Climate alarmists ‘crying wolf’ are finally losing credibility

From at least the 1970s there have been near-continuous claims of the impending devastation of the Reef.  This has included alleged causes as varied as starfish damage, coral bleaching, more numerous and severe cyclones, nutrient runoff, and warming ocean temperatures.  Malcolm Turnbull's government even pledged over $1 billion to protect the Reef.  In 2016 other “experts” put an $8.2 billion price tag on “saving” the Great Barrier Reef.  The Queensland Government more recently announced a “much-needed” $330 million funding to address the Reef’s water pollution problem over five years.  

For the record, the Great Barrier Reef has just recorded six years of exceptionally high coral cover .  The latest data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science reveals that hard coral cover across the vast marine park has remained stable or increased, with the northern and central regions recording their highest levels in decades.  Natural phenomena are often ignored by alarmists, who seek to attribute all reef changes solely to climate change.  The reality is that most of the resources devoted to “saving” the Reef have been a waste of public money, merely pork-barrelling vested interests.

Rising sea levels (stemming from global warming) have been another unfounded climate scare, that is readily debunked.  The mean sea level trend at Sydney, Fort Denison 1 & 2, is +0.84 mm/year with a 95per cent confidence interval of ±0.10 mm/year, based on monthly mean sea level data from 1886 to 2025.  That is equivalent to a barely significant rise of only 3.24 inches in 140 years.

According to the UN and a plethora of climate alarmists, the (widely cited) Pacific island nation of Tuvalu (as well as other low-lying islands) “battles rising sea levels that threaten to put large parts of the island entirely underwater by the end of this century”.  Tuvalu's foreign minister even gave a speech to the Glasgow climate conference standing knee-deep in seawater to show how Tuvalu is on the front line of climate change.

The problem is that academic studies do not support this thesis. 

One study found that:

...the significant increase in sea level observed at Tuvalu’s current tide gauge is attributed more to multidecadal oscillations, significantly affecting short-term records, and the subsidence of the tide gauge, rather than the global thermosteric contribution. The residual rate of sea level rise is likely influenced by other factors, such as changes in circulation within the lagoon or other local anthropogenic biases. The suggested analysis aligns with prior research, reinforcing the perspective that the sea levels are gently rising and the surfaced area of Pacific islands and atolls is not diminishing.

According to a report published in February 2018 in the scientific journal Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, Tuvalu isn’t sinking or even shrinking.  It’s expanding.   Despite a cumulative sea-level rise of 15 centimetres since 1971, an analysis of all 101 islands in Tuvalu’s atoll chain has found that Tuvalu’s land area has actually increased by 2.9% (74 hectares). 

Another heavily promoted climate scare has concerned the predicted decimation of the world’s polar bear population.  A typical panic is that pushed by (for example) the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), stating that:

a recent study shows that by 2100 it is likely that there will be local extinctions of polar bears from some parts of the Arctic, even if we moderately reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.  If we fail to reduce our emissions, by 2100 we may lose all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations in and around the Last Ice Area.

The Director of Wildlife Research with the Arctic Government of Nunavut on the other hand has stated that: 

Of 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct or even appear to be affected at present.