The report contained "nothing new" according to a director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, but the department insisted every reference to Australia be deleted. It got its way: there's no mention of Australia's 19 World Heritage-listed sites, including the Great Barrier Reef, anywhere in the report.

Coincidentally, but hardly surprisingly, worrying new evidence has emerged in recent days to suggest the reef is being affected by climate change as never before. A study into the effects of a significant warm water episode on the reef this summer found that 35 per cent of the 84 reefs surveyed by James Cook University researchers had succumbed to bleaching.

Describing the findings as having caught the team by surprise, JCU's Professor Terry Hughes described it as "a huge wake-up call because we all thought that coral bleaching was something that happened in the Pacific or the Caribbean, which are closer to the epicentre of El Nino events".

On Friday the department released a statement outlining why it had insisted on the deletions in the UN report. It claimed the report – subtitled "Destinations at risk" – had the potential to "cause considerable confusion".

"In particular, the world heritage committee had only six months earlier decided not to include the GBR on the in-danger list, and commended Australia for the Reef 2050 plan."

The report, it said, "confused two issues – the world heritage status of the sites and risks arising from climate change and tourism". And the clincher: "Recent experience in Australia had shown that negative commentary about the status of world heritage properties impacted on tourism."

The thinking that "negative commentary" about world heritage sites might damage tourism – and that it should therefore be downplayed, minimised or suppressed – is not without its own logic. But there's something faintly absurd about the belief that censorship is the best way to deal with unwelcome news from the reef, or that denial of anthropogenic climate change will change anything, particularly the spread and incidence of coral bleaching.

Doubtless to forestall accusations of political interference, the department claimed Greg Hunt had not been briefed "on this issue". But there's a long history of Coalition ministers downplaying international concerns about the GBR – even as they lend their support to the development of new coal mines and ports in Queensland which will likely damage the reef further.

Instances of whitewashing and information-burial (whether at the insistence of cabinet ministers or departmental secretaries) abound within the federal bureaucracy. Rarely, however, has camouflage been as blatant as that perpetrated by the Environment Department.

It's all proved ultimately futile – much as Coalition's silence and complacency about global warming will prove impractical. All it is doing is holding us back from taking the action needed.