scientists-64357

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      john karajas

      Ah yes, Andy Glikson. On a personal level, nice guy. Amongst his peers doing research into Archaean geology at UWA in the late 1960’s: object of some rather derisory comments as to his scientific ability, afraid to say.

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    pat

    of course, Glikson & co want to kill coal, same as these letter writers yesterday!

    24 Aug: Financial Times: Pilita Clark: Biggest US pension fund calls for G20 action on climate change
    The US’s largest public pension fund has joined more than 120 investors (Investor Group on Climate Change -IGCC), with over $11tn in combined assets, to urge leaders at next week’s G20 meeting to ratify the Paris climate change agreement this year.
    The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), along with groups including Aviva Investors in the UK and Deutsche Asset Management, also want the world’s 20 major economies to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and back a doubling of global investment in clean energy…
    ***The investors’ letter was co-ordinated by several organisations in North America, Europe and other regions…
    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/16fa4efa-694f-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f.html#axzz4IIrvaz5f

    ***Pilita should surely have explained who did the co-ordinating.
    some clues below?

    24 Aug: BusinessGreen: James Murray: Top investors urge G20 nations to ratify Paris Agreement this year
    The group of institutional investors brings together the members from six of the world’s largest green investment groups: Europe’s Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC); Ceres and the North American Investor Network on Climate Risk, the Australia/New Zealand Investor Group on Climate Change, the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change, CDP and ***PRI.
    Signatories of the letter orchestrated by the group include some of the world’s largest investment firms and pension funds, including AXA, BNP Paribas Investment Partners, Church of England Pensions Board, Hermes Investment Management, HSBC Global Asset Management, New York City Comptroller, and The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust…
    She (Mindy Lubber, President of the US NGO Ceres and Director of the Investor Network on Climate Risk – INCR) added that the groups’ members were broadly supportive of the work being undertaken by the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) (set up by Mark Carney, Bank of England, chairman Michael Bloomberg), which aims to develop new guidelines for climate disclosure processes, and urged governments to properly consider the upcoming recommendations from the group.
    The latest intervention came as this week also saw the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries reportedly sign up (LINK) to an Overseas Development Institutes’ statement urging G20 governments to provide a timetable for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies…
    http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2468735/top-investors-urge-g20-nations-to-ratify-paris-agreement-this-year

    ***UN PRI: About Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)
    PRI’s MISSION:
    “We believe that an economically efficient, sustainable global financial system is a necessity for long-term value creation. Such a system will reward long-term, responsible investment and benefit the environment and society as a whole.” …
    HOW DID THE PRI START?
    In early 2005, the then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan invited a group of the world’s largest institutional investors to join a process to develop the Principles for Responsible Investment…
    The Principles were launched in April 2006 at the New York Stock Exchange. Since then the number of signatories has grown from 100 to over 1,500…
    WHAT IS THE PRI’S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNITED NATIONS?
    The United Nations (UN) has been supporting the Principles for Responsible Investment ever since their launch. The PRI has two UN partners – UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative and UN Global Compact – which play an important role in delivering the PRI’s strategy, including by holding a seat each on the PRI Board, and provide additional avenues for signatories to learn, collaborate and take action towards responsible investment…
    HOW IS THE PRI FUNDED?
    The PRI is funded primarily via an annual membership fee payable by all signatories. Additional funding comes from grants from governments, foundations and other international organisations
    https://www.unpri.org/about

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    tom0mason

    From
    http://www.reefbase.org/global_database/default.aspx?section=t4

    Bleached corals are still alive and can recover fully if the stressful conditions are not too severe or prolonged. However massive coral mortality is a feature of many severe bleaching episodes. The events of 1982/83 and 1998 in particular resulted in wide spread mortality of some coral in some areas. Following milder bleaching events, most coral recover their health, but this may take several months, and can result in lower growth and abnormal reproduction for some time after normal colour has returned.

    [my emphasis]

    Sounds to me like normal nature at work — kill off the old and sick making room for new life to start.

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      tom0mason

      From http://www.reefcheck.org.my/projects/coral-bleaching

      Bleached corals are still alive. However prolonged bleaching periods can cause the death of corals. Bleached corals, however, are dangerously weakened as they have lost their symbiotic zooxanthellae, which once provided up to 90% of their food. Bleached coral therefore rely 100% on active feeding to nourish themselves.

      Corals that survive a bleaching event involving the loss of zooxanthellae will eventually regain normal density of zooxanthellae (recoloured) when environmental conditions improve and stresses are eliminated.

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        Rereke Whakaaro

        Am I right in thinking that anti-fouling paint, so popular with boaties, is an anathema to coral?

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    pat

    note: Reuters mentions AustralianSuper is in the mix:

    24 Aug: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Investors urge G20 nations to ratify Paris climate deal this year
    A total of 130 investors, grouped in six coalitions, wrote a letter to G20 leaders and also called on them to double global investment in clean energy, develop carbon pricing and phase out fossil fuel subsidies.
    Among backers were the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, Swedish National pension funds, Aegon, ***AustralianSuper, the Church of England Pensions Board and the New York City Comptroller, it said…
    http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-g20-climatechange-funds-idUKKCN10Z0S5

    more reasons to watch your Super!

