Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be nice if people responded to you instead of downvoting silently. Thank you for the information. It's also worth noting the Great Barrier Reef is fairly new (6-8k years old). It came to be from the sea rise of the Last Glacial Maximum 20k years ago.
Information is fine, overconfident denialist commentary earns a downvote. When you see a comment to the effect of "The self-proclaimed experts are wrong! I know the truth," you should heavily discount the conclusions it draws. Just because the mechanism of resurgence is unknown does not mean that all previous science on the topic is invalidated. It can simultaneously be true that ocean warming is devastating the Grea…
This is really the core of the problem. It's why the downvoters are wrong and why it's worth debating the topic here, because it's really a much wider problem than corals or climate.
What government employees have done so far wasn't actually science and they aren't really experts. It was presented to the public as science, it was funded from science budgets, it has the superficial look of science, but it wasn't science. It was merely data collection, followed by wild theorizing based on nothing, followed by political lobbying. It wasn't even extrapolation, as there was no trend to extrapolate!
That isn't how the scientific method is supposed to work. Scientists are supposed to form a hypothesis, gather data that could falsify the hypothesis, publish it, then let others replicate it and so on, until we are certain enough we understand the underlying system to proclaim it a theory. Then you can go to politicians and demand money or changes to laws.
The complete lack of scientific method here is why reef ... people ... I don't want to give them the title of "scientist" ... have managed to not only seriously embarrass themselves but undermine confidence in all ecology and climatology. They had no basis on which to claim that CO2 induced warming was killing corals. The data simply did not fit that hypothesis at any point. Yet by tying their field to climate change they unlocked media interest and a much greater flow of money. They took the easy, tempting path instead of the right path and it is not only completely legitimate but a moral imperative to point out their dishonesty. Their own colleagues and institutional supervisors aren't doing it, so other people have to. If nobody does then this is how science dies, people! When anyone can call themselves a scientist despite not doing science, then eventually the whole concept of science itself will be seen as a discredited joke. That's how dark ages happen. Everyone should be calling out those who claim high confidence in their predictions whilst not having done the work to deserve that confidence.