"Global coral bleaching event that has lasted three YEARS has finally ended - but reefs are still fighting for their lives"

Nonsense all round.  The Indian ocean was not affected so the event was not global.  And it is admitted below that the effect was largely due to El Nino, not anthropogenic global warming.  They say that El Nino and anthropogenic global warming together had an additive effect but -- even conceding that CO2 causes anthropogenic global warming -- there was no CO2 rise in the relevant years so there was clearly NO rise in anthropogenic global warming.  To put it semi-algebraically:  El Nino + 0 = El Nino. 

And corals are at their most diverse and abundant in warm tropical waters so the claim that warm waters are bad for them is fundamentally perverse.  In Australia's case a sea-level fall was almost certainly the cause of bleaching in warm tropical water off the Far North Queensland coast

And both the extent of the loss and the difficulty of the recovery have been greatly exaggerated.  Do I need once again to mention the coral reef at Bikini atoll which was once the target of a thermonuclear blast -- but which is now again thriving?

 It's just all baseless assertion below.  Correlation is asserted as causation.  Factors like sea-level fluctuations are almost certainly involved but no attempt is made even to look at that.  One doesn't look to Warmists for a balanced account of anything -- which reveals them as fundamentally unscientific.  A scientific paper will normally look at all the possible causes of an event and evaluate them against one another. Warmists know just one cause for everything, ignore all else and assert it "ad infinitum"


A mass bleaching of coral reefs worldwide has finally ended after three years, U.S. scientists announced Monday.

About three-quarters of the world's delicate coral reefs were damaged or killed by hot water in what scientists say was the largest coral catastrophe.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration first announced a global bleaching event in May 2014.

It was worse than previous global bleaching events in 1998 and 2010.

The forecast damage doesn't look widespread in the Indian Ocean, so the event loses its global scope.

Bleaching will still be bad in the Caribbean and Pacific, but it'll be less severe than recent years, said NOAA coral reef watch coordinator C. Mark Eakin.

Places like Australia's Great Barrier Reef, northwest Hawaii, Guam and parts of the Caribbean have been hit with back-to-back-to-back destruction, Eakin said.

University of Victoria, British Columbia, coral reef scientist Julia Baum plans to travel to Christmas Island in the Pacific where the coral reefs have looked like ghost towns in recent years.

While conditions are improving, it's too early to celebrate, said Eakin, adding that the world may be at a new normal where reefs are barely able to survive during good conditions.

Eakin said coral have difficulty surviving water already getting warmer by man-made climate change. Extra heating of the water from a natural El Nino nudges coral conditions over the edge.

SOURCE






Parents' outrage over Aboriginal 'sorry' mural children were forced to paint at their school

It's a perfectly reasonable point to say that Aborigines deserve no apology.  Up until the Leftist Rudd government of 2007, all Australian Federal governments had taken that view.  It is true that Aborigines were dispossessed of most of their land but they obtained substantial compensatory benefits in the form of extensive welfare and modern services.  As a result it appears that their population has never been higher than it now is. 

It is also a reasonable and once universal view that conquest takes away the rights of the incumbent.  Most countries today have at once stage been subjected to conquest and a loss of rights by the incumbent so why should Australia be different?

Not everybody agrees with either of those views but it is sheer arrogance and authoritarianism to coerce the utterance of a contrary view


A primary school has been slammed over an artwork saying 'sorry' to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations, with parents claiming it's making their children feel 'guilty'.

Coburg North Primary School, in Melbourne's northern suburbs, recently put the art showing an arrangement of hands spelling out the word 'sorry' up in its schoolyard.

But while the mural containing cut-outs of their hands was intended to continue the message then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd started in 2008, it has caused a stir among parents, 3AW reports.

On each of the hundreds of red, yellow and black hands arranged in the art, students had written the word 'sorry'.

Radio host Tom Elliott said it was inappropriate for schools to make children feel at fault for Australia's sins - comparing it to German kids apologising for the Holocaust.

'I don't like it. I don't mind kids learning history and that can mean some of the darker parts of Australia's history,' Elliott said.

'But at the same time, the idea that a five, or a six, or a seven-year-old now feels that he or she has to go and say sorry - I think it's wrong. 'It's like saying every young German should be taught if they ever see a Jewish person to go up and say sorry to them.'

A local parent said that despite not having children at the school, the artwork hadn't sat well with him. 'I don't think it's a primary school's responsibility to make young children feel guilty,' the man, who gave his name only as Joel, said.

The school also regularly holds 'welcome to country' and smoking ceremony rituals, Coburg North Primary School's principal told 3AW.

In 2008, Mr Rudd apologised to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations on behalf of the Australian public, giving a speech to parliament which was broadcast nationwide.

SOURCE






Gillian Triggs: Just another lying Leftist

CHRIS KENNY

I noticed a fresh outbreak of the not uncommon and always inane Twitter abuse coming my way. It had been sparked by an article in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald by Michael Gordon lauding the outgoing president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs.

The article contained the usual attempted deification of Professor Triggs and the now predictable glossing over or censoring of her errors, contradictions, failings and misstatements. But it also contained a sharp and accusatory quote from Triggs about me.

“He keeps swirling the same facts over and over again and they are not true for a start — and that’s all he’s got,” Triggs reportedly said. “I’ve never met him. He’s never phoned me or made any attempt to understand anything. It’s just been a full-on attack.”

