Next time you read that such and such a percentage of the Great Barrier Reef has already been destroyed by humankind, laugh out loud! I say that not to offend, and not because I don’t care about the corals, but because it is better to laugh than to be drawn into their madness.
According to a completely mad research paper published by John Pandolfi and ten other reef researchers – each a high-profile marine biologist including Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Research – the Great Barrier Reef was pristine before the arrival of humans. According to Pandolfi et al. published in the prestigious journal Science in 2003 (entitled ‘Global Trajectories of the Long-Term Decline of Coral Reef Ecosystems’) a rather large 25 percent of the inner Great Barrier Reef was destroyed with the arrival of Australian aborigines.
Except that when the Aborigines arrived much of the region known today as the Great Barrier Reef was open Eucalyptus woodland.
There was no Great Barrier Reef!
Back then, the Pacific Ocean began at the edge of Australia’s continental shelf that is now 100 to 200 kilometres offshore.
Sea levels began to rise some 18,000 years ago, after the arrival of the Aborigines. In fact, 100 percent of the Great Barrier Reef was formed after the arrival of humankind.
The first Australians predate the Great Barrier Reef by some 40,000 years. The first Australian walked across from New Guinea during the depth of the last ice age when there was no Great Barrier Reef. In fact, sea levels were about 120 metres lower than they are today.
It is only in the last 10,000 years, since the beginning of this geological epoch known as the Holocene, that the Great Barrier Reef has formed. It formed after sea levels rose by more than 120 metres during a period from 18,000 to 10,000 years ago when the coastline was being eroded by up to 50 metres each year.
On the subject of laughing: next time one of those expert professors in the ilk of Pandolfi or Hughes tell you to be fearful of 36 centimetres of sea level rise, remember that since the arrival of humankind in Australia some 40,000 years ago, sea levels have risen not by some few centimetres, but by around 120 metres! Oh, and all of that was before the industrial revolution that was just a couple of hundred years ago.
If there is one thing that these experts lack, especially the professors running Great Barrier Reef research, it is perspective. While they lack perspective it is the case that they are successfully drawing much of our civilization into their madness.
Just yesterday, I read that News Ltd, which publishes The Australian newspaper, has changed its editorial policy and will now, like the rest of the legacy media, be cheering madly for net zero emissions. Whatever that means. Do you know what it means? Read yesterday’s editorial in The Australian (7th September, entitled ‘National must prepare to deal with Glasgow summit’) and mention is made of Australia being ‘carbon neutral’ preferably before 2050.
I wonder if the newspaper’s editor, Michelle Gunn, has any real appreciation of what that means in practical terms. My husband is an Imperial College trained chemist, I asked him what he understood it to mean. He said it means that there is to be no additional carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by us dreadful Australians, with the potential for offset through carbon capture and so on. He doesn’t believe any of this is realistic, unless the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, bans petrol cars, stops immigration and also childbirth. Though in yesterday’s editorial mention is only made of banning coal-fired powered stations in Australia. According to the editorial, given the rules governing such things, coal-fired powered stations will still operate in China, South Africa, Indonesia, Russia and Vietnam. Coal-fired power stations will just be banned in Australia and a few other countries. Yet I’m sure the sea level rise of some 40 centimetres since the Industrial Revolution that the university professors and newspaper editors profess to be so concerned about is a global phenomenon that shows no respect for national coastlines.
To be sure, they mostly write and publish politics and madness.
There are antidotes to such madness. You could begin by cancelling your subscription to the journal Science and The Australian newspaper.
Instead, spend more time at the beach and in the ocean. Australia has a long coastline and most of us live not far from a beach – from the ocean.
I visited Lady Elliot Island at the Great Barrier Reef earlier this year with my husband, John Abbot. Scuba diving, I was unable to find any coral bleaching. Walking along the seashore with John (Abbot, not Pandolfi) I could only find evidence of sea level fall, not sea level rise. Indeed, the image featured at the top of this blog post shows John looking at a Porites sp. microatoll whose growth is constrained by sea level. The coral colony is flat topped, and dead-on top. A thin veneer of live coral grows around it’s margin and down to the sand. The live coral would thus be invisible to the surveys by Terry Hughes from 150 metres up in an airplane. (That is another mad story written up in prestigious journals and repeated in the press. It is everywhere, the madness.)
