By Jo Nova
The biggest and best studied reef in the world is looking good
Despite record high emissions of carbon dioxide, and hottest ever temperatures, the Great Barrier Reef was again enjoying one of its best years yet. In the 40 years that AIMS has been studying it, the last four years are great results.
Judging by the data, corals are coping fine with today’s heat and CO2. But the more money we spend finding a climate crisis, the worse our science institutions get. One-sided money and monopoly science can turn any institute into a tax-grabbing-machine, that serves the Blob, not the people. Thus is it so.
The AIMS annual reef survey for 2025, tells us that the Great Barrier Reef had suffered “a sharp decline after a record breaking heatwave “. Worse, mass coral bleaching is becoming more frequent as the world warms, and the time between events is shrinking, giving corals less time to recover.
So Peter Ridd took the same data and did the graph that AIMS, with $90 million in taxpayer dollars, couldn’t do, so we can all appreciate the full disaster. And here it is:
AIMS also tells us that the “reef is more volatile”, and has suffered the tragedy of declining from record highs all the way back to “near long term average trends”, which sounds awful, I mean, “normal”. Like regression to the mean. Though it doesn’t look very “average” in the long term graph that AIMS don’t want you to see.
The Blob Media promptly took the one-sided, politically-convenient AIMS press release, investigated no claims, asked no hard questions and churned out the worst possible interpretation of a good result. Which is apparently exactly what AIMS expected, because they didn’t complain.
The ABC, with a billion dollar budget, could have done the graph Peter Ridd did. They could have asked AIMS for it. Heck, they could have just phoned Peter, he would have given it to them, and with a smile. Instead they pressed the “Climate Alarm: Give us Your Money” button.
The ABC | The BBC | The Guardian
It’s clear that The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) is not even trying to give Australians the most meaningful information they can on the reef. When the media exaggerates the crisis, the experts are happy. AIMS don’t ring up the journalists and correct them. They don’t explain the bigger perspective.
AIMS researchers surely know, but won’t mention things like the extraordinary genetic adaptability of reefs: corals already have the genes to survive another 250 years of climate change. They can use epigenetic tricks to adapt to warmer and “more acidic” water and that the Great Barrier Reef has 112 protected tough spots that survive and replenish after the bleaching.
Corals got bleached way back in 1862, before the first coal plant, and long before the Ford Model T. Most likely corals have been bleached on and off for millions of years, it’s just that there were not many scuba divers around to take a photo or collect an ARC grant in 2 million BC.
After millions of years of asteroids, volcanoes, wild temperature changes and dramatic shifts in atmospheric gases, (plus sea level swings of 125m) it would be a shock if corals did not have a full toolkit to cope with a bit of climate change.
REFERENCES
The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) annual reef survey
Peter Ridd, Reef Rebels
God save us from green scientists.
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I doubt he is in charge of them; rather another figure.
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How dare you question ‘the science’!!!!
Don’t you know that science is all about not questioning the established consensus and accepting received wisdom as the gospel truth?
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I’m seeing AI image of AIMs and others tipping garbage info into a chute leading to a machine that spits out even worse garbage from orifices labelled ABC, Gaurdian, SMH which spill onto the masses.
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I saw the headlines on the news re the “devestation” that has occurred to the Great Barrier Reef this year. I immediately thought that this was going to be another rant about gerbil warming….and I was correct again.
The credibility of any/all claims concerning “climate change” should be treated with the same skepticism that you would have with anything that a pollitician promises.
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Great article Jo, with an appropriate amount of cynicism. The latter is always needed when discussing anything climatological – which is never logical anyway.
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The GBR also survived the 8 c much warmer Eemian interglacial and our earlier warmer Holocene optimum, so what’s the problem today?
And we know the MSM + blob + pollies etc are just lazy and stupid, so what else is new?
IOW lazy and stupid donkeys have so far won the day(s) and we can only hope that some day the majority start to wake up. Who knows when that’s likely to come about?
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The majority voted for the ALP, Greens and Teals. That should tell how smart the majority is. Then agin the majority may have just been voting themselves a few extra bucks to put their ignorant children into the nearest propaganda academy. Either way the corrupt scientists in Academia will continue to grow fat on fraud.
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Please read the AIMS Report. The Great Barrier Reef is not healthy, pioneer species grow but then get beaten back again by bleaching events. The GBR is in a far more volatile state than it has been in the past.
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The GBR is more resilient than you imagine, with cyclones and crown of thorn starfish to contend with, it has returned to average.
https://gcrmn.net/2025/08/06/gbr-monitoring-2024/
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Sorry everyone.
My uptick was a function of my fat, aging fingers.
