The Australian newspaper appeared to think it had a slam-dunk this week with a front page story pointing to official government data which showed “the Great Barrier Reef is refusing to die” despite decades of warnings that global heating would cause its demise.

In an editorial to back its reporting, the newspaper claimed the “continued good health” of the reef was a “welcome reminder that physics rather than the pseudo-religion of climate change doom still holds sway over the natural order.”

Scientific-based assessments of risks facing the reef from global heating were wrong, it seemed, and the data and the physics showed it.

But the Australian Institute of Marine Science – the agency upon which the outlet pinned its claims – has told this column the newspaper was guilty of “oversimplified framing” and that its recent surveys did not contradict warnings about the risks to the reef from the climate crisis.

“The scientific concern is not that the GBR should already have disappeared, it’s whether reefs will have sufficiently long periods between disturbances for full ecosystem recovery,” the institute said.

The Guardian sent questions to The Australian but received no response.

‘Volatility is evidence of ecosystem instability’

The Australian’s report leaned heavily on the latest annual results of the institute’s long-term monitoring program – a 40-year effort which, between August 2025 and June 2026, took detailed records from surveys of 121 reefs.

The program reports annually on levels of coral cover – that is, how much live hard coral is growing on reef areas – which was at “near record levels” across the reef, The Australian reported.

According to the institute, “coral cover across all three regions of the GBR increased slightly or remained similar to levels recorded in 2025, signalling the start of recovery from the impacts of the 2024 mass bleaching event.”

But was this evidence that “decades of scientific consensus” about the reef was wrong, as The Australian had suggested?

“No,” replied Aims.

“The [monitoring] findings show that many reefs in the Great Barrier Reef retain a strong capacity to recover when disturbance pressure eases. That is evidence of resilience, not evidence that climate-related risks have been overstated.”

In an editorial, The Australian newspaper wrote: “The continued good health of the Great Barrier Reef is a welcome reminder that physics rather than the pseudo-religion of climate change doom still holds sway over the natural order.”

But Aims responded that it was physics that underpinned the science of climate change and coral bleaching.

“The phrase ‘continued good health’ overlooks the volatility of the reef during the past 15 years when rapid gains in coral cover have been followed by sharp losses,” Aims said.

“Volatility is evidence of ecosystem instability; it shows how quickly recovery can be reversed.”

‘Out of touch’

The Australian’s report gave prominence to several quotes and claims of Dr Peter Ridd – a long-time climate science sceptic who rejects the risk to corals from global heating.

Ridd had said, the newspaper wrote, that recent coral bleaching events had “not produced a major drop in coral cover.”

He said “data since 1986” showed reefs in every sector “have had periods of very low coral cover. This is entirely natural.”

Aims said that “high coral cover in 2026 doesn’t demonstrate low mortality in preceding years” and that it was “wrong to suggest [coral bleaching events] have killed very little coral.”

“The 2016 and 2017 events caused serious coral mortality at very large scales, and the 2024 event drove the Reef’s largest coral loss in nearly 40 years of monitoring in two of the three regions,” Aims said.

“High coral cover is evidence of recovery and resilience, not evidence that the disturbances causing mortality didn’t happen. The concern is whether recovery windows remain long enough for that resilience to continue operating as disturbance frequency increases.”

Aims reported that increases in coral cover after 2017 “had been primarily, but not exclusively, driven by fast-growing but vulnerable corals.”

The Australian’s report also briefly referenced – accurately – research by Dr Mark Eakin, a US-based oceanographer and leading coral reef scientist.

Eakin told Temperature Check it was “well-understood this rapid colonisation by weedy, fast-growing corals is only the first step in the succession that occurs after reef destruction and that full recovery takes decades.”

“The rapid return of five severe marine heatwaves causing widespread bleaching in less than a decade shows that the reefs of the GBR are not being given enough time to recover,” he said.

Study findings “misinterpreted”

Lloyd’s story also reported on a study by Macquarie University of “potentially ­climate-resilient reef locations” around the world.

“About one-third of the Great Barrier Reef was judged to be resilient to the impacts of climate change,” Lloyd reported.

This is also wrong and is not what the study found.

One of the study’s authors, Dr Stacy Jupiter, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, told Temperature Check the Australian had “misinterpreted” the study’s conclusions.

She said the study – which has not yet appeared in a journal – had modelled coral cover at reefs around the world now and up to the year 2050 and looked for areas with better chances than others of surviving.

Crucially, she said the study was “pre-designed to select 30% of coral reefs from each ecoregion” to match with global targets to protect 30% of oceans by 2030.

She said it was “not predicted that every identified reef will survive” and it was “an incorrect interpretation to say that the study judged a third of the GBR to be resilient with any degree of certainty.”

So, rather than finding a third of the reef to be “resilient to the impacts of climate change” the study was, rather, set up to identify 30% of the Great Barrier Reef that may have a better chance at surviving global heating in the short term so that conservationists might choose to focus their efforts in those places.

• Graham Readfearn is an environment and climate correspondent at Guardian Australia