The Great Barrier Reef keeps on living

It's a living thing,what a terrible thing to lose….

When the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) recorded their big hit back in the '70s they could have been referring to the Great Barrier Reef, although frontman Jeff Lynne insists it was really just about lost love.

The fate of our greatest natural wonder remains a hot topic here and overseas but if the climate change doomsayers were correct with their monotonous predictions, it would have been dead many years ago. Unfortunately, some potential overseas visitors are under the impression that it is in fact dead or dying, thanks to misinformed proclamations by some group-think scientists and even former US President Barack Obama when he visited Australia back in 2014.

Obama in his usual slow-talking drawl told a mainly youthful audience at the University of Queensland that "the incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened…"

Hesaid he did not have time to go to the reef then but, "I want to come back, and I want my daughters to be able to come back, and I want them to be able to bring their daughters or sons to visit. And I want that there 50 years from now."

We haven't seen Obama make a return visit to see for himself that the Reef is still there and I imagine he might have his hands full dealing with the latest alarming revelations by United States Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about election interference during his term. (She has claimed there is firm evidence of fabricated reports by senior security officials about alleged Russian collusion on behalf of Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential campaign.)

The fate of the Reef is back in the headlines again after the latest report from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) which some climate catastrophists and media sycophants have seized on. It claims hard coral cover has declined significantly across the Great Barrier Reef, following a record bleaching event in 2024.

Cyclones, associated flooding, and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish have reportedly compounded the impacts, with record coral losses in both the northern and southern regions.

It says the Reef retains higher levels of coral than most others around the world, but faces a "volatile" future. However, the report also states that while coral losses were significant, they came off a high base, with observed coral cover now sitting at "near to long-term average levels".

Oops. I hope Barack is following this and I hope he also reads a recent report in The Australian by scientist Dr Peter Ridd, who had his tenure with James Cook University terminated in 2018. His sacking stemmed from critical comments he made about colleagues and Reef researchers which allegedly breached its code of conduct.

But that hasn't silenced him by any means. Dr Ridd said the latest 2025 statistics on the amount of coral on the Great Barrier Reefshow "the reef is still doing fine despite having six allegedly cataclysmic coral bleaching events in the last decade. There should be no coral at all if those reports were true.

The normalised coral cover dropped from a record high number of 0.36 down to 0.29, but there is still twice as much coral as in 2012. The raw coral cover number for all the last five years has been higher than any of the previous years since records began in 1985…

Analysis of the data at smaller scales shows the GBR is doing what it always does – change. There is a constant dynamic as cyclones, starfish plagues and bleaching events dramatically kill lots of coral in small areas, while it quietly regrows elsewhere…

The institutions often justify this embarrassingly high coral cover as just weed coral. But the type of coral that has exploded over the past few years is acropora, which is the most susceptible tohot-water bleaching.How can we have record amounts of the type of coral that should have been killed, again and again, from bleaching? The acropora takes five to 10 years to regrow if it is killed.

There are two conclusions that must be drawn. First, not much coral has been killed by climate change bleaching – at least not compared to the capacity of coral to regrow. Second, the science institutions are not entirely trustworthy, and are in need of major reform.

Amen from me.

The article in The Australian is accompanied by a beautiful photo of vibrant healthy coral, which even Barack Obama might like. But it is another image on the AIMS website of a diver clinging to a "manta board" that set my mind in its version of Dr Who's TARDIS back to the mid '70s when I was on a reporting assignment to a famous international reef destination at Heron Island off Gladstone in Central Queensland.

The "assignment" was one I gave myself as editor of the Gladstone Observer, partly because I liked to be involved in our news coverage but probably more because I loved the reef and have done ever since excursions as a teenage snorkeler and spearfisherman off various coral atolls that dot its 2,300 km stretch from north Queensland to Lady Elliot Island in the south.

This time I was meeting up with some officials from the fledgling Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and some international scientists conducting coral studies at the Heron Island Research Station, which shares space on the atoll with the international tourist resort.

They invited me onboard a vessel engaged in the research by towing a diver with a manta board behind the boat. And incredible as it may seem with today's strictly governed workplace safety rules and official red tape, when I mentioned my earlier diving experience, they asked if I would like to try my hand at manta boarding.

Would I? You betcha!

Some basic instructions - press down on the front to dive, press down on the back to rise, just let go and rise to the surface if in any difficulty, then I was over the side and cruising along over an abundance of lovely plate corals, staghorns, soft corals and a plethora of marine life including some turtles wondering what this weird interloper was.

Diving down among the fish, swallowing to equalise ear pressures, then zooming back up to the surface, it sure beat the normal dive progress.

Finally, back on the boat I was towelling myself when the skipper nonchalantly asked, "Did you see any sharks?"

"Yes, just a few small 'Reefies' checking me out from a distance."

"That's good but we did see a White Pointer out here a few days ago…"

Now he tells me! I could have been live bait, but as the old saying goes, what you don't know won't hurt you.

I made it back to the mainland and the newspaper office unscathed and for any Doubting Thomases out there, I dutifully wrote a report of my experience which featured on an Observer front page and would still be in some old file from back in the day.

And thankfully, I'm very optimistic that the Great Barrier Reef will still be surviving and thriving long after Barack Obama and any of today's climate doomsayers have

gone to a better place.