Peter Ridd’s Fight For Academic Freedom In Climate Science

 
This week the Federal Court appeal hearing took place for the case of Peter Ridd, Australian scientist, who was fired by his university after he had criticized Great Barrier Reef science.

Australian scientist and journalist Jennifer Marohasy is following the case closely and reports about the latest chapter in this sad saga:

To be truly curious we must confess our ignorance. The person who knows everything would have no reason to question, no need to experiment.

If they went in search of evidence, it could only be to confirm what they already knew to be true. Knowledge then would be something that conferred prestige, rather than something to be built upon.

It was because of Peter Ridd that I had to know if all the coral reefs off Bowen were dead, or not. I went looking for mudflats with a Gloucester Island backdrop after the first judgment was handed down, which was back last April 2019.

Of course, Peter was cleared by Judge Vasta in the Federal Court of all the misconduct charges that had resulted in his sacking. Yet the University appealed, and that appeal was heard this last week.

The university appealed because the modern Australian university can’t let a comprehensive win by a dissident professor go unchallenged.

The modern university is all about prestige, and they probably thought that eventually, Peter would run out of money, the money needed to defend himself in the courts. But they don’t know Peter, or the team backing him.

Yesterday Peter thanked both the Union and also the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) for their support.

Peter also wrote:

    The Federal Court appeal hearing is over, and the lawyers have done their work. We now wait, possibly for some months, for the three judges to make the decision. In essence the appeal was about defining the limits of academic freedom, and what a university scientist can say, and how he or she might be allowed to say it.

    For example, was I allowed to say that due to systemic lack of quality assurance, scientific results from Great Barrier Reef science institutions was untrustworthy?

    JCU said I was not, [not] even if I believed it to be true.
    I am certainly not ashamed of anything I said, how I said it, or of my motivation.

    Irrespective of the outcome of the appeal, I can now focus on other matters.

    First, I will work tirelessly to raise the problem of hopeless quality assurance of the science of the GBR, including the effect of climate change on the reef. I am hoping that the Senate Inquiry will come out of Covid hibernation soon. I will also be pushing AIMS to release their missing 15 years of coral growth data, and JCU to release its buried report on possible fraud at its coral reef centre. It is shameful the contempt with which these institutions treat the people of the region.

    Second, I will work with those agricultural organisations that show a determination to fight, which is sadly far from all of them, to demonstrate that the recent unfair regulations on Queensland farmers are based on shoddy science.

    Third: I will work to encourage governments at both state and federal level to force universities to behave like genuine universities and not the glossy public relations companies that they have become. Governments must mandate the introduction of genuine and enforceable guidelines on academic freedom such as those outlined in the Commonwealth governments (unimplemented) review by ex-High Court judge, Robert French.

My IPA colleague Gideon Rozner has an important article in The Australian newspaper that provides much more context. The piece includes comment that:

    The Ridd case has resonated around Australia — and has attracted significant attention worldwide — for good reason. It confirms what many people have suspected for a long time: Australia’s universities are no longer institutions encouraging the rigorous exercise of intellectual freedom and the scientific method in pursuit of truth. Instead, they are now corporatist bureaucracies that rigidly enforce an unquestioning orthodoxy and are capable of hounding out anyone who strays outside their rigid groupthink.

    JCU is attempting to severely limit the intellectual freedom of a professor working at the university to question the quality of scientific research conducted by other academics at the institution. In other words, JCU is trying to curtail a critical function that goes to the core mission of universities: to engage in free intellectual inquiry via free and open, if often robust, debate. It is an absurd but inevitable consequence of universities seeking taxpayer-funded research grants, not truth.

    Worse still, it is taxpayers who are funding JCU’s court case. Following a Freedom of Information request by the Institute of Public Affairs, the university was forced to reveal that up until July last year, it had already spent $630,000 in legal fees. It would be safe to assume that university’s legal costs would have at least doubled since that time. The barrister who JCU employed in the Federal Court this week was Bret Walker SC, one of Australia’s most eminent lawyers. Barristers of his standing can command fees of $20,000 to $30,000 a day. And all of this is happening at the same time as the vice-chancellor of the university, Sandra Harding — who earns at least $975,000 a year — complains about the impact of government funding cuts.

    While Australian taxpayers are funding the university’s efforts to shut down freedom of speech, Ridd’s legal costs are paid for by him, his wife and voluntary donations from the public. As yet, neither the federal nor the Queensland Education Minister has publicly commented on whether JCU is appropriately spending taxpayers’ money and, so far, both have refused to intervene in the case.

Gideon Rozner is tireless and has also put together a fascinating 3-part podcast providing background into Peter Ridd’s fight for academic freedom. He interviewed me for this series.

The saga will continue for the next few years, whatever the judges decide. As will my interest in all things to do with the Great Barrier Reef.