    24 Aug: Guardian: Simon Sheikh: Super funds and fossil fuels: Scott Morrison should study the facts
    Scott Morrison should know better than to chastise superannuation funds who choose to protect their members’ savings from the decline of coal and fossil fuels…
    Many financial analysts, including Citibank, Moody’s and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, have publicly declared that the writing is on the wall for the coal industry. This is not a cyclical downturn; thermal coal is in structural decline…
    Portugal achieved a stellar run of four days straight on 100% renewable energy earlier this year and achievements like this will only keep on coming…
    Chinese economic activity has now decoupled itself from electricity demand…
    As the global renewables transition gains pace, investors are increasingly talking about the growing risk of fossil fuels investments becoming stranded, or, in other words, the emergence of a carbon bubble…
    An analyst at Barclays has suggested that the fossil fuel industry risks losing up to $33tn in revenue as these reserves are forced to stay in the ground…ETC
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/24/super-funds-and-fossil-fuels-scott-morrison-should-study-the-facts

    Simon Sheikh’s “ethical” Superfund, Future Super, is only disclosed if u click on his name at the top of the article. reader sgrowe71 in the comments claims to compare Future Super’s fees with alternatives:

    Future Super: Our Story
    http://www.myfuturesuper.com.au/our_story

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    pat

    well worth a read:

    19 Aug: Daily Caller: R.J. Lehmann: The White House is using the SEC to crack down on fossil fuels
    (R.J. Lehmann is editor-in-chief, senior fellow and co-founder of the R Street Institute)
    But what’s important to bear in mind is that such things are already covered under existing disclosure requirements for “material risks.”…
    Proposed changes to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Climate Risk Disclosure Survey floated by California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones would, for instance, ask whether “the company has taken to engage key constituencies on the topic of climate change,” making implicit company’s duty to lobby lawmakers on environmental issues.
    Jones has more recently led a campaign to get all insurers doing business in the nation’s largest state to divest from coal-related stocks and bonds, including utilities, even though these represent only a tiny portion of insurers’ overall investments. Meanwhile, California Gov. Jerry Brown last year signed legislation forcing the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) to divest from coal investments. Predictably, being forced to dump the investments has caused the pension funds to lose money.
    Then we have the case of New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, an elected official who also happens to serve as administrator of the city’s $160 billion public employees’ pension funds. Stringer appears to be exactly whom Deese and Zients have in mind when they note their campaign has the support of “large institutional investors representing trillions of dollars in capital.” Stringer has in recent years used his funds’ leverage to push for proxy access – that is, the ability to run alternative slates of directors – at dozens of oil, gas, coal and utility firms. The campaign has gotten him lots of attention from pro-divestment activists, but it’s not at all clear how it serves the interests of the retirees whose pensions he has a fiduciary duty to protect…READ ALL
    http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/19/the-white-house-is-using-the-sec-to-crack-down-on-fossil-fuels/

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    pat

    jo has a new thread, but this will be more relevant here, as it’s been commented on already:

    A MUST-WATCH:

    24 Aug: Youtube: 6mins35secs: ‘Mr. Brexit’ Nigel Farage Speaks at Donald Trump Rally in Jackson, MS
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj4K9fr_WgY

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    RB.

    Apart from (as pointed out above by Thommo) bleached coral is not dead and might not die unless extreme conditions persist, it was obvious from the original announcement that they turned,from only a hand full of surveyed sites, 93% showed some bleaching into 93% was bleached. Its sort of like going to a dozen games of footy and seeing a person be racist in eleven games and then claim that 93% of footy crowds throw bananas!

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    If you suspected that reports claiming 95% of the the Great Barrier Reef had been devastated by coral bleaching was probably an exaggeration, you would have been right. If you thought this was 95% BS and that the description “reef expert” is an oxymoron, you would have been even closer to the truth.

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    Wayne

    I have heard on radio 2GB nightime in the past the tour operator at The Great Barrier Reef and he said the Great Barrier Reef is fine, nothing wrong with it, enough said.

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    EyesWideOpen

    Whoa! … look out reef divers collecting independent observational data! Y’all just swam right into a shark grotto without the correct armor.

    Whatever government agency is empowered to reauthorize your dive and tourism licenses may revoke your ‘privileges’ for upsetting the big Green Sharks who politically OWN this reef. This is like opening a bar in Chicago and expecting to take 100% of your after tax profits for yourself, and then you realize you’re in some other dogs stomping ground!

    What’s the bet that the Green police try out some stand-over tactics on these rogue divers who are arrogant enough to question the ABC and MSM green cool-aid?

    Time for an ABC story on the negative effects of allowing so many diving licenses to be issued without first ‘educating’ the management about ‘proper care for the reefs’… ‘care’ being defined as holding the appropriate left wing political persuasions so that the coral – which is telepathic – won’t be bleached by the fear induced by the presence of ‘right wing’ politics.

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    […] coral prompted claims that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef were damaged. But just two weeks ago teams of divers surveyed 300 km of the worst-hit portions of the reef and reported: Everywhere we have been we have found healthy […]

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