Great Barrier Reef Still Great
As environmental scientists herald a bleak landscape of the aquatic wonder off Australia’s coast, Bjorn Lomborg cries halt. Not so fast. This is reef madness, he argues in the WSJ. “The truth is much less alarming.”
Mismanaging Data
Australian scientists have meticulously tracked the reef’s coral cover since 1986. For many years, they published an annual average coral cover figure. The data show that the reef was mostly stable until 2000. Then it began declining. By 2012, it had shrunk to less than half its original cover.
After the downsizing, Mr. Lomborg reports, the reef started growing, confirming a spectacular rebound. Would scientists (nervous that readings weren’t fitting into the climate-change narrative) have stopped publishing their reef-wide average? Scientists did continue, however, to publish regional- and sector-wide averages, allowing “anyone to effectively recreate the reef-wide average.”
A 2021 coral reef measurement proved that coral cover was higher than when measurements began.
It increased further, staying at unprecedentedly high levels in 2022 and 2023. The coral grew more still in 2024.
Marketing or Science?
Here we are in 2025, and new data show that coral cover has dropped across 10 of 11 sectors, with two experiencing their largest one-year drop. Climate alarmists lost little time heralding the bad news.
From BBC: “Great Barrier Reef suffers worst coral decline on record.”
From CNN: “Australia’s Great Barrier Reef devastated by worst coral bleaching on record, new report finds.”
Ignored by the press was that reductions came off the record high of 2024. Year-to-year variations are typical, reports Lomborg. In 2025, coral cover in one sector reached its highest level ever.
Cover across the entire reef is still higher than in 2021, which itself was higher than in any other time prior recorded year. All the highest years are in the 2020s, yet we hear nothing but doom and gloom.
Relax
Impossible, explains Lomborg, to compare today’s reef with the pristine, natural state. The data is just not there. For example, research in the 1970s focused on biodiversity.
The reef fluctuates, but today it still logs its fourth-highest coral cover since records began. Instead of being “devastated,” the Great Barrier Reef is still great.
Reports the WSJ: Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “Best Things First.”
