Ove Guldberg of the University of Queensland is at it yet again in predicting doom for the Barrier Reef. This time it’s a mass bleaching that will apparently hit the reef in 2016.

For those who are not familiar with Ove the catastrophist, he has been predicting doom for the Barrier Reef for at least the last 15 years. Andrew Bolt has a very handy list of Ove’s failed predictions on the Barrier Reef here. These are some of my favourites:

• After all, in 1999 [Hoegh-Guldberg] published a paper claiming that global warming would so heat the oceans that the mass bleaching of the reef in 1998 (from which the reef in fact has recovered almost entirely) would occur every two years from 2010 – and every year from 2020.

• 2000: The reef-building corals that make the Reef possible are likely to become very rare indeed if warming continues unabated… As much as I would love to be proven wrong, it is very hard to argue around it… We now have more evidence that corals cannot fully recover from bleaching episodes such as the major event in 1998. Although some small areas of coral can bounce back, the overall damage is irreparable.

• 2006: Between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s great Barrier Reef could die within a month…

• 2014: Co-author Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, told Guardian Australia that current climate trends signal “game over” for the Great Barrier Reef.

The reef may or may not bleach next year. If it does, it certainly won’t be because of ‘global warming’ or because this dipstick predicted it.

Of course, the reality is that the Barrier Reef has been taken off UNESCO’s ‘endangered’ list and that coral reefs actually like warmer water:

A GOVERNMENT-RUN research body has found in an extensive study of corals spanning more than 1000km of Australia’s coastline that the past 110 years of ocean warming has been good for their growth.

Keep gettin’ dem government grant cheques Ove.

But seriously, the ability of the Left to mobilise the masses for its causes is staggering. The Paris climate change conference is coming up later this year and it’s obvious that these messages are all part of a highly coordinated scheme to extract some serious climate change money out of our taxes.

So far, since the recent UN conference in New York, we’ve been told:

• that Australia’s economy is at stake;

• that we only have months left to save the world;

• to look at what happened to Mars! (We don’t want to be like Mars do we?); and

• that now, because of our wicked ways, the Barrier Reef is toast.

I wonder how long it will be before the Solar System and the fate of the Galaxy are at stake? And all because of a trace gas (about 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere) of which humans impact trace amounts of (about 3-4%).