Flat White Change the government, or the reef gets it!

Professor Mumby said: 'There is an awful lot of work that needs to be done to shepherd this reef into a safer future and listing it as "in danger" helps, then fair enough.'

What hubris.

With an ecosystem that is 344,000 square kilometres in size, consisting of 2,900 individual reefs over a length of 2,300 kilometres of coast, filled with uncountable Sydney Harbours of seawater, what difference is a couple of marine science departments really going to make?

It's like taking a few hundred PhD graduates and raking the Sahara to preserve it from dust storms. You'll never rake a significant area, and even if you did, that's not how dust storms work.

And this from a country whose record in biological control can be summed up by the fact that it has singularly failed to stop the spread of one tiny little amphibious reptile – the cane toad.

The farmers and the fishers and the tourist operators all get the blame for the 'poor' state of the reef. But as Peter Ridd has demonstrated, the water quality on most of the reef is virtually pristine, and more silt is deposited by a decent wet season than in the whole history of near-Great Barrier Reef farming.

Visual fact checks on reports of coral bleaching by Jennifer Marohasy have also found recent events this year to be, to put it kindly, exaggerated.

CO2 doesn't seem to be a problem for reefs. We know they've dealt with much more CO2 in the atmosphere in the past, and thrived, and suffered when there was less.

We know they prosper in hotter temperatures than it is possible for our sub-tropical waters to reach, which is why there aren't a lot of them south of Fraser Island – the water's just not inviting enough.

As for predators, well, the Crown of Thorns starfish has got to eat, and it's been dining on coral for millennia without emptying the pantry.

But our professors and et al researchers need to be kept employed, and they're not really that worried about Tanya Plibersek retaining her job, so they're happy to use the UN.

Poor Tanya. They say that if you don't know who the mark is you're the mark, but there's a more sophisticated version where there are two marks. She thought she was running the con, but it turns out that all along she was just another sucker.