I intended to downtick Simon and couldn’t correct it!
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Bleaching events is a part of the great barrier reef history that goes back into the distant past thus not surprising when they occur today.
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Utter ignorance. Do your pitiful brain a favour and stop watching the ABC
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Does Peter Ridd make any calculations regarding biodiversity and evolutionary potential?
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Does Gee Aye make any calculations regarding actual history or actual science?
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History or historic data? Yes.
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Please show your working.
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Show us your data!
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Hysterical
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Nah, hystorical! If you are a releaf teacher in the business of supposedly fact-checking other commenters by way of posing questions that you answer yourself…well l guess made up words fit the bill (SIC).
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Peter Ridd in The Australian
Regarding biodiversity —
1. We’re still waiting for you to find any reference with observations that show man-made emissions have a causal effect on the climate and this is not just another normal natural shift. Don’t hold back with those references, OK?
2. Biodiversity is usually reduced in stable unchanging conditions and increased with moderate environmental “volatility”.
3. Corals have survived hundreds of millions of years of climate change. Before you say “man made climate change is faster” say asteroids and volcanoes. Corals survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs. They survived the Permian Triassic extinction that wiped out 90% of marine species. They are among the toughest things on Earth.
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The biodiversity of the GBR is sound and its been around for 8000 years.
During the Holocene Thermal Maximum the waters surrounding the GBR would have been warmer than now, so I reckon coral can recover from a marine heatwave.
Of course quantum AI could resolve the issue, but in the meantime some sleuthing is required.
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thanks for your data driven response. I’ll check those references later.
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Chill with the snark. We’re still waiting for you to provide references for your faith in the power of beefsteak and car exhaust to shift jet streams and ocean currents. It’s been 14 years…
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A lesson in paleoclimate history, in the beginning dirty water was the problem.
https://news.uq.edu.au/2022-05-30-8000-years-great-barrier-reef-climate-history-revealed
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Going back a little further we find the Younger Dryas, a return to full glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere 12,900 – 11,700 BP. It was a bipolar seesaw and the GBR SST was similar to our modern climate optimum.
‘Near-modern sea surface temperatures were reached during the Younger Dryas Chronozone on the Great Barrier Reef.’ (Brenner et al 2020)
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Your replies to me suggest you have no idea what biodiversity is.
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We are all at the mercy of climate change and the GBR is resilient.
https://www2.gbrmpa.gov.au/learn/biodiversity
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Biodiversity. Is that when hiring is based on race, or when folk get gender confusion?
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When are YOU going to post a cogent argument, all you have are empty one liner posts that says nothing useful.
Allegedly you have a science background but fails to make a learned set of commentary here, is it laziness or what…….
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A hollow vessel I think one of the general issue from our end Uni’s
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As the YD came to an end there would have been a rise in sea level, but eventually it stabilised. In this abstract we can see how coral adapts to survive.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379124001379?utm_source=miragenews&utm_medium=miragenews&utm_campaign=news
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The Holocene Thermal Max came earlier than we previously thought, also cool waters would have required adaptation.
‘ … cooler water temperatures with reduced seasonal amplitude at ~5.2 ka (2.76–1.31°C cooler than present) and ~7 ka (1.26°C cooler than present) at Heron Reef. These results contrast the previous suggestion of a mid-Holocene Thermal Maximum in the central GBR around 5.35 ka and 4.48 ka, yet may be explained by differences in temperature of the shallow ponded reef flat (central GBR) and the deeper reef slope waters (this study) and potential large reservoir correction errors associated with early radiocarbon dates.
‘Combining coral-based water temperature anomaly reconstructions from the tropical and subtropical western Pacific indicates a coherent temperature response across the meridional gradient from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea down to the southern GBR. This similarity in reconstructed temperature anomalies suggests a high probability of an earlier expression of a mid-Holocene Thermal Maximum on the GBR between ~6.8 and 6.0 ka.’ (Sadler et al 2016)
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By not defining ‘normalised coral cover’ in the Reef Rebels/Ridd explanation, you can make up any graph you want. For example, the coverage around Dunk Island has declined since 1985, but if you cherry pick, you can get a graph that matches the Reef Rebels fantasy
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Don’t look now Peter, but you’re cherry picking.
Dunk Island is in the Central Reef area. AIMS “Executive Summary” dot point for the Central reef states:
That means, despite the recent decrease (and despite Dunk Island having declined since 1985 in your comment), the Central reef is still a massive 44.4% above it’s long-term average. But let’s “cherry pick” Dunk Island to try and say the trend is false.
For previous editions of the graph, Ridd has stated it is the AIMS data for the three reef zones combined into one for the whole reef. My guess is that is what “normalised” means.
