Climate hysteria in the media has really got to stop

Reading the news, you would believe that the Great Barrier Reef — the aquatic wonder off Australia’s coast — is on its deathbed, bleached beyond recognition by climate change.

- Bjorn Lomborg

Recent headlines shouted in unison: “Great Barrier Reef suffers worst coral decline on record.” Environmental journalists are in panic mode about irreversible damage. This is advocacy campaigning, not impartial reporting.

Since 1986, Australian scientists have measured coral cover on the reef each year, meticulously tracking variations. Up to the millennium, the reef was mostly stable, but in the early noughties it started declining, and by 2012 it had shrunk to less than half its original cover. Unsurprisingly, reporting got more pessimistic. Researchers famously predicted that climate change and warmer waters would halve the coral cover again by 2022 to almost nothing.

Then something surprising happened.

The reef started improving. But the reporting didn’t. The consistently climate-alarmed newspaper The Guardian penned the reef’s obituary in 2014.

Over the next decade, the reef rebounded spectacularly. By 2021, coral cover was higher than it had been since measurements began. Then it increased further, staying at almost impossibly high levels in 2022 and 2023. Did the media celebrate? Hardly.