https://www.thegwpf.org/publications/gr ... ord-again/
quote source:Final comment
The latest data on the GBR indicates it is in good shape. It happens to
have a great deal of coral in 2022 because there have been few major
mortality events over the last five to ten years. The three or four bleaching
events since 2016, which have been widely reported in the media, could
not have killed much coral, otherwise the 2022 statistics would not be so
good.
The data since 1986 shows that every region, every sector and most
reefs have had occasionally had periods of very low coral cover for one
reason or another. This is entirely natural. The media makes much of occasional setbacks to coral cover, but a measure of the health of an ecosystem is the ability to recover from a major stress. Frail systems will not recover, robust systems recover well, just as healthy people recover quickly
from disease.
The GBR has proven to be a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. This
should not be a surprise; there are few human pressures on the reef, and
it is well protected. It is also unreasonable to expect that the small temperature rise over the last century (1°C) will have caused much impact, especially as it is well known that most corals grow faster in warmer water.
The data collected by AIMS shows that the GBR is a robust system
with rapidly fluctuating coral cover. We must expect that, sometime in
the future, a sequence of events will cause the coral cover to fall sharply,
as it did in 2011. We must then remember that this is almost certainly
natural, and not allow the merchants of doom to depress the children.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads ... al-GBR.pdf