Eco-Alarmists Hype Damage Done to Great Barrier Reef By Ship Grounding

It is good to see that the environmental damage to the Great Barrier Reef has been minimal after the grounding of a Chinese ship on the reef:

A Chinese coal carrier that ran aground and leaked oil on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef cut a scar the length of 10 city blocks into the shoal and may have smeared paint that will prevent marine life from growing back, the reef’s chief scientist said Tuesday.Even if severe toxic contamination is not found at the site, initial assessments by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority indicate it could take 20 years for the world’s largest coral reef to recover, said scientist David Wachenfeld.

“There is more damage to this reef than I have ever seen in any previous Great Barrier Reef groundings,” Wachenfeld told reporters on Tuesday. The Shen Neng 1 ground into large parts of the shoal, leaving a scar 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) long and up to 820 feet (250 meters) wide.

The 755-foot (230-meter) vessel veered into protected waters and slammed into a shoal on April 3. Coral shredded part of its hull, causing a leak of about 3 tons of fuel oil, which was later dispersed by chemical sprays and is believed to have caused little or no damage to the reef. Small amounts of oil, however, have begun washing up on beaches near where the ship ran aground, according to Maritime Safety Queensland.  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest of the article at the link, but it is just more eco-alarmism by the usual suspects.  This ship damaged 10 city blocks on a reef that is 1,600 miles long.  To put that into comparison it would be like 10 city blocks in Washington, DC damaged between there and Miami, Florida. 

Here is what Walter Starck had to say about this latest eco-alarmist scare:

Oil floats, coral doesn’t. The damage to reefs from oil spills is minimal and recovery is rapid. Follow-up studies of oil spills have repeatedly found that environmental recovery has invariably been much faster and more complete than predicted with the worst affects being inflicted by clean-up efforts. The use of dispersants, as was done in the current event, is only a PR stunt by government wanting to be seen to be doing something. For the reef, it is the worst thing to do.

– In the First Persian Gulf War in 1991, the largest oil spill ever occurred when 6-8 million tonnes was dumped into an area of shallow water and reefs. With a thousand oil well fires to contend with, no effort was made to do anything about the marine spill. Follow-up studies found that within 4 months most of the oil had been degraded naturally and within 4 years even the most heavily affected areas had largely or completely recovered. This spill was about 10,000 times larger than the total carried by the ship now on the reef.  [Quadrant Online]

Read the rest of the article because it is highly entertaining. 

I also highly recommend reading Andrew Bolt’s article which further puts into perspective this latest eco-alarmist scare. 

While the alarmists hype ship groundings and global warmng as reasons for the near term destruction to the reef, what is causing real environmental damage to the reef goes on largely unnoticed.