Andrew Bolt: Great Barrier Reef scare campaign proves warmist ‘experts’ can’t be trusted

This Great Barrier Reef discovery has taught a vital lesson to trust nothing the global warming industry says about the “climate crisis”.

For decades you were told the Great Barrier Reef was dying, if not dead already. Now you know you were utterly conned.

No longer can you trust the “experts” pushing the global warming scare.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science last week admitted there’s in fact record levels of coral cover in the northern and central parts of the reef.

Yes, there was a small decline in the southern reef, but not because of global warming. There’s been an attack by crown-of-thorns starfish.

This is a massive scales-from-the-eyes moment. The “dying” Great Barrier Reef has been the biggest and oldest scare of our global warming hustlers.

Only last Wednesday, Greens leader Adam Bandt was still at it: “The Great Barrier Reef will die!”

But it’s not just him. For a quarter of a century, global warming scientists and activists had claimed global warming was destroying the reef, and doom-addicted journalists lapped it up.

In 2000, for instance, Queensland University’s Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who’s since won huge grants, claimed the reef could be dead within 50 years: “We now have more evidence that corals cannot fully recover from bleaching episodes such as the major event in 1998.”

Days ago, Greens leader Adam Bandt was claiming the Great Barrier Reef would die. Picture: Martin Ollman

The ABC, our national broadcaster, was instantly hooked. In 2002, ABC host Kerry O’Brien groaned our “once-spectacular” reef was “threatened by global warming” and “up to 10 per cent of the reef has been lost to bleaching since 1998”, turning it “bone white” – a script the national broadcaster has stuck to ever since.

In 2006, Hoegh-Guldberg amped up the scare, warning “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef could die within a month”.

In 2007, Labor leader Kevin Rudd exploited the scare in his successful campaign to become prime minister: “Climate change is a challenge for the nation. It’s a challenge for the planet, and it’s a challenge for the Great Barrier Reef.”

In 2014, Hoegh-Guldberg told the gullible Guardian Australia climate trends showed it was “game over” for the reef.

In 2016, the same institute that last week admitted the reef had record coral cover claimed half of it was dead already, and 93 per cent bleached.

In 2018, the ABC declared this damage was permanent: “Scientists say the Great Barrier Reef was forever changed by a catastrophic marine heatwave in 2016.”

A small decline on coral in the southern Great Barrier Reef was blamed on crown-of-thorns starfish.

Just last year the Australian Academy of Science published a report warning of “mass dying of corals”, blaming global warming. The Sydney Morning Herald headline blared: “Barrier Reef doomed as up to 99 per cent of coral at risk, report finds.”

But the academy’s report illustrated the dangerously incestuous world of climate catastrophists. It was written by a panel headed by Hoegh-Guldberg and including Professor Lesley Hughes, who is also on the Climate Council of warming alarmist Tim Flannery, author of another infamously dud prediction in 2007 that “even the rains that fall will not actually fill our dams and our river systems”.

Around the world, eco-catastrophists exploited this scare. US president Barack Obama in 2015 gave a speech in Queensland to embarrass then prime minister Tony Abbott into backing his climate crusade, claiming “the incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened”.

Renowned environmentalist David Attenborough claimed half the reef was dead. Flannery said “we’re heading for a future where the Great Barrier Reef is a coral graveyard”.

Scientists have revealed record levels of coral cover in the northern and central parts of the Great Barrier Reef.

The groupthink and hysteria were astonishing, and hurt Queensland’s tourism industry.

But questioning the scare was dangerous. I pointed out evidence that the reef was in good shape, bouncing back from bleaching and cyclones, yet was repeatedly attacked by the ABC’s Media Watch.

Far more serious, shameful and sinister was the ABC’s hounding of the one prominent Australian expert who correctly warned that many climate scientists exaggerated the reef threat.

Peter Ridd was head of James Cook University’s physics department and Marine Geophysical Laboratory, yet Media Watch pilloried him as some crank and quoted a scientist sneering that Ridd’s warnings were like “the tobacco industry strategy defending smoking”.

Worse, James Cook University – in one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our universities – sacked Ridd for criticising his colleagues’ exaggerations.

Yet now we know Ridd was right. Most of the “dying” reef has record coral cover. The global warming “experts”, politicians and journalists were wrong, yet the only person to lose their job is the man who told the truth.

So last week’s news teaches a vital lesson: trust nothing the global warming industry says about the “climate crisis”.