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
And Tim Flannery’s waterfront property at Broken Bay was perched high on a cliff above a freshwater creek in the bottom of a deep gorge.
Thanks Jen for the up date. Yes I will laugh and then ignore the appalling unscientific research being done by Pandolfi, Hughes & co ….
But I do wonder if the Aboriginal communities know that they are being blamed for that 25% reduction of the ( then non existent) Great Barrier Reef.
Feedback from the Aboriginal communities might straighten out their thinking.
Bill
PS I’ve stoped reading “The Australian”. Who wants to read such gloom & doom nonsense ! I suspect that Michelle Gunn might find herself unemployed if we all just stop the income stream from daily paper purchases or subscriptions
Jen,
As a once and long ago student at JCU (Bob Carter was my supervisor), I should point out that the Uni used to do some good work – well, in the Geology Dept in any case. Peter Ridd’s nephelometer studies in Cleveland Bay were world leading, and, coupled with other work, were the first real attempt at modern inshore sedimentary budgets in the GBR. There was good, original work showing ample evidence for a sea level high stand (~1.5m above current ASL) about 5.5Kbp, from oyster beds on Maggie Island (see the reference below). So, a plea to not lump all the science from JCU into with the current crop of catastrophists rubbish (though admittedly, very creative) “science”.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250082431_New_Evidence_for_the_Holocene_Sea-Level_High_from_the_Inner_Shelf_Central_Great_Barrier_Reef_Australia
I stopped buying major newspapers a long time ago.
Luckily our local twice weekly one has survived all the takeovers and that is enough.
Television and radio, (even our own local station), are just as unreliable and city centric as the papers.
I think more and more people are realising it too.
The dubious motives of the owners of these conglomerates are not the least reason for the mistrust.
Well put Jen.
I’ve had a few queries off line about the photos. They were all taken by me at Lady Elliott island on 13th May 2021. That includes the top pic of John Abbot, and the other three. 😊
Thanks for all the work you do Jennifer. I have, in the last few days, been contemplating cancelling my subscription to The Australian because its movement into green madness is becoming harder to ignore,
Thank you for the information update. Disappointing news about the editorial policy change at The Australian.
Laugh at their arrogant corruption. They know they are not telling a data based story. Yet they are laughing all the way to the bank, while their better is fired from his job for following the facts.
Funny how much attention is focused on the putative wayward sea level and precisely ZERO on the simple, inescapable fact the the “land” also moves in three dimensions, albeit usually at a slow rate on a continental scale.
So, as the Australasian plate, on which we “sail” has bee moving North-West-ish forever, we currently have NO active or even serious dormant volcanoes, just a significant bunch of extinct ones posing as “Plugs” or as crater lakes. If you live in the Norther Rivers district of NSW, you are sitting on the floor of one of the largest volcano calderas on the planet.. The place was MUCH more lively in days of yore.. As the place shoves large chunks of Indonesia out of the way, this may change as the plate wanders over the hot-spots. That should liven things up in a few dozen millennia.
There is a reason that the stand of ANTARCTIC Beech trees in Lamington National Park are fruitless and bewildered. They’ve come a LONG WAY, Baby!.
And if anyone wants to look at some other interesting sea-level changes, look around the coastal regions of South-East Asia. Specifically the Limestone Karsts around Viet Nam and Thailand Limestone towers reaching hundreds of feet above current sea level. Limestone being heavily-compressed CORAL, one has to wonder at a couple of things: What height of coral is needed to give a COMPRESSED ROCK height of hundreds of feet?
What depth of overburden would be required to provide this compression over what significant time?
Given that without light, there is no coral; what was going on with sea AND land levels for all that time?
It gets better. In North Queensland there are MARBLE quarries.
