Coral Recoveries and Growth Show The Hill Is Misleading About Global Warming Killing Reefs
By
Linnea Lueken
October 16, 2025
A recent article in The Hill, “Climate change is not a ‘con job’,” claims that catastrophic, human-caused climate change is killing reefs via ocean heatwaves. This claim is false. In reality, corals have existed for millions of years, through warmer and colder periods, and in the recent past, coral reefs have recovered from bleaching events and even die-offs, proving to species to be adaptive and resilient in the face of climate change.
The Hill article, from Rebecca Vega Thurber, the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute, is framed by Thurber’s annoyance that President Donald Trump says climate change is a “con job.” She claims her personal research experience refutes his comment.
Thurber explains that pollution from fertilizer runoff can kill corals, which is true, but goes on to assert that “every result we have collected, in every one of these well intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades.” She says their efforts to mitigate pollution were “overwhelmed by high water temperatures driven by climate change or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.”
Thurber claims marine heatwaves in the French South Pacific hampered her work by “transform[ing] these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.”
https://climaterealism.com/2025/10/coral-recoveries-and-growth-show-the-hill-is-misleading-about-global-warming-killing-reefs/
