Great Barrier Reef Coral At 5th Highest Level On Record, Yet Media Pushes ‘Tipping Point’

This post, authored by Chris Morrison, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

Despite signs of recovery in the last few months, coral on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) failed to hit its fourth record year of growth. Alas, coral levels are now only at their fifth highest level since consistent observations began almost 40 years ago.

Heavy bleaching in 2024, most likely caused by the water temperature spikes of a powerful El Niño ocean oscillation, led to reductions across the Reef, particularly in the cooler waters of the South. Nevertheless, coral cover remains above the long-term average – in the Central region the cover of 28.6% compared with the long-term average of 19.8% – according to the latest 2024-25 survey from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

As water temperatures return to previous levels, the recovery appears to be under way. Individual AIMS reef surveys concluded up to March 2025 show “bleaching prevalence” at “high” on one reef, “medium” on seven and “low” on 38. Ending in May, this had fallen to 0, 0 and 30 respectively.

In its latest up-date report on the health of the GBR, the Reef Authority observed slightly elevated sea temperatures in July around the Reef, although these are too low to temporarily stress the coral.

It was noted that 338 individual health impact surveys were completed between June 1st and July 20th this year across 44 individual reefs in the Northern, Central and Southern Marine Park regions. “No coral bleaching was observed during this period,” it was reported.

Needless to say, joy was unconfined among the sandwich board activists writing the story for the BBC and the Guardian. They don’t generally cover good news at the GBR, since it possibly falls foul of ‘false balance’ settled science guidelines supporting the Net Zero fantasy.

The last few years of record growth have no doubt been a serious disappointment – a disaster maybe, since at bloated climate desks such as the BBC it could easily have led to fears of layoffs. This year is a real tonic and, back in mid-season form, the BBC reported that the habitat may have reached a “tipping point”.

This nonsense was also noted by the Guardian, which added that scientists are observing areas they call “graveyards of coral”. Widespread bleaching was first seen in 1998, claimed the newspaper (first seen by whom?) and happened again in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2025.

According to the actual figures shown in the graph below, the last four events have occurred at a time of near vertiginous coral growth, interrupted by the fall in 2025.

Writing in the Australian, Dr Peter Ridd, one of the leading scientific authorities on the GBR, noted that the normalised coral cover has dropped from a record high number to 0.29, but this was still twice as much cover 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,” he pointed out. When one considers the uncertainty margin, the present figures are not significantly different from many of the previous years.

The Reef is still doing fine, he continued, despite having six allegedly cataclysmic coral bleaching events in the last decade. “There should be no coral at all if those reports were true,” he added.

The recovery of the coral over the last four years has been astonishing, not least because it points to entirely natural forces at work. For hundreds of millions of years, tropical coral has grown in waters between 24°C and 32°C.

It appears to grow faster in temperatures towards the higher end of the range. It bleaches in response to sudden spikes in temperature but a growing body of research indicates that it recovers very quickly from the temporary stress.

Over the last 20 years, the bleaching events have been closely tied by activists to human involvement. This despite the fact that there is no scientific proof to back up the claim that humans cause temporary water temperature spikes in small oceanic locations.

Nevertheless, AIMS states that “the projected disturbance regime under climate change is characterised by marine heatwaves that are increasingly frequent, severe and long lasting”. Of course the solution is our old political friend, Net Zero – “enabling coral reefs to survive these conditions requires a combination of global greenhouse gas reductions to stabilise temperatures”.

Great politics, shame about the opinionated science. But then this AIMS is the organisation that starts its report by suggesting the aboriginal people who hunted and gathered around the Reef were “Australia’s first scientists”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

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