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Comment by starkd | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? He is refuting the doomsday claims that the entire reef was dead. He is pointing to its regenerative capacity after mass bleaching events. He never claimed it had completely recovered.

But crying "its the end of the world" is also an outrageous claim used by the modern left to generate attention and raise funding.

From the Australian Institute for Marine Science: https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...

A couple of points:

-Over the past 36 years of monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), coral reefs in the GBR have shown an ability to begin recovery after disturbances.

-In 2022, widespread recovery has led to the highest coral cover recorded by the LTMP in the Northern and Central GBR, largely due to increases in the fast-growing Acropora corals, which are the dominant group of corals on the GBR and have been largely responsible previous changes in hard coral cover.

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One crying-wolf person? That's "the environmentalists"?

The data (not hyperbole) was that the reef was in trouble and in decline. It continues to be in trouble and in decline.

"Begin recovering after disturbances" is double-talk for "continues it's alarming decline." A bit of coral growing over the sterile corpses of hundreds of miles of dead reef is maybe romantic and hopeful. But not anything to justify the "recovery" word. Mocking science for a sound-byte by one academic is corrosive nonsense.

"The article titled "How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?" discusses the misreporting of the state of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) by environmental activists and media outlets. The article argues that the GBR is not, in fact, dead, as was claimed in a widely circulated obituary in 2016, but rather is still alive and thriving.

The article suggests that the doom-mongering around the GBR is driven by a desire to generate fear and promote political agendas, rather than an accurate portrayal of the state of the reef. It also notes that there are many other threats to the GBR, such as overfishing and pollution, which are often overlooked in the focus on climate change."

I asked chatgpt to summarise in two paragraphs, since it's at least not a climate doomster. "Alive and thriving" seems a strange conclusion from recent events, given that its health assessment was downgraded to very poor.

> "Alive and thriving" seems a strange conclusion from recent events, given that its health assessment was downgraded to very poor

The problem is it was downgraded by the same academics who

a. clearly don't understand the reef lifecycle

b. have been predicting that the entire reef will die completely, for decades

c. financially benefit from doing so

In 2019 they were saying the reefs would take 10 years to fully grow back and might never do so, in 2022 suddenly it's grown back completely and then got even bigger.

The problem here is inherent to academia. Scientists are funded via short term grants. If you can gather all the data you need within the scope of those grants by asking grad students to tick some boxes then fine, but to be able to understand the lifecycle of huge natural systems that have been around for millions of years you apparently need more data than what they have. But if you need to collect data for 100 years before you have sufficient data to make predictions, how do you get so many grants without papers to show for it? Would it even be funded at all if not for the predictions of doom? The only field that seems to have found solutions to this is high energy physics.

That seems to be a fantasy based on the evidence. "Very poor" and continuing large areas of sterile reef are nothing like "grown back completely".

Strange how I suspected I was reading something from ChatGPT before I got to your last sentence. I think maybe we're already starting to rely on ChatGPT as an authority way too soon.

Yes, well, I think it is for some things. It's really good at summarising, for example.

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