“We should be more optimistic about the fate of the Barrier Reef.”

In my last Great Barrier Reef review that I wrote, there was a factual error – I misspelled Peter Reed to Rudd instead – I apologize for that. Dr. Peter Reed is a marine physicist with over 100 publications and 35 years of experience working with coral reefs.

Last year, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee decided not to officially declare the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in danger. The Great Barrier Reef has been around for more than 600 million years and has been constantly exposed to the forces of weather without us humans doing anything about it. It shows that we should be more optimistic about the fate of corals – just as pioneering scientists discovered that corals were being eroded by coral-eating starfish in the 1960s.

The data also shows that hurricanes are the main cause of temporary reef loss and that bleaching events are relatively small because corals in the shallow parts of the reef are affected by sunlight – not carbon dioxide. The biggest catastrophic event was Hurricane Hamish that hit the southern and central reefs in 2009, and the waves it created destroyed up to 75 percent of the reefs in its path. But today’s reefs are doing better than ever – despite what all the climate-worried broadcasters say – and despite what much is said, hurricanes haven’t gotten more and more bad in the last century – climate data hides nothing…

Per Johansson