If you'd told Australians in the 70s and 80s that the Great Barrier Reef would suffer catastrophic impacts in 40 years time and the government would both deny and ignore it, they would have been shocked and in disbelief. Australia was a different country then. The level of climate change denialism and the severe fixation on ‘houses and holes’ (property speculation and mining) is hard to believe if you haven't lived here. The change in political culture started taking hold around the year 2000.
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, but I'm Australian and I was around in the '80s, and there were warnings for the barrier reef then too (in the context of greenhouse effect, and also CFCs and crown of thorns).
Sadly for your casual climate denier they interpret this as 'meh, they've been saying the reef will die for years, and it's still here'.
I don't agree with that thinking, and I understand that the threats then are a mix of the same and different ones now. But the '80s were no more enlightened on the matter than now.
Don't mind me. The older I get the more I grump at people's perceptions of the past ;)
Not directly related to your point, but I feel people are just constantly shocked and in disbelief about a whole bunch of things, and all that shock and disbelief amounts to practically nothing in the end.
People will stand there slack-jawed as the steam-roller barrels toward them. "Oh this is shocking", "I can't believe this is happening".
I don't think it's as much ignorance as it is a specific reaction and pushback. I imagine we've all got someone in our social circle who pushes back against "political correctness gone made", or the green agenda or whatever else. Oddly, it's very rarely against the big end of town. Maybe that's because wealth is still something that almost everyone aspires to?
If not that, a feeling of helplessness? You can cut down on beef, but you can hardly convince everyone or stop industry lobbying against the environment.
The majority of the damage to the reef is actually crown of thorns, and runoff from dredging / mining operations - not climate change. Definitely not building a port could have helped.
They are 25-30 cm starfish with up to 21 arms, and they damage the reefs. It does say that "warmer sea temperatures enhance larvae development", with this reference: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep08402
"An autonomous starfish-killing robot called COTSBot has been developed and as of September 2015 was close to being ready for trials on the Great Barrier Reef.[84] The COTSbot, which has a neural net-aided vision system, is designed to seek out crown-of-thorns starfish and give them a lethal injection of bile salts."
I'm not sure about that. CoT has been a problem for a long time. Silt is a problem close to shore, but the extent of bleaching in recent years is unprecedented in terms of sheer area of decimation: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-29/reef-great-barrier-ree...
Fertilizer run off from agriculture (mainly sugar cane farming) is also a huge problem [1]. Not sure if they're actually getting any better with this or not...
