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Australia's Great Barrier Reef Is “Still Great”

Originally posted on SURFER | By Owen James Burke | Last updated Sep 9, 2025 6:37 PM ET

We as surfers might not pay all that much attention to the Great Barrier Reef as it doesn’t tend to provide much opportunity in the way of surf—though there are exceptions, and some do see it as the last frontier in surfing. It is used as something of an indicator for the general health of our tropical seas, and ever since researchers began monitoring its condition in 1986, we’ve heard little but one tragic piece of statistics after another.

And the narrative has largely been true: Since 2001—four years after the Great Barrier Reef was named one of the seven wonders of the world—it has shrunk due to bleaching with acidification and temperature rise being the scientific community's best guess of culprits. By 2012, it was reported that the GBR was at “less than half its original cover,” the somewhat controversial climate-change author Bjorn Lomborg wrote in a recent Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal.

Now, it’s worth taking an opinion piece published by the preeminent newspaper of the money-grubbing public and penned by a notoriously questionable climate-change writer—who does, it’s worth adding, support climate-chaos theory, but believes there’s lots of “baseless” panic and hysteria around environmental concerns—but data doesn’t lie: Right around the time the GBR reached its historic, or 26-year bottom-out, it took a turn for the better. It’s anyone’s guess as to what the reason may be for its upturn, but by 2021, data showed that it was at its healthiest since it began undergoing annual physicals.

As is too often the case, that didn’t fit with the doom-and-gloom agenda of lobbyists whose interests’ lie solely in fomenting mass hysteria, and so that information was swept under the rug, cast by the wayside in favor of other statistics that better served the purpose.

Reportage on the deteriorative state of the GBR went all but quiet for some time until last year, when once again, the data was warped in favor of what Lomborg calls in his opinion piece “a baseless coral panic.” And ridicule him as you may, but in this technicality, he is not wrong. Plug “Great Barrier Reef News” into your search engine of choice today and outside of this one WSJ story and its syndications and jubilationary retweeting, re-blogging, and so on, you’ll find a sea of hysteria claiming that it currently “suffers worst coral decline on record,” as per the BBC, or as CNN reports, the GBR is “devastated by worst coral bleaching on record.” What these news flashes don’t take into account is that those numbers are based upon a series of consecutive years—2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024—of its largest size on record.

Now, of course, this great environmental success story is being used to propose that various regulations be dialed back left, right, and center by deskbound buffoons who see more in dollar signs for them and their constituents than they do a clean, healthy ocean and planet for their grandchildren. It’s the same old song and dance, and the pendulum now swings the other way as the powers that be look to undo much if not quite nearly all of what the EPA has done, since 1970, to save this here blue marble—created under the direction of one Richard Milhouse Nixon, lest we forget. And if that isn’t a lesson in taking the good with the bad—however bad the bad may be—what is?

Oh, how the tables turn, some for good, some for ill. But shall we at least take a moment, a brief pause in fighting our good fight, to celebrate this incredible success story? Good. Now back to it, folks. As sure as Earth will spin, so too will the news. The meta message remains: We’ve got an ocean to save.

This article first appeared on SURFER and was syndicated with permission.

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