We heard about the sixth mass bleaching in March 2022 and as usual, it was non-stop doom and gloom from the popular press. Here’s what the Guardian was shouting at the time:
Aerial surveys show almost no reefs across a 1,200km stretch escaping the heat, prompting scientists to call for urgent action on climate crisis
The confirmation from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) marks an alarming milestone for the ocean icon, with 2022 going down as the first time mass bleaching has happened in a cooler La Niña year which scientists had hoped would be a period of recovery for corals.
Government scientists said the confirmation showed the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions that were driving the repeated mass bleachings.
As it happens, at the same time as this alleged climate crisis induced coral reef destroying bleaching event was taking place, surveys were recording record coral reef cover right across the GBR. Those surveys ended in May 2022. We didn’t get to hear about that of course. It took until August for the Guardian and other papers to report the truth through gritted teeth - the reef was not dead, in fact it was in the best health it has been in for decades. How is this even possible? In the midst of a sixth mass bleaching event, the first such in a La Nina year supposedly, coral reef cover was at a record high! The answer is that bleached corals are not dead corals and they generally recover very quickly from periods of bleaching. This is not the doom-laden narrative we’ve been spun from climate alarmists for decades, who have used the GBR as the poster boy for their alleged man-made Thermageddon - along with polar bears, that is.
Here’s what the New ‘Scientist’ was reporting on March 25th this year:
Unusually warm ocean temperatures have turned corals white on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in the first-ever mass bleaching under the cooling conditions created by the La Niña weather pattern.
An official analysis of aerial surveys published today finds mass bleaching across all four of the reef’s management areas, with the north and central parts of the World Heritage Site worst hit. The impact has been less severe in the south of the reef.
“What we’re seeing at the Great Barrier Reef is very worrying,” says Miriam Reverter at the University of Plymouth in the UK.
Warmer oceans under climate change have led to an increase in mass bleaching events at the world’s largest reef: this is the sixth since modern records began in 1988, and the fourth in just seven years. Ocean temperatures at the reef during March have been between 0.5°C and 2°C above average in most places, and up to 4°C higher in some spots. Normally, the water would be expected to start getting cooler in March.
The bleaching is particularly notable for happening when the region is in a cooling phase brought about by La Niña. The worst mass bleaching event happened in 2016, the planet’s hottest year on record, when an El Niño warming phase was in effect.
Terry Hughes at James Cook University in Australia tweeted that the latest mass bleaching was “a grim milestone during what should have been a cooler (La Niña) summer”.
Reverter says the milestone means there is increasingly little respite for coral. “Coral reef scientists were thinking there would be some years when coral reefs could recover,” she says. “We thought it [La Niña] could be a safe period. Turns out it’s not.”
Hughes’ ‘grim milestone’ has turned into a good news story just a few short months later! Apparently, just like Mark Twain, reports of the death of the GBR were greatly exaggerated. To be fair, NS did include this weasel-worded caveat:
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which conducted the surveys using helicopters and small planes over the past week, said on its website that the bleached coral could still recover if the waters cool, as happened in 2020 when there was relatively little coral die-off despite the most widespread bleaching ever.
They also reported the following:
UNESCO, which awarded the reef World Heritage status, last year stopped short of placing the natural wonder on a list of sites in danger because of the impacts of climate change, after lobbying by the Australian government. Hughes and other researchers have said the decision was denying the scientific evidence.
