Why Don't We Hear Any More About the Death of Australia's Great Barrier Reef?

Thanks to the invaluable Dennis Gartman, we learn about the amazing recover of Australia's "Great Barrier Reef" (with links to the Guardian)

We note then that it was front page next several years ago when threats appeared imminent against the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s shore. The coral reefs were said to be under attack due to bleaching that took place as the waters grew warmer than usual for a year or so, killing the algae that the coral fed upon and stimulating the growth of weeds that did further damage to the living coral.

The Greens wailed and gnashed their teeth publicly. It made the news.

What is not making the news these days is that the Great Barrier Reef has regenerated itself. The coral did not die; the ocean waters cooled; the algae returned; the weeds were chocked off and the coral reef is once again growing. Note then what Mr. David Obura, the Chairman of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s working group on climate change and coral reefs, said about what has taken place:

Ten years after the world’s biggest coral bleaching event, we know that reefs can recover [if] given the chance. Unfortunately, impacts of the scale of 1998 will reoccur in the near future and there is no time to lose if we want to give reefs and people a chance to suffer as little as possible.

The lesson to be learned here is that Mother Nature is far stronger than anyone might imagine. Nature takes man’s actions into account; deals with them and evolves from them. Man was not responsible for the bleaching event; Nature was…and Nature resolved her own problems, without man’s interference. The Greens would have had us intervene; Nature has proved that non-intervention is the better course of action. Our bet, however, is that none of our school aged children will hear that Mother Nature did her own damage to the coral reefs and that she resolved her own problems; rather we are certain that our school children will simple be told that the reefs were dying because the oceans waters were rising…were hot… and were so because “Man” is evil and intent upon destroying the environment. Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?

Note that the environmentalists will never say that their apocalyptic warnings were wrong. The next environmental disaster is ever around the corner if mankind is not careful to leave the management of the earth to them. If disaster does not come to pass, they were not wrong, we were just lucky. Or, as the Voice of America will have it, environmentalism was the cause of the recovery.


Not to be misunderstood, clean air and water is a good thing. Just ask the people in Mexico. But to attribute fragility to the environment, as virtually every environmentalist does, is to infantilize the issue. The earth is not fragile. It is remarkably robust. It has withstood floods and drought, earthquakes and volcanoes, fires and floods, heat and cold and the earth endures.

Undaunted, like the people who gather on mountaintops to watch the end of the world, when it does not come, they don’t lose faith. They simply sacrifice a virgin, adjust their calendars and recalculate the next end of everything.