News about health of Australian coral is always bad even though the data shows Great Barrier Reef at record levels. Consistent bad news prods governments to waste trillions on non-existent ‘disasters’
By Bjorn Lomborg, National Post, Oct. 21, 2025
Reading the news, you would believe the Great Barrier Reef — the aquatic wonder off Australia’s coast — is on its deathbed, bleached beyond recognition by climate change. Recent headlines shouted in unison: “Great Barrier Reef suffers worst coral decline on record.” Environmental journalists are in panic mode about irreversible damage. But this is advocacy campaigning from media who consistently tell a negative story whatever the data say.
Impartial reporting would tell us the following: Since 1986, Australian scientists have measured yearly coral cover on the reef, meticulously tracking variations.
Until the millennium, the reef was mostly stable, but in the early 2000s it started declining, and by 2012 it had shrunk to less than half its original cover. Unsurprisingly, reporting got more pessimistic. Researchers predicted climate change and warmer waters would halve the coral cover again by 2022, leaving it at almost nothing.
Then something surprising happened. The reef started improving. But the reporting didn’t. In fact, in 2014 the consistently climate-alarmed Guardian wrote the reef’s obituary.
But over the next decade the reef rebounded spectacularly. By 2021, coral cover was higher than in any year since measurements began. Then it increased further, staying at almost impossibly high levels in 2022 and 2023. Did the media celebrate? Hardly. They either ignored the dramatic recovery or spun it as a fleeting anomaly before the inevitable end. Instead of reporting the good news, in 2023 the Guardian said the high plateau showed recovery had “stalled.”
Editorial pessimism erodes public trust
Last year saw even-higher record coral coverage (see Figure 1), but again this good news was all but ignored by the media. Which brings us to 2025. The latest data show that coral cover has dropped across 10 of 11 sectors, with two experiencing their largest one-year drop. Finally, the media could again deliver end-of-times headlines, and they didn’t hold back, with CNN reporting that the Great Barrier Reef is “devastated.”
But remember: large year-to-year variations are typical; this year’s declines came off the record highs of 2024; one sector is at its highest-ever coral cover; and cover across the entire reef is “only” the fourth-highest ever recorded since systematic monitoring began. Across the entire reef, cover is still higher than in 2021, which itself was higher than any other year since recording began. All the reef ’s highest years are in the 2020s, and yet the media continues to paint a dismal picture.
Relentless editorial pessimism doesn’t just distort public understanding. It erodes trust and fuels a collective sense of helplessness. And it’s a symptom of a deeper rot. Trust in journalism is at a rock-bottom low, and one-sided climate scaremongering is one cause of the malaise. We’re bombarded with apocalyptic narratives that paint every heat wave, storm or ecological hiccup as the end times.
This leaves people worried and pessimistic, with young people hit hardest. A global survey in The Lancet revealed that climate worries haunt young people worldwide, with distress disrupting sleep, work and daily life. Understandably, kids and teens can’t stop obsessing over the endless depictions of a fiery apocalypse.
The coral reporting fits a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly. Bad news that can be shaped into a climate narrative gets endlessly replayed. Good news is ignored or twisted. Even Nature magazine accepts that for decades, more CO2 has fertilized plant growth, greening the planet. From 2001-20, satellites show the area of new leaves that emissions have added is 1.4 times the area of the contiguous U.S. states. Yet, news outlets rarely report this, and if they do, they portray it as a problem.
The coral reporting fits a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly. Bad news that can be shaped into a climate narrative gets endlessly replayed. Good news is ignored or twisted
In a famous cover story, Time magazine showed Tuvalu sinking into the water along with other Pacific atolls. But Tuvalu’s land area has expanded, and studies show most atolls are stable or growing, as coral sand accretes faster than erosion.
So the media pivot to the next horror story, like killer heat waves, ignoring the reality that cold kills 16 times more people annually in the U.S. alone. In the early 2000s, stories abounded about the climate extinction of polar bears, but when the data revealed their population had doubled since the 1960s, the media simply moved on.
Governments spend trillions to cope with non-existent ‘disasters’
We are feeding our kids hysteria, not hope. And fearmongering drives lousy policy choices: when the world is on fire, only a disaster response is fitting. Governments pour over $2 trillion a year into clean energy, mostly on inefficient subsidies that spike bills and leave the poor shivering in winter but will have almost no effect on global temperatures over the next 75 years.
Selective storytelling gives us a warped view of the state of the world. Yes, anthropogenic climate change is real and poses costs. But life expectancy has doubled in a century, extreme poverty has plummeted from 75 per cent to under 10 per cent, and weather-related deaths have dropped 98 per cent. The media drumbeat should be hope.
The Great Barrier Reef isn’t on its last gasp. Its coral cover fluctuates, but today it’s remarkably vibrant. If we let doom porn dictate our understanding of the world, we miss the bigger picture and the smartest fixes.
Financial Post Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, is visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.