A Queensland tourism official is using foul language to accuse a scientist of stifling Great Barrier Reef tourism, while scientists are defending him and asking tourist to stop trying to kill the messenger.

Col McKenzie is the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, which represents more than 100 businesses that count on people visiting the Great Barrier Reef.  He's asking the federal government to pull funding from Professor Terry Hughes, claiming his comments about the crisis of bleaching caused by man-made global warming were "misleading" and damaging the tourism industry.

"I think Terry Hughes is a dick," Mr. McKenzie told Guardian Australia.  "I believe he has done tens of millions of dollars of damage to our reef in our key markets, being America and Europe.  You went to those areas in 2017 and they were convinced the reef was dead.  And people won't do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead."

Professor Hughes is one of the world's leading experts on the Great Barrier Reef.  He's also the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and he has his defenders.

"Blaming scientists and attempting to get their funding cut is the worst possible response to this crisis," said Kelly O'Shanassy, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation.  "Scientists are not to blame.  Big polluters and their political allies are to blame.  We need high-quality science more than ever so we can monitor and track what's happening to the reef."

Hughes did not respond directly to McKenzie's accusations.  Instead, he pointed to his latest peer-reviewed article for the journal Science and Nature, which found that coral bleaching events caused by warming seas were now happening too regularly to allow the reef to adequately recover.

"We analysed bleaching records at 100 globally distributed reef locations from 1980 to 2016," Professor Hughes wrote in the paper, "The median return time between pairs of severe bleaching events has diminished steadily since 1980 and is now only six years."