In February 2022 the green billionaire-funded Carbon Brief reported that a rise of 0.3ºC in the current global temperature would kill off 99.8% of coral with the rest going as a result of another 0.5ºC of warming. The increasingly unpopular prints are full of similar tosh, despite the fact that sub-tropical corals grow happily between 24ºC-32ºC. Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC rather than 2ºC would likely be the difference between the complete decline of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), reports the Guardian, quoting a United Nations report. What decline we might ask following three stonking years of embarrassing record growth? Such great click-bait stories are endemic throughout the mainstream media – it’s just a shame about the facts. A newly-published science paper reveals massive increases in coral on the GBR from about 8,000 to 6,000 years ago at a time when sea surface temperatures were 4ºC higher.
