The favourite scare story of the climate-deranged media is ‘Hottest [Insert day/month/year] Ever!’ Which, the legacy media, being the reflexive liars that they are, in fact means ‘on record’, which, further, in fact, means, ‘in the last hundred years or so’... or often less.
Official government temperature records have been kept, for the most part, only in the last century or so. Australia’s ‘official’ record only began in 1910. Even worse, the current method of high-resolution temperature data from satellites only began in the 1970s. The current, uniform Landsat measurements only began in 2013.
So, ‘ever’ is the rubberiest claim imaginable.
As it happens, though, in sporadic times and places, we do have much older temperature records. So why don’t we ever hear about them? Especially when it comes to such alarmist claims as that the Great Barrier Reef is in imminent danger of being boiled alive?
On its face, such a claim seems absurd given that the GBR has so far survived half a million years of wildly fluctuating temperatures, from ice ages to warming periods. As it happens, we have at least one pretty good data set, showing just how absurd it is.
The Australian Eclipse Expedition of 1871 was sent by the Royal Society of Victoria to Cape York to observe a total eclipse of the sun. In the last weeks of that year, the Queensland government steamship Governor Blackall sailed from Sydney.
The expedition was thought at the time to have been a failure – clouds and rain obscured the sun on the day of the eclipse.
But the expedition inadvertently collected a rare gem of a dataset – the first high-quality water temperature data on the GBR on both northward, and the southward, journeys along almost the entire length of the reef. It was a major scientific expedition with scientists from the Melbourne and Sydney Observatories, and included not only astronomers, but also a diarist and biologists interested in studying wildlife […]
The expedition carried scientific instruments that were very advanced for the time. Thus, it is safe to assume that they used a well-calibrated thermometer to measure water temperature. A similar scientific temperature transect along the length of the reef would not be carried out again for the best part of a century.
So, what did the data say about water temperatures in the then-pristine GBR compared to today? Well, it’s not exactly a one-to-one comparison, given that the ‘official’ data, collected only for the last 30 years, is collected in different places.
Thus, a degree of spatial interpolation is required to give some comparability between the modern data and that of the 1871 expedition. In addition, it is important to determine the natural variability of water temperature (typically a couple of degrees) from one year to the next – at least for the modern data.
Does the eclipse transect data fall within this range of variability or is it colder? If those members of the 1871 science expedition sailed the coast in 2025 – would they have noticed any appreciable difference?
In short, the answer is no. The 1871 data falls within the range of variability that has occurred from year to year over the last few decades.
Your die-hard Climate Cultist will likely respond that that’s just one year. Maybe it was just unusually hot that year (apply that same caveat to, say, 1998, then).
With data for only one year, this cannot be discounted entirely, but data shows it was unlikely. The ‘official’ Hadley Centre temperature data for the region, compiled from very sparse ship traffic, do not indicate that 1871 was especially warm.
If those eminent gentlemen who undertook that expedition in 1871 did the trip again, they would be unlikely to notice any difference in temperature, except that their cabin would now be air-conditioned.
We can also use proxy measurements. The Cult loves proxies – so long as they give the answer they want. In this case, corals in the GBR show annual growth rings just like trees.
Corals living in hotter water grow faster, and produce thicker growth rings. Because some corals live for centuries, analysing coral growth rings gives an indication of water temperature going back well before British settlement. Such data also shows minimal changes in growth rate and therefore temperature.
Then there’s the glaringly obvious fact I noted in the intro: the GBR has been around for about half a million years. Does anyone really think there was no dramatic variation in all that time? Yet, here the reef is: still alive and thriving.
Cool and warm years come and go and the 1871 data suggest temperature along the GBR has remained within its range of natural variation for at least the last 150 years. This, together with record high amounts of coral, is good evidence that the catastrophism associated with the Great Barrier Reef is misplaced.
For all the hysterics from the legacy media, the fact is that the vast bulk of the GBR is doing just fine. As the Doom Goblin might scowl, how dare it!
