A interpreter for Queensland touristry has taken the unusual stair of calling a leading Great Barrier Reef scientist “ a dick ” and criticizing him for report on the poor wellness of the coral , Guardian Australia reports .

“ I suppose Terry Hughes is a dick , ” Col McKenzie toldGuardian Australia . “ I believe he has done tenner of 1000000 of dollar of damage to our reef in our central mart , being America and Europe . You go bad to those orbit in 2017 and they were win over the reef was bushed . And people wo n’t do long - haul tripper when they cerebrate the Rand is dead . ”

Unsurprisingly , preservation groups have a fair amount to say about this stance . Rather than shooting the messenger   – as Hughes is simply report on and recording what is happening to the Rand as the ocean temperatures rise   – perhaps the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators should be focusing their ire on major defiler and what the government plan to do about climate alteration , rather .

“ blame scientists and essay to get their funding cutting is the bad possible reception to this crisis , ” the Australian Conservation Foundation ’s CEO Kelly O’Shanassy explain toThe Guardian . “ scientist are not to blame . self-aggrandising polluter and their political allies are to find fault . ”

“ We need high - timbre science more than ever so we can supervise and track what ’s happening to the reef . ”

McKenzie does not of necessity disaccord with the fact that more needs to be done to keep the 2,900 Rand tidy , but he has a major military issue with how Hughes has been report it , arguing that many people abroad now think that large wrapping of the Great Barrier Reef are numb .

This mainly comes follow Hughes ' far - reaching theme that found thata shocking 93 percentof Witwatersrand sampled had go through some form of coral bleaching in 2016 , with up to 50 pct of reefs in the northern section die out . A further report published this year has find that the oftenness of bleaching events hasincreased dramatically since 1980 , harm the reefs ' power to recover .

Just because these findings are tragic , it does n’t mean that they should not be reported . Hughes points out that the skill behind them is neither debris nor deceptive , with most of his recent papers being published in leading scientific journals .

[ H / T : The Guardian ]