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Comment by EnigmaFlare | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone could explain the reef-are-fine idea (https://www.australianenvironment.org/gbr-report-2024) that seems to contradict the climate-change -> bleaching -> no more reefs idea. It looks like crackpottery and is promoted by one former academic. But he was fired for talking about it so that suggests the climate-change idea is politically enforced and thus also untrustworthy. So is Peter Ridd wrong on something or are they orthogonal issues or what?

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‘But he was fired for talking about it’ is a rather bold claim. Many people get fired who didn’t promote fringe ideas, but claiming you got fired for exposing some big lie is great publicity. I would suggest looking for evidence before assuming someone is telling the truth when they say such things.

As to bleaching it’s not an every year or every reef thing. The general consensus in terms of recent events only 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2022 had wide scale impacts and there’s quite a bit of recovery between those dates and many areas that aren’t impacted. However, more frequent bad years has impacts not just on the ecosystem but also tourism. EX: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/04/10/2016-2017_gbrble...

Minor omission, but you missed 2024 from your list of mass bleaching events. Though I guess it's too early for consensus as to the scale of the impact.

As far as I can tell, he really was fired to talking about it. That included criticizing other organizations that promoted bleaching catastrophism. Though the direct reason was publishing confidential information about his own disciplining for, as I understand it, saying things publicly.

It's not like he stole office equipment or other unrelated things.

To resume in a couple of paragraphs the outcome of a very complex and chaotic system, concerning thousands of different species is not realistic. Just assume that this is only a raw simplification.

Bleaching is caused by more than one factor. Corals are an antique, diverse and rich group of organisms and they know a few tricks about survival for millions of years.

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