Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" One global warming mini-scare has barely faded away – with the realisation that polar ice is not vanishing, the extent of Antarctic sea-ice having just broken all records – when the next arrives
A paper from the US National Academy of Sciences claims that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral in 27 years and could soon be all but gone. Nearly half this loss, apparently, is due to damage from the more frequent cyclones brought by man-made global warming. Much of the rest is caused by coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, fostered by warming seas.
One puzzle is that no one has noticed such a scary loss of coral before. (Even the researchers admit that undamaged coral is still growing at nearly 3 per cent a year.) Another is that the evidence indicates cyclones being more frequent in the past than recently. Similarly, rises and falls in that starfish population are a natural phenomenon, nothing new.
As yet another scarelet bites the dust, part of the explanation may lie in the fact that researching into the world’s largest coral reef has become a £130 million a year industry. Governments are not going to pay out that kind of money just to be told that nature is doing what nature does."
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