Figures released last week show record coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef. It is hardly a surprise that its demise has been greatly exaggerated.

When Greens leader Adam Bandt recently declared that ‘the Great Barrier Reef will die,’ one could confidently predict that the opposite was true. When US president Barack Obama said in 2015 that ‘the incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened,’ it was as likely to be correct as his modest prediction that his nomination as Democratic presidential candidate was, ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet...