In the last few weeks various media have reported that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR), the world’s largest coral reef system, is experiencing a “sixth mass bleaching” that threatens lasting devastation. NPR, CNN, and The Guardian, with many others, all told essentially the same story.

But actual experts on the GBR challenge the narrative.

In Quadrant Online marine biologist and reef specialist Leonard Starck writes:

Contrary to the incessant bleating of office-based Great Barrier Reef “experts” (who visit the Reef a couple of weeks in a year), the reported incidents of coral bleaching are nothing new, unusual or threatening. They are common natural event[s] no more threatening than trees shedding their leaves with the changing seasons, or occasionally in response to a dry spell.

He continues with 11 points that explain the natural, cyclical process of coral bleaching and recovery. He then concludes:

That we have only recently become aware of such things as bleaching events, mass spawnings, population blooms, and internal waves bringing surges of cold, deep, nutrient-rich water onto steep outer reefs is not because these are unprecedented. The discovery in the past few decades of hundreds of species of reef creatures that were new to science is likewise not because they did not exist for eons before.  This is all simply a reflection of the still very limited level of our experience and understanding of these richest of all communities of life.

The GBR is not dying or even threatened.  Over its vastness, across its wide range of conditions and habitats, and amidst its endless diversity of dynamic interactions there are always times and places of detriment and decline along with a prevailing condition of luxuriant natural beauty and flourishing life. 

We see what we look for and look for what we wish to find.  Most visitors to the Reef find an overwhelming experience of natural beauty and flourishing life.  For a small, but noisy, minority of activists, academics, bureaucrats, and the legions of the righteous, threats to the Reef bestow a cornucopia of attention, funding and self-importance, along with a delicious sense of moral superiority.  They, too, see what they want to see.

Finding, promoting, investigating and pretending to “save” the Reef has become an attractive industry offering a permanent full-time, all-expense-paid Barrier Reef holidays with very modest duties, excellent job security and pension benefits.  There is now a whole  generation of Reef salvationists whose entire experience of the Reef has been focused on threats, leading them to perceive every fluctuation of nature as evidence of their fears. Although they profess to be terribly concerned about the threats, they take no hopeful interest in evidence that things are not  as persist in claiming. Their angry rejection of any suggestion that optimism is justified makes it appear the true commitment is more to hyping “threats” than it is to the Reef itself.

Jennifer Marohasy also rebuts the current claims of GBR bleaching devastation here and here on her blog. In both she includes beautiful photographs of the colorful reef as she saw it in her own recent dive trip.

Coral bleaching may in some instances be connected with global anthropogenic climate change. Sometimes it’s also driven partly by local pollution. But overwhelmingly it is a natural, recurring process from which corals almost always recover quite fully, usually within weeks. It is not evidence of devastating manmade global warming, despite common claims to the contrary.