<a href="https://climatechangedispatch.com/peter-ridd-fight-academic-freedom-climate-science/">SOURCE</a>   

Push to bring back Australia's lost oyster reefs

<i>This is one environmental progran that makes sense -- if the costs can be curtailed</i>

Australia's southern states had their own version of a Great Barrier Reef until it was erased almost entirely by the middle of last century.

Before European settlement, the flat oyster reef ecosystem that dominated southern waters lay like a wreath around the coastline in bays, inlets and harbours. But with the oyster beds harvested for food or broken up to be used in cement, these reefs were made functionally extinct.

Now scientists, recreational fishers, conservationists and local governments are calling for government funding to bring the reefs back. They say previous public investment in reef restoration has exceeded expectations and expanding it will be a cheap, quick and effective regional jobs stimulus.

What's more, bringing back an ecosystem from extinction to the point where it could regrow itself would be a world-first, James Cook University marine biologist Ian McLeod said.

"The reefs act as a catalyst for a new food chain … [they] support lots of fish and all sorts of marine life, seagrass, worms and crabs," Dr McLeod said.

"It's surprising how well things have been going" with the handful of installations already established, he said. Reefs have been rebuilt over recent years in places such as Victoria's Port Phillip Bay, South Australia's Gulf St Vincent, Western Australia's Oyster Harbour and Port Stephens in NSW.

Oysters, and the mussels that proliferate among them, cannot naturally recolonise without help. Since their natural habitat was removed, bays have silted over and they need a bedrock to cling on. However, it's an easy fix.

The only requirement is some quarried limestone, concrete or compressed old shells harvested from restaurants to serve as a bedrock, seeded with oyster sprat and dropped overboard.

The Nature Conservancy is leading the campaign for funding. With $100 million, 60 reefs – about a third of the natural range of shellfish reefs – could be brought back, generating 850 jobs in construction, fisheries and service industries, it said.

"The reefs come back like a miracle ecosystem and provide a huge environmental benefit," said Nature Conservancy Australia director Rich Gilmore.

"There's huge water quality benefits. Each oyster filters about 150 litres of water a day. And then there's the fish benefits too. One hectare of oyster reef can create 375 kilograms of fish a year."

Mr Gilmore said the pilot reef installations had met with "no community opposition, but have overwhelming community support".

Recreational Fishing Alliance of NSW president Stan Konstantaras said restoring oyster reefs was a "no-brainer".

"More habitat equals more fish," Mr Konstantaras said. "Places like Botany Bay have suffered huge amounts of habitat degradation … everywhere has been modified by development. Every estuary on the coast would benefit from having an oyster reef."

Dr McLeod said the world was at "peak oyster industry" when Australia was settled, with vast oyster industries in New York and London quickly harvesting all their native shellfish beds for food.

The same thing happened to Australia's flat oyster, which once flourished from Sydney to Tasmania and Perth, and the Sydney Rock oyster, which lives from around Noosa to Sydney. Limestone oyster reefs in bays and estuaries were also busted up and hauled ashore once Australia had exhausted its land-based limestone resources to make mortar and cement.

By the time the Second World War rolled around, the flat oyster reefs were gone.

<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/push-to-bring-back-australia-s-lost-oyster-reefs-20200529-p54xo6.html">SOURCE</a>   

 

Science and free speech under challenge from Greenie correctness

A court case this week in front of three judges of the Federal Court was a further stage in Peter Ridd’s fight for freedom of speech on climate change. The case, James Cook University v Peter Vincent Ridd, has enormous significance for the future of Australia’s universities and scientific institutions.

Ridd’s case is a dramatic illustration of the free speech crisis in Australian universities, not least around matters as politically and emotionally charged as climate change. It will determine, in effect, whether universities have the ability to censor opinions that threaten their sources of funding. It is one of the most important cases for intellectual freedom in the history of Australian jurisprudence.

The Ridd case has resonated around Australia — and has attracted significant attention worldwide — for good reason. It confirms what many people have suspected for a long time: Australia’s universities are no longer institutions encouraging the rigorous exercise of intellectual freedom and the scientific method in pursuit of truth. Instead, they are now corporatist bureaucracies that rigidly enforce an unquestioning orthodoxy, and are capable of hounding out anyone who strays outside their rigid groupthink.

JCU is attempting to severely limit the intellectual freedom of a professor working at the university to question the quality of scientific research conducted by other academics at the institution. In other words, JCU is trying to curtail a critical function that goes to the core mission of universities: to engage in free intellectual inquiry via free and open, if often robust, debate. It is an absurd but inevitable consequence of universities seeking taxpayer-funded research grants, not truth.

Worse still, it is taxpayers who are funding JCU’s court case. Following a Freedom of Information request by the Institute of Public Affairs, the university was forced to reveal that up until July last year, it had already spent $630,000 in legal fees. It would be safe to assume that university’s legal costs would have at least doubled since that time. The barrister who JCU employed in the Federal Court this week was Bret Walker SC, one of Australia’s most eminent lawyers. Barristers of his standing can command fees of $20,000 to $30,000 a day. And all of this is happening at the same time as the vice-chancellor of the university, Sandra Harding — who earns at least $975,000 a year — complains about the impact of government funding cuts.