Maybe you can eyeball the three AIMS graphs and see if the single graph looks about right. Or maybe you can seek out his definition of normalised. Instead of just throwing out an accusation.
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So Peter, when you single out one island, that’s fine, but when we average the whole reef that’s cherry picking?
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from the evidence you presented, it is the only explanation, the entire souther section of the reef has less cover now than in 1985, and that is in the AIMS statistics.
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The AIMS statistics show the Southern Reef is below the 1985 level, and below the long term average.
The AIMS statistics show the Northern Reef and Central Reef are both above the 1985 level and both above their long term averages.
If you’re suggesting Ridd is cherry picking because two out of three Reef zones have increased, and the nett result of all zones is an increase, then you’re not being honest.
BTW, the AIMS report states that most of the bleaching is confined to the Northern Reef. That the Southern Reef is affected by a few factors, including quite a starfish outbreak and cyclone activity.
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The southern section is impacted by cool upwelling, which has put a dampener on growth?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-11-30/hopes-barrier-reef-could-endure-high-temperatures/104660482
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Study in Germany a few years ago.
The less you knew about science in general and climatology in particular the more you were freaked out about global warming/climate change.
That’s the nice way to put it. The other way is the dumber you are the easier you will believe Leftist kangaroo [snip].
Do you guys in OZ use that term?
.
[No. We use “Bull” rather than “Kangaroo”. – Raquel]
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Bulldust is often our euphemism for bull[snip]. Kangaroo dust isn’t as catchy but could be an option that avoids moderation…
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We all know what happens to truth tellers.
See Galileo for details.
👩⚖️💀
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What everyone seems to forget or quietly ignore is that the reef had to re-establish itself after thousands of years at 100metres or more above sea level. That alone should prove the resilience of corals to massive changes in climate and in particular sea levels. As Geologists we were all taught that corals were an accurate gauge as to sea temperatures and depths of the ancient seas that they thrived in. As plate tectonics shifted our continents around and drove the former Coral beds up into the formations we record in the Alps and along continental margins, these became the limestone formations within our geological history.
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The sea bed is recolinised by the critters flowing in on the currents. Nothing in the new reef is derived from the corals that were exposed after sea levels dropped. They are dead. It is a new reef, not a continuation of the old one.
So the reef completely died in this circumstance – hardly “resilient”.
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Quite resilient.
‘With the melting of the ice sheets, sea-level rose from -125 m to reach present levels around 7,500 years ago. This coincides with when most of the coral reefs of the middle and inner shelf began growing about 7,000 years ago.
‘Coral reef accretion – their growth vertically and laterally – peaked 5,000–6,000 years ago before slowing around 4,000 years ago as most reefs reached sea level and sea levels fell by around 1 m. To put it simply, coral reefs grew quickly to use the best space available and then accretion rates have slowed or even ceased at some sites.’ (Dr Stephen Lewis 2016)
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I meant resilient as a species Gee- not that particular reef – all reefs are built on the foundations of old dead ones – don’t misinterpret for you own ends
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How could you possibly know that?!
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Yesterday Sky New’s Chris Kenny told us the true facts about the GBR.
He included that clueless yap from the Obama loony and the recent factual data from Dr Peter Ridd.
Thanks again to Jo Nova detailing the factual data and the graph of the GBR over the last 40 years.
Here’s Chris Kenny’s report…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdsuCO7jwiY
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The climate whingers can’t growl about the human induced extra CO2 in the atmosphere and forget that it increases the Partial Pressure of CO2 in the oceans which via the process of Equilibrium is taken up by corals for extra growth.
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A Massive Fraud Ring Is Publishing Thousands of Fake Studies and the Problem is Exploding.
“These Networks Are Essentially Criminal Organizations”
Organized misconduct is rapidly poisoning the global scientific record.
by Tibi Puiu August 6, 2025
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-massive-fraud-ring-is-publishing-thousands-of-fake-studies-and-the-problem-is-exploding-these-networks-are-essentially-criminal-organizations/
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Warmer and more acidic? That’s a lie!
No ocean is acidic! All are alkaline. Even acidifying is absurd as it has the pH of tap water and slightly more neutral.
And the North South reef spans 2000km so it is generally 3C different from top to bottom.
How does it behave as a single organism when it is the size of Germany and 250km wide?
