Climate alarmists can relax, Reef is just fine

THERE’S so much wrongology in Romayne Westwood’s letter ( TB, 15/8) that I can only marvel at the prowess of the well-paid agitpropwriters who produce it.

Of course, when the agitprop factory is the tax-hoovering United Nations and all its grantgrabbing “useful idiots” in Australian academia, then it makes perfect sense.

But let’s focus just on this one bit of wrongology: “But earlier this year, a muddy plume of polluted water hit our Reef. It was so big you could see it from space.”

Search the internet for “Muddy plume extends to Great Barrier Reef images from space” and there are several alarmist websites (including “our” ABC) showing just one obviously modified image.

It purports to show a wetseason plume extending about 50km out to sea from the

Burdekin River, which drains an area twice the size of Tasmania.

The nearest reef to the Burdekin’s mouth is about 57km out and the plume certainly isn’t “hitting” it, or even touching the other 344,400sq km of the Reef.

But we sceptics always track information back to its source.

In this case the original image is found at eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/ images/imagerecords/48000 /48438/qsld_amo_2011004.jpg.

Yep, you guessed it, the alarmists “shopped” the photo – the soil run-off is getting nowhere near the Reef; at best it’s going about 40km out.

It’s as Professor Ridd said: the prevailing south-easterly wind and currents keep sediment away from the main Reef, and more clean ocean water flows through the Reef each day than flows from our rivers in a year.

Also, soil run-off isn’t “pollution” even to the fringing reefs because it’s been entering the sea since before the Reef moved to its current site (due to bare earth from indigenous firestick farming).

So Romayne, make yourself a nice cup of tea, heap it up with clean, green, Queensland-grown sugar, and relax; the Reef is fine. PETER CAMPION,

Tolga.