Some of the finest Italian marble is hacked out of quarries THOUSANDS of feet above sea level. It didn’t walk there. Marble is Metamorphosed Limestone; i.e., further compressed and COOKED. This means that it had to be buried deeply AND seriously baked by the big geothermal bomb many, (but not THAT many), kilometres below our feet, before being shoved up into the Italian Alps.
I’m no rock-doctor, just an old, enthusiastic amateur. There is some serious “political science” being played out with this “sea-level rise” caper..
Excellent rant, Jen! The more I read about how all of us are doomed if we don’t expel carbon from the planet the more I am convinced that the world is overrun with stupid people who are totally clueless. If they were actually able to realize their goal of zero-carbon that would end life on Earth. How ever did we get to this point, where so-called experts can opine freely on subjects they are tragically ill-informed about. The time has come to implement one of Douglas Adam’s solutions….
The Pandolfi and Gunn report is typical of third rate uninformed non-scientific garbage that is financed by a political agenda and has nothing to do with scientific research. Therefore this report can be safely binned in a rubbish skip since reliable science is based on measurable and repeatable facts which will always confirm scientific theory provided the basis for the theory is correct. The fact is that the current politically motivated climate change theory is not based on any scientifically acceptable theories which withstand proper scientific scrutiny. Mother nature will surely wreck these theories when the reality of nature comes to the fore.
Much thanks to Charles at WUWT for republishing, https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/09/08/the-madness-of-john-pandolfi-and-michelle-gunn/
Pamela: Re. the “Douglas Adams” solution:
As I recall, the “A” Ark, full of scientists, engineers, doctors, etc., got eaten by a “space monster” and the “B” Ark, full of telephone sanitizers , manicurists, personal assistants, and so on, survived.
Hence the description of certain types, particularly terminal bureaucrats, as “B Ark material”. Marginally more subtle than “Oxygen thieves”.
Be careful what you wish for, especially since Murphy was an optimist.
Great photos as usual, Jennifer. Still wish for some North arrows, though …
Michelle Gunn is obviously scientifically illiterate and mathematically innumerate, but she doesn’t care and has no intention of changing that. Our meeja (MSM) have no use for fact and logic as they have been categorised as “essential” – by politicians and bureaucrats who crave the public megaphone the MSM provide. A genuinely closed circle.
Geological time has no meaning for such people. Only a few years ago I was talking with a journo who had been on Kim Beazley’s media staff (still full of enthusiasm, he was) and inadvisedly I tried describing to him the importance of recognising through detailed mapping where in the tectonic cycle any particular rock suite is. He regarded this as some sort of parlour trick.
That homo sapiens arrived in Aus 40,000 years before the growth of the current reef is beyond their imagination.
Jennifer, do Queenslanders have a different Editor from the Opinion Editor for the NSW edition, Jennifer Campbell. The editorial of 7th September here was headed “China plays hardball on climate” and was nothing like that which you described from Michelle Gunn.
Hi Rod, I read The Australian online. There is one editorial with each edition. As explained in the above blog post I very clearly referred to the editorial of 7th September that was entitled: National must prepare to deal with Glasgow summit and can be found at this link: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/nation-must-prepare-to-deal-with-glasgow-summit/news-story/cd9a064a673471024d425fb02451350d
The new editorial policy was detailed in the Sydney Morning Herald, and is not denied by those I contacted at the Oz: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/rupert-murdoch-newspapers-24-hour-news-channel-to-champion-net-zero-emissions-20210905-p58oyx.html
Thank you for the links. It seems there are two or more editorials each day. found the second one for 7th Sept on the second page of the list of editorials. I will cancel my subscription if the management of The Australian or Fox News muzzle the people who express their scepticism, such as Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin, Cory Bernardi, and a few others. For me the climate change argument is purely political. It is coming “ready or not”. For tens of thousands of years people have adapted to it. We will again.
The madness of climate obsession seems to require an ability to ignore facts, history, science and truth.
Yet the climate obsessed see their power and influence grow….