> Sorry it took so long to get back to this
No worries! I appreciate the effort you're putting into your responses, even if we might disagree in our conclusions. :)
Now, not to boil down your extensive post, but I'm going to highlight a key statement from that 2017 paper that you describe as the "most comprehensive study" about the GBR:
> unusually warm sea temperatures in the northern Great Barrier Reef resulted in widespread coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017.
This directly contradicts your claim that ocean temperature has absolutely no effect on coral survival.
In fact, in multiple places that paper speaks to climate change as a key contributor to coral die-off. Here's another one (Section 5, "Condition of coastal and marine ecosystems", "Summary of evidence"):
> Mid-shelf and outer shelf reefs in the southern half of the
Great Barrier Reef have shown the capacity to rapidly
recover from previous disturbances; however, a severe mass
thermal coral bleaching event in 2016 resulted in significant
coral mortality, especially north of Port Douglas.
I honestly don't know what to say at this point.
I'll be extremely blunt: I feel like you're cherrypicking, not just papers, but statements within papers, to support a conclusion you've already come to.
Again: I absolutely agree with the conclusion that controlling coastal pollution can have a profound effect on reef health. That is unquestionably true. But the evidence is clear that climate change is also an important factor, as indicated in the very papers that you cite, and that coral will continue to die off if we don't work to solve both problems. Finally, I agree that coastal pollution management is lower hanging fruit that, if addressed, may give us more runway to address the larger issue of climate change, as these reefs may then be more resilient to increased water temperatures if pollution stressors are reduced or eliminated.