Tourism CEO Calls Leading Coral Researcher "A Dick" For Hurting Business, Demands His Funding Be Cut
A Queensland tourism representative has called one of the Great Barrier Reef’s leading researchers “a dick”, blaming the professor for a downturn in tourism growth at the state’s greatest natural asset. Col McKenzie, the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a group that represents more than 100 businesses in the Great Barrier Reef, has written to the federal government asking it to stop funding the work of Professor Terry Hughes, claiming his comments were “misleading” and damaging the tourism industry.
But the Australian Conservation Foundation said tourism representatives and operators like McKenzie should stop blaming scientists for reporting what was happening to the reef and start targeting major polluters to ensure change.
Hughes, who serves as the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the reef, has been warning of the damage rising water temperatures have been inflicting on the reef for years.
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Hughes did not respond to McKenzie’s comments directly, but included his most recent peer-reviewed articles in Science and Nature, which deal with the increased incidence of coral bleaching as a result of rising sea temperatures. His Science paper, published on 5 January, found that coral bleaching events were now happening too regularly to allow the reef to adequately recover. “We analysed bleaching records at 100 globally distributed reef locations from 1980 to 2016,” the paper reported. “The median return time between pairs of severe bleaching events has diminished steadily since 1980 and is now only six years.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/13/great-barrier-reef-tourism-spokesman-attacks-scientist-over-slump-in-visitors
