Make no mistake, the time to do something to protect a significant proportion of it was back in the 90s, about the time of the Kyoto agreement. Instead, we dropped the ball on global warming and have showed no inclination to pick it up other than some idle curiosity and a kick down the road at the Paris agreement a little less than 18 months ago. Far too little, far too late – even if humans were to disappear from the planet today, the Reef as a functioning entity is now committed to an inexorable process of ecosytem extinction, and will be 90% gone by the end of the century.

Every year of continuing as we have sees disappearing more of the possibility of salvaging something of the remaining 10%. We have to stop kidding ourselves that if we act soon we can make it all better. We can’t. All that we can do is to make it so that there’s something left for the future to work with, to in turn leave something for their future to perhaps rebuild what we’ve destroyed.