The BFD | The Beach That Won’t Go Away

In the classic Beyond the Fringe comedy sketch, “The End of the World”, a group of doomsday cultists gathered to witness the prophesied armageddon. When it fails to materialise, the cultists glumly remind each other, “Same time next week, Brothers: we must get a winner one day”.

Millenarian, doomsday cults are like that: impervious to inconvenient evidence such as the world not ending when it should have. The latest, the Climate Cult, are no different. They’ve been screeching that We Have Just Ten Years since at least when leg-warmers and poodle perms were the height of fashion. The world has stubbornly refused to end.

But, hey, if we don’t all burn, we’re all gonna drown, right?

Just a few hundred metres from Moruya airport, Bengello Beach looks like any other typical Australian shoreline.

But among coastal geographers, it’s globally renowned for providing the longest continual data set of beach change in the Southern Hemisphere.

And what this half-century of data reveals is the staggering resilience of nature — and what the future may hold for Australian coastlines.

Spoiler alert: nothing much.

Just as centuries of records at Port Arthur and Sydney Harbour have conspicuously failed to show any noticeable difference in sea levels, just as Miami and Wall Street are still high and dry in spite of Al Gore and James Hansen, Bengello Beach is in fact doing just fine.

The study began in 1971 when Australian National University professors Roger Maclean and Bruce Thom travelled from Canberra to the six-kilometre stretch of beach on the New South Wales south coast, to start recording sand movement at four locations.

Every few weeks they would set up tripods and use a measuring rod to calculate changes in sand volume and beach profile at the four key points, often wading into the water — sometimes treading water — for accuracy.

Wading into the water?! See, proof positive of sea-level rise!

Or not.

They measured Bengello throughout the intense La Nina storm period of 1974 to 1976, when the equivalent of 12 concrete trucks’ worth of sand was removed from every metre strip of the beach.

Over the next six years, they noted that the beach regained the sand it had lost during the 70s.

Professor Thom said storms had made the biggest impact on the beach.

OK, so it recovered from the intense storms of 1974-76. But surely, it’s being eroded to nothing, now?

Yet, in a paper released this year, after 50 years of the study, he said the main lesson from tracking Bengello was its natural resilience.

“There’s been really no change over all that time in terms of the amount of sand and the position of the beach,” he said.

That’s because “sea level rise” is never as simple as the simplistic ninnies of the Climate Cult try to make out. That’s why Bangladesh, for instance, the would-be poster child of sea-level rise, has actually gained land area. It’s why most Pacific islands are either static or gaining in land area.

And it’s why beaches stubbornly refuse to wash away forever.

“With storms, the sand goes offshore but the sand comes back again.

“Bengello showed us how sand can recover. Nature is the best healer.

Oh, and remember how “extreme weather events” are getting more intense? Yeah, about that…

Using satellite technology, which was introduced in the 1980s, coastal geographers can recreate beach profiles dating back 40 years.

“The significance of this study is that it captures that little bit of change that occurred before [satellites], and especially captured the storms of 1974 — which are the most significant in the last 50 years,” [University of New South Wales coastal science expert Thomas Oliver] said.

Of course, this is just one beach, but as already stated, it’s yet another piece of evidence that the asinine shrieking of the Climate Cult needs to be taken with a Siberian grain of salt.

But, the Climate Cult being the cult it is, they’re not giving up on their doomsday prophecies so easily.