Glass half-full view: "James Cook University’s Jon Brodie, a professorial fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, was frank in his assessment of the proposal. He conceded the idea sounded silly but said it could work and was worth trying.
“It’s an absolutely silly idea when you read it, but we’re in silly times, so it looks like it could be a goer,” Brodie said.
He has been trying to save the reef for much of his career. He said the federal government had sat on its hands, and its current attempts to improve water quality were not working. “We’ve given up. It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed,” he said.
Mass bleaching events have occurred in 1998, 2010, 2015-16, and this year."