Babies love peek-a-boo.  In a brand-new world, reality is defined by the limits of their senses.  When your face vanishes behind your hands, as far as they are concerned, your face ceases to exist.  That's why they are so thrilled when your face re-emerges.  Reality has shifted.

Leftists are just like babies: they think that their sensory and (sometimes pseudo-) scientific perceptions define the past, present, and future.  Whatever they notice about a natural phenomenon is reality, and they cannot imagine a different status.  Reality though, especially the Earth's mysteries, is not bound by leftists' infantile understanding.

The Earth has been evolving for about 4.5 billion years.  It's heated and cooled repeatedly.  Continents have drifted.  Magnetic fields have rotated.  Even leftists understand how busy it's been.  However, leftists are so dazzled by their recent observations that they've forgotten the Earth's dynamism.

When it comes to historical temperature changes, I like to point to the Medieval Warming Period (when Greenland was actually green).  The heat released water, creating perfect growing conditions.  The medieval population boomed.  Then the Mini Ice Age began its long, slow build-up.  Water froze, the rain lessened, and crops failed.

Because Malthusian rules inevitably applied before modern farming techniques appeared, food soon became limited even as the population continued the last growth cycle growth.  That brought famine, making people vulnerable to disease — and there was one heck of a disease coming to the fore in Central Asia.  Over the next decades, the Black Death ravaged Europe, killing up to 60% of the population.  All because of climate change.

Then there are climate cycles (driven by the sun).  I highly recommend this article discussing the Grand Solar Minimum, which is preparing to cool the Earth even as we cycle through a small global warming period.

Keep in mind that modern temperature records go back at most about 170 years.  Also, in recent years, the people behind the climate change cult have been systematically doctoring past climate records to justify future climate predictions.  (In this regard, when you hear "climate denier," remember that it's meant to connote the idea of Holocaust denial.  With that in mind, you can see the difference: Holocaust denial sees people denying mountains of hard evidence about a past event.  Climate denial sees people denying highly contested computer-generated predictions of probable future events, with a long track record of failed predictions.)

Image: Great Barrier Reef corals by Gökhan Tolun.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

My point is that the leftist climate changistas, who have amassed dangerous and extraordinary power, are ignorant about history and base all their predictions on an infantile and narrow range of observable data.  So, when they noticed that the Great Barrier Reef off Australia was undergoing some bleaching, like the baby who sees a face vanish, they concluded that the reef was dying, even dead.  And like the baby, who at least has an excuse for that mistake, they were dead wrong:

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is doing just fine with vast sections defying every forecast of impending doom made by climate catastrophists over the past 30 years, a report Thursday outlines.

Coral cover on two-thirds of the iconic reef, which is seen as a bellwether of ocean health, has reached its highest level since records began 36 years ago, according to marine scientists monitoring the ecosystem.

The Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) said in its annual report the reef is vibrant and flourishing although challenges do remain for such a "resilient system" that "still maintains that ability to recover from disturbances," AIMS monitoring programme leader Mike Emslie confirmed.

Emslie makes the usual clucking about the fact that climate change is probably still going to kill the reef.  Likewise, "[t]he Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which manages the reef, says despite the latest positive news the outlook for the icon is 'very poor' due to 'climate change.'"

For these people, mentioning climate change with regard to everything is as reflexive and meaningless as a teenager sprinkling her speech with irritating "likes" and "you knows."  The reality is that the reef, like everything in nature, has a cyclical lifespan, and it's on an upswing now.

We are stewards of the Earth, and we must be diligent in doing what we can to preserve its vitality and beauty for ourselves and future generations.  I'm glad lakes aren't catching fire from chemical contamination as they did in the 1960s.  Likewise, I never want to experience an airport that has smog inside because of pollution, as was the case when I was in Beijing a few years ago.

Having said that, there is no reason whatsoever for us to continue to let the climate change cultists force us back into a dark, scary, and deadly premodern era solely because they are such babies that they are unable to understand that reality extends far beyond their limited, immediate, and very uninformed perceptions.