Warming Gives Us MORE Reefs !

The notion that warming seas were bad for corals always seemed implausible to me, especially since I know that coral reefs have been around for at least 440,000 years and survived through the most hot and cold conditions the earth experienced. Yet our local scaremongers kept pushing the line that global warming would kill Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

This gigantic underwater edifice extends over 2000 kilometres along the coast of Queensland. It is the world's largest coral reef ecosystem consisting of more than 3000 individual reef structures many of which have become islands that support more than 200 species of birds. The amount of fish species is just staggering to comprehend.

Never once consulting Australia's own top FOUR climate scientists, Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and William Kininmonth, about their anti-warmist stance, Julia Gillard has her climate-advisor, Will Steffen, warning us that nothing short of securing an effective global agreement to tackle climate change can save the reef. He quotes one of the world's leading reef scientists, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, saying that Australia will be left with "a great weedy reef" unless the world cuts emissions. Another scientist went even further, Professor Terry Hughes, from a nest of warmists at James Cook University, said nations needed to cut carbon emissions to 90% by 2050 to save the reef. That's right, everybody gets to live in the Middle Ages just to keep the weeds out of the reef. Unrealistic dumb bastards!

Hoegh-Guldberg's past predictions make me doubt his latest. In the 1998, he warned that the reef was under pressure from global warming and much of it had turned white. He later admitted the reef had made a "surprising" recovery. In 1999, he claimed global warming would cause mass bleaching of the reef from 2010 onwards. Last week he admitted...it hadn't. In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant "between 30-40% of coral on the Great Barrier Reef could die within a month." He later admitted this dying had a "minimal impact."

And now the latest research from Japan, from its National Institute for Environmental Studies and published in Geophysical Research Letters. shows that warmer seas indeed help reefs, not hurt them: Rising temperatures caused by climatic warming will cause a poleward range shift and/or expansions in species distribution. We found the first large-scale evidence of poleward range expansion of corals based on 80 years of national records in many areas around Japan, where century-long measurements of in situ sea-surface temperatures have shown significant rises of coral growth. Four major coral species, including two key species for reef formation in tropical areas, showed poleward range expansions, whereas no species demonstrated any range shrinkage or local extinction. The speed of these expansions reached up to 14 km/year, which is far greater than that for other species.

The Way I See It....the corals that make up reefs around the world have endured warm and cold periods with many large rises and lowerings of seas levels over millions of years. Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef is one more change that occurs when a huge amount of fresh water runs off the land but it's temporary and within 3 weeks the polyps return when the saltwater density equalises. Marine biologists know this but are prepared to support the warmist agenda.

I have personally heard it myself from marine biology students. It's a ongoing joke that if you want a government grant to pay for your field work, you simply write into your grant proposal that you want to see what global warming is doing to...the reef, the fish, the coral polyps, the islands eco-system or the water's PH. BINGO...here comes a nice chunk-of-change! I have checked on a number of James Cook's finest marine scientists and found that $100,000+ a year is not unheard of...year in and year out. And all the while they are corrupting the next generation of marine scientists to defraud the government grants system by pushing the threat of terrible climate change. What a racket!