For those watching from afar, who hear the 2 sides of the "debate" about the
health of the GBR, and don't really know who to pay more attention to, I would suggest you become familiar with Dr. John " Charlie" Veron. He's in Wikipedia and Youtube, so it's really easy.....
Quick summary, Charlie has
single handedly been responsible for taxanomically classifying and documenting about 20% of the
world's coral species, and most of the GBR corals. Yes, the entire GBR!
And he's done that since 1971 over a lifetime of
diving coral reefs, not just studying
coral specimens in a lab from a jar collected by others. He's done it himself. Do you comprehend what a massive achievement this is?
I met Charlie in the early !980's when he gave us a talk on coral at our dive club. He is a quiet fellow, very unassuming, but his talk was riveting, and he warned about this thing called coral bleaching which he'd been studying. His passionate love for coral
reefs was infectious, and I caught the disease from him that evening. I have dived the GBR since 1974 when I arrived in Oz, from Cooktown to lady Elliot Island, as often as I could manage. There are small pockets of reef that are almost pristine, with the species variety that existed back then, but they are very few and very far in between.
But depressingly, it is fading rapidly, and I fear nothing will halt the decline until the Mauna
Loa observatory data CO2 ppm's start to drop. When they have dropped three years in a row, I will try and rekindle some optimism....
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
So, this is the guy that knows more about the status of the GBR, from personal experience, that anyone I'm aware of. Listen to him.
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