GBR, Climate Coverage In Queensland So Shitty That Scientists Are Buying Full-Page Ads
Last edited Thu Apr 21, 2016, 01:11 PM - Edit history (1)
Scientists say they are fed up with Queensland’s biggest newspaper not covering the worst bleaching event to hit the Great Barrier Reef, so have taken out a full page ad to get the message out. The ad comes as a survey revealed 93% of the Great Barrier Reef was affected by the bleaching. That finding motivated the Queensland government to call on the federal government to convene an urgent meeting of the nation’s environment ministers to talk about measures to address climate change in light of bleaching.
Organised by the Climate Council, the full page ad in the Courier Mail on Thursday contains an open letter signed by 56 scientists. “One of the reasons we placed the ad in the Courier Mail was that we’ve seen very little coverage of the coral bleaching event in that paper and in fact there was a front-page story that said the coral bleaching event had been wildly exaggerated,” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland and one of the signatories of the letter. The letter explains that it is the worst bleaching event in its history, and that it is being driven by climate change.
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On 7 February, the Courier Mail ran a story quoting the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, as saying the reef remained an untouched beauty. His comments were in response to a David Attenborough documentary about the Great Barrier Reef being aired. “The key point that I had from seeing the first of the three parts is that, clearly, the world’s Great Barrier Reef is still the world’s Great Barrier Reef,” Hunt told the Courier Mail. The story included a subheading that read: “Reports of reef’s death greatly exaggerated: Attenborough”. A News Corp Australia spokesman said on Wednesday that the claim there had been very little coverage of coral bleaching in the Courier Mail was “frankly baffling”.
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A story about the 93% bleaching appeared in Thursday’s paper on page 13.
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/21/scientists-resort-to-advertising-to-get-great-barrier-reef-crisis-in-queensland-paper
