The Australian government yesterday announced that substantial progress has been made toward protecting the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Conservationists applaud improvements in the reef’s health and resilience, but caution that current government policies do far too little to counter global warming, which officials and scientists both agree is the greatest threat to the reef’s long-term survival.
“[There is] still a long way to go,” says Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral reef expert at University of Queensland, St. Lucia, in Brisbane, Australia.
As part of a March 2015 “Reef 2050 Plan” put forward to avoid the GBR losing its coveted World Heritage Site status, the federal government and the government of Queensland state, which borders much of the GBR, promised annual updates on the status of efforts to manage and protect the reef. Officials feared failure to protect the reef would seriously affect tourism and give the nation a black eye.
Modern Journalism in a nutshell take a news story exaggerate it, to get clicks, sit back and look at gullible morons on twitte crying about something they probably couldn't give a damn about the day before, wishing the human race would go extinct, screaming why aren't we doing anything et cetera et cetera.There’s no denying the Great Barrier Reef is in serious trouble, having been hammered in recent years by El Niño and climate change. In April, scientists from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies found that the most severe coral bleaching event on record had impacted 93 percent of the reef.
But as a whole, it is not dead. Preliminary findings published Thursday of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority surveys show 22 percent of its coral died from the bleaching event. That leaves more than three quarters still alive ― and in desperate need of relief.
Two leading coral scientists that The Huffington Post contacted took serious issue with Outside’s piece, calling it wildly irresponsible.
Russell Brainard, chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, told HuffPost he expects the article was meant to highlight the urgency of the situation. But those who don’t know any better “are going to take it at face value that the Great Barrier Reef is dead,” he said.
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