Well done UNESCO for resisting lobbying by the Aussie government, who would have looked pretty stupid at this particular point in time - well, more stupid than they already look. Hughes does look stupid and he has form as an unapologetic coral reef alarmist whose approach to doing science borders on academic fraud. I referenced his then latest alarmist study - Spatial and temporal patterns of mass bleaching of corals in the Anthropocene - in my article above, written in 2018 at Cliscep.com. Here is what the abstract of the paper says:
Tropical reef systems are transitioning to a new era in which the interval between recurrent bouts of coral bleaching is too short for a full recovery of mature assemblages. We analyzed bleaching records at 100 globally distributed reef locations from 1980 to 2016. The median return time between pairs of severe bleaching events has diminished steadily since 1980 and is now only 6 years. As global warming has progressed, tropical sea surface temperatures are warmer now during current La Niña conditions than they were during El Niño events three decades ago. Consequently, as we transition to the Anthropocene, coral bleaching is occurring more frequently in all El Niño–Southern Oscillation phases, increasing the likelihood of annual bleaching in the coming decades.
Here is what I said at the time:
So, they took their data from the 1980s onwards and claim that before then coral bleaching events were localised only, not global. I don’t know if there was any consistent worldwide monitoring of the state of coral reefs prior to 1980, but here’s a thing. El Nino and La Nina instrumental records only go back to 1950. Guess what? There have only been three recorded “very strong” or super El Nino events since 1950 – all after 1980, namely 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2014-16.
Which means that the authors of this study have (cherry?) picked a period in history where very strong El Ninos have been unique and frequent and by no means at all can this fact be unequivocally attributed to climate change. Indeed, it is more likely to be related to the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976, whose cause is still something of a mystery. Which means that the global mass bleaching events which the authors identify and which Hughes tells us were “unheard of” before 1980 might be rather more related to super El Ninos than actual generalised warming of the oceans. If so, GHG warming, even supposing it is the main contributor to the rise in tropical ocean temperatures since 1980 (very debatable) is not the principal cause of widespread coral bleaching events; El Ninos are and these events are naturally caused and have been ongoing for centuries.
In addition to the very strong El Nino events above, there were also strong El Ninos in 1987-88 and 1991-92, so it’s been quite a rollercoaster for El Nino since 1980 and this is almost certainly why mass coral bleaching events have occurred so frequently, not just on the GBR, but globally; not warming oceans supposedly affected by man-made climate change. In fact, as pointed out by Paul Matthews at the time, Hughes et al’s own paper proves that the incidence of mass bleaching events is totally uncorrelated with rising ocean temperatures:
Tucked away towards the end of the paper is this:
“We tested the hypothesis that the number of bleaching events that have occurred so far at each location is positively related to the level of post industrial warming of sea surface temperatures that has been experienced there (fig. S4). However, we found no significant relationship for any of the four geographic regions, consistent with each bleaching event being caused by a short-lived episode of extreme heat (12, 19, 20) that is superimposed on much smaller long-term warming trends. Hence, the long-term predictions of future average warming of sea surface temperatures (13) are also unlikely to provide an accurate projection of bleaching risk or the location of spatial refuges over the next century.”
So this brings us back to the present. Despite reports of a sixth mass bleaching event earlier in the year, we now learn that the GBR is in rude health, covered with the most coral it has seen since reporting began in the 1980s. ‘Coincidentally’, we are in the midst of a rare ‘triple dip La Nina’ event that’s been running almost continuously since September 2020 and may well extend into 2023.
The UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said there was a 70 percent chance that the protracted La Nina event—which has held the globe in its clutches almost uninterrupted since September 2020—will continue until at least August.
"Some long-lead predictions even suggest that it might persist into 2023," it said in a statement.
If it does, this would be only the third so-called triple-dip La Nina—meaning the phenomenon is present during three consecutive northern hemisphere winters—on record since 1950, WMO said.
Here are the main findings of the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s Annual Report 2021/22:
As you can see, probably out of acute embarrassment, they try to temper the good news with warnings of future vulnerability, but the fact is, the GBR is covered with basically the same amount of hard coral that it enjoyed in the early 1980s, before the long run of consecutive powerful El Ninos. It’s not dead. It’s very much alive and thriving. They told us on numerous occasions that it was dying and would soon be an underwater wasteland because of climate change. They told us all corals were in danger of extinction. They were wrong.
Well done and thank you