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The survey results from AIMS annual checks are very misleading. As for as I know, it is carried out by dragging a scuba diver over the reefs behind a boat while he makes a visual assessment (guess) as to the coral cover. This means that the sides of the reefs, going down well into the deeps and host to vibrant long lived corals are missed. According to Jennifer Marohasy, these reef perimeters are where the majority of the older corals, often unaffected by surface storms and low tide bleaching, live. I have no idea what proportion of the total coral populations these corals constitute, but it would have to be significant. Only assessing the highly sensitive surface corals which are significantly affected by bleaching and storms, does not give a true evaluation of the extent of corals on the reef.
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Peter, I can see Jen’s point, but the AIMS work is the best data and longest study anyone has on the biggest reef in the world. It’s still worth discussing, and as I pointed out, still shows the pathetic self-serving bias of AIMS and the media.
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Reef decline at worst rates in some areas
Program:
Wed 6 Aug 2025 at 6:00am ABC AM
Report confirms further bleaching of Great Barrier Reef
The health report card for the Great Barrier Reef is not looking good, with researchers from several key agencies confirming the reef has experienced its sixth widespread coral bleaching event in nine years. The latest summer snapshot produced by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority ABC 25/4
Record coral recovery seen in parts of Great Barrier Reef
Marine scientists say they need more data before determining if the health of the Great Barrier Reef is improving, with recent surveys finding the amount of coral across the reef’s three regions has increased.
7 Aug 20247 August 2024ABC News
cognitive dissonance????
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That’s an example of very localized Climate Change on parts of the reef. It can happen to your neighbour or in a gully in Texas or a river gorge in Germany or just a single house at the beach.
Climate Change is cunning and can strike without warning.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
A medieval horror story, like Climate Change as retold by Lewis Carroll.
So you must buy Gillard Carbon Credits to protect the country from the ravages of Climate Change. She who would not have a Carbon Tax in government, she lied. Gillard in Wonderland. How many people even know Gillard Carbon Credits are the basis of the Safeguard Mechanism, a 35% tax on CO2, soon to apply to everyone but doubled and buried in the bills you pay. Everything really.
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These new style taxes are designed to be hidden from public view, not accountable to parliament in an alleged democracy. And the media and politicians are silent. I do not see how they can be ignorant. After all they are saving the Great Barrier reef, a job given to us by the UN at our own great cost. And it’s only in such great shape because of the $444million + $140Million tax given to Lucy Turnbull by her husband, the Prime Minister. Without even having to ask for the money. Some men are just so generous.
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The good health and continuance of the funding of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is entirely dependent on the severity of the decline of the health of the Reef as described by the aforementioned “Authority”
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There was a discussion this week by Russian supporting commentators about why the Russians allowed the US to get away with all the lies they print about the Russians.
In contrast, the Russians don’t fabricate lies, instead they are economical with the truth … quite literally. Because they always tell the truth (at least as far as I can verify), but they do not tell the whole truth, so they do not comment on what they do not want their listeners to hear.
And, it has been interesting watching how the two strategies work out. The US … like the hare … rushes ahead dolloping its very distorted version of events. And, then some time later the Russians come out with their truthful, boring facts … omitting any they don’t want to highlight.
The US, UK and I presume Australian media obviously love the lies pushed out by the US. And, they ignore the truth from the Russians. So, it appears the Russians have lost. But, slowly slowly people get bored of the lies, as they get ever more incredulous against the facts which eventually leak out. And, the final result is that the Russians end up being the news source that people trust and the western media are the ones that no-one trusts.
And, what is the western media’s response … to double the lies. Whilst the Russian tortoise just plods on boringly telling the truth … but not the whole truth.
CLIMATE
So, perhaps telling the boring truth works. Because whilst it might appear to be a disaster as the press just love printing the climate doomsayer cult lies … the public have grown tired of them. And, they now have no way back. Because if they did tell the truth, no one would believe them, and if they do just escalate the lies, still no one believes them.
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It’s interesting that when you compare the multitude of climate models, the most accurate ( least wrong) is the Russian one. Keep being a cynic Scot , there’s plenty of opportunities out there.
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JCU surfacing in an item made me think of a recent furore about a student passing his medical degree with a simewhat coloful track record. I searched “JCU latest scandal” and my goodness quite a litany of escapades popped up. Quite a place is JCU.
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Congratulation Jo for the fight against this BS climate change con and thanks for all the hard work that comes with it. I do have a problem with your terminology though: “…to adapt to warmer and “more acidic” water…”. The ocean waters are not acidic. They are alkaline, therefore “less alkaline” would have been the proper term to use. The warmist wackos are sneaking this term “acidic” into the conversation to scare public into believing, that situation is dire. So do please avoid using this term.
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Thanks, I used the quote marks to show it’s fake. Sometimes we have to speak their lingo (as cheating as it is) to explain why something is wrong, and also, in headlines because not many people are searching for “less alkaline oceans”.
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