This was an extraordinary comment and I was immediately surprised that Gordon had not contacted me. Ethical journalistic practice would ensure that such a damaging claim would be put to the subject for a response. I could have very quickly demonstrated that Triggs’s allegation was untrue.

Let’s look at Triggs’s claims. Yes, my reporting has been replete with facts and yes I have repeated them — guilty. Most of those facts simply have been direct quotes from Triggs to various parliamentary inquiries. The facts that she says I keep “swirling” are words out of her mouth that have been contradictory, inconsistent, wrong, untrue or, sometimes, all of the above.

And the president should not be able to get away with saying the facts “are not true” because their truth is what makes them facts. Ipso facto.

So, let’s go to some more facts. The clear imputation of the rest of Triggs’s quote is that I have not given or tried to give her the opportunity to answer criticisms against her. She is right to say we have never met nor spoken on the phone but that has been her choice. And it is not for my want of trying.

Within minutes of reading the Gordon article I was able to dig out numerous requests on my iPhone. “Angela,” I had emailed her media assistant on November 24, 2014, “I wonder if you could please again forward a request to Professor Triggs for an interview.”

On February 26, 2015: “Angela, I am very keen to speak so that I can put some questions to the president as soon as possible …. Happy to chat with the president if possible.”

There have been phone calls to her office over the years, always shunted to her media assistants, and other emails where I passed on detailed queries and sometimes received AHRC statements in response.

On October 20, 2016, my producer at Sky News emailed the AHRC media team: “Chris Kenny is hoping Professor Gillian Triggs can join him on his Viewpoint program this coming Sunday or Monday evening for a discussion of the HRC’s investigation into Bill Leak’s cartoon, the Racial Discrimination Act & recent events surrounding the Nauru detention facility.” The approaches were rejected and my producer passed on a standing interview offer anytime that suited.

In the interim I became so frustrated by Triggs’ refusals (and the lack of forensic questioning when she spoke to so-called progressive journalists) that I sent direct questions to her on Twitter and mentioned from time to time on my television show that she was welcome anytime. “I’d love to have an interview with Gillian Triggs but she won’t turn up,” I said on Sky News Viewpoint on April 24 last year.

Later that same month I tweeted directly to Triggs’ Twitter account my “standing interview requests” for her, Sarah Hanson-Young and Bill Shorten who are two other public figures who have rejected multiple requests (I added a lighthearted wishlist of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and k.d. Lang — perhaps I’ll have more luck with them).

The point of these tedious but incontestable facts is that they demonstrate beyond doubt that the clear inference and everyday meaning of what Triggs had to say in the Gordon article was wrong — and she must have known it was wrong. She was willing to attack my integrity by pushing a line she knew was untrue. This fits into a terrible and unfortunate pattern of incorrect and self-serving public statements from the AHRC president.

Naturally, today I sent a detailed list of questions to the AHRC in response, demanding to know whether the requests were never passed on to her or why she would say things that are “demonstrably untrue” and asking her to correct the record. It solicited a response which gives the game away. “Statement from President Professor Gillian Triggs,” was the rather grand heading.

“I stand by my comment that I have never met or spoken to Chris Kenny,” Professor Triggs said. “The Australian Human Rights Commission has responded on my behalf to questions from Mr Kenny, and we have provided comment and interviews to a number of journalists at The Australian and Sky News.”

How disingenuous. Triggs knows she has rejected numerous requests from me so skirts the issue, rather than apologise for the incorrect imputation she promulgated.

She has failed to point out a single factual error in the many thousands of words I have written on her tenure or related issues.

Oh, in case you were wondering, my email repeated the longstanding request for an interview. Her statement was silent on that question. Don’t hold your breath.

SOURCE






How long for Australia?

Although free for so long from the scourge of political and religious terrorism, in the long term, Australia can hardly avoid a deadly Islamist attack such as occurred in London or Manchester.

But these were not acts of ordinary, politically motivated terrorism. Jihadists have no political or social objectives they seek to achieve. Forget negotiating politics with them.

Many of our politicians thinks it’s simply a matter of decisively stamping out extremist Islamist ideology. But what does getting tough on extremism really amount to?

For one thing, it means changing the way we think about religion — something many still refuse to take seriously, insisting it is a private matter for the individual.

We often assume that if a religious person has to choose between pursuing religious ideals and political ideals, they will choose the political — and always endorse secular norms.

But this betrays a failure to understand religion. Believers often place the highest stakes on obeying their God’s law — an event when the religious and the political come into conflict.

When that happens, given the eternal nature of the believer’s relationship with God, it should not be a surprise to find that religious demands almost always take precedence over political ones.

Secular liberals refuse to take such beliefs seriously because they have long since lost the ability to distinguish between the sacred and the secular. Their response is to denounce all religion.

But simply denouncing religion — especially extremist Islam — will not work, even though religion may at times make unreasonable or even outrageous claims.

When believers are committed to the precepts of a religion, it is not enough to say they are all hopelessly misguided. What committed believer will agree with that?

Instead, unreasonable religious claims must be challenged on religious — not secular — grounds. The freedom openly to discuss religion, engaging support of community leaders is also essential.

Confronting religious violence requires an unfailing commitment to defending the principles of an open, liberal society. But we must learn to take religion seriously — just as believers do already.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here