While Australian taxpayers are funding the university’s efforts to shut down freedom of speech, Ridd’s legal costs are paid for by him, his wife and voluntary donations from the public. As yet, neither the federal nor the Queensland Education Minister has publicly commented on whether JCU is appropriately spending taxpayers’ money and, so far, both have refused to intervene in the case.

Ridd describes himself as a “luke-warmist”. “I think carbon dioxide will have a small effect on the Earth’s temperature,” he told an IPA podcast recently. “But it won’t be dangerous.” He has been studying the Great Barrier Reef since the early 1980s and was even, at one point, president of his local chapter of the Wildlife Preservation Society.

But Ridd is sceptical about the conventional wisdom that the Great Barrier Reef is dying because of climate change. “I don’t think the reef is in any particular trouble at all,” he says. “In fact, I think it’s probably one of the best protected ecosystems in the world and virtually pristine.”

The problems Ridd’s views cause for JCU are obvious. The university claims to be a leading institution when it comes to reef science, and has several joint ventures with taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

Ridd challenged his sacking in the Federal Circuit Court on the basis that the university’s enterprise agreement (which determined his employment conditions) specifically guaranteed his right to “pursue critical and open inquiry”, “express unpopular or controversial views”, and even “express opinions about the operations of JCU and higher education policy more generally”. In September last year, Ridd won his case as the court found he had been unlawfully sacked and he was awarded $1.2m in damages and compensation for lost earnings.

The case in the Federal Court this week was an appeal by JCU against that decision. At issue was whether the intellectual freedom clauses in the enterprise agreement covering JCU staff protected his criticism of quality assurance issues in reef science at the university. The university alleges that in going public with his concerns that organisations such as the ARC Centre “cannot be trusted” on reef science, Ridd committed several breaches of the university’s staff code of conduct, with its vague, faintly Orwellian requirements to act “collegiately”, and to “uphold the integrity and good reputation of the university”.

In other words, even though the enterprise agreement specifically declared that staff had the right to intellectual freedom, it was for the university to determine the limits of what that freedom actually permitted. If it is accepted, it will be the death knell of free intellectual inquiry in Australia’s universities. As Ridd’s barrister, Stuart Wood QC, said to the Federal Court: “If you can’t say that certain science cannot be trusted because it is ‘discourteous’ and ‘not collegial’, then you cannot call out scientific misconduct and fraud. It’s not just the end of academic freedom, it’s the end of the scientific method. At that point, JCU ceases to be a university and becomes a public relations outfit.”

An academic who doesn’t have the ability to challenge the research findings of their colleagues because those questions threaten the university’s funding doesn’t have intellectual freedom. And if academics know they could get sacked, as Ridd was, for asking uncomfortable questions, they will stop asking uncomfortable questions.

Academics should of course be open to criticism — particularly for some of their more outlandish conclusions — but as a matter of public policy it is vital that universities be places where bad ideas can be expressed as well as good ones. The difference between the former and the latter should be resolved by free and open debate, not opaque “disciplinary processes”. We may not like what university professors say, but a strong university sector requires that we defend to the death their right to say it.

It is up to the Federal Court now to decide exactly how far universities can go to censor and sack their staff. But in Ridd, James Cook University has one professor who will not go quietly.

<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-death-of-the-scientific-method/news-story/511d5a6bb47757e27e10385a8da3ffa4">SOURCE</a>   

A Queensland university that unlawfully sacked a professor for criticising colleagues for their research on the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef is back in court

James Cook University is appealing the Brisbane Federal Circuit Court's finding that it contravened the Fair Work Act when it dismissed Peter Vincent Ridd in 2018.

Judge Salvatore Vasta made 28 findings in April 2019 against the university, which censured Prof Ridd for remarks against a coral researcher, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

The university was later ordered to pay Prof Ridd more than $1.2m for lost income, lost future income and other costs.

Before sacking the geophysicist, the university alleged Prof Ridd had violated its code of conduct during an August 2017 interview on Sky News when he remarked some of the university's research could "no longer be trusted".

It also alleged Prof Ridd wrote of a researcher in an email to a student: "It is not like he has any clue about the weather. He will give the normal doom science about the (Great Barrier Reef)".

Judge Vasta found the university's actions, including the dismissal, were unlawful.

"Incredibly, the university has not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom," he wrote in his findings.

"In reality, intellectual freedom is the cornerstone of this core mission of all institutions of higher learning."

Freedom of expression and the interpretation of the university's code of conduct were the focus of the appeal submissions on Tuesday.

The university's lawyer, Bret Walker SC, said the university was responsible for enforcing standards of behaviour to protect intellectual freedom and the code of conduct.

Mr Walker said staff had the right to intellectual freedom and the right to express certain views but not bully, harass or intimidate others.

"Freedom .... is not without limit, restriction or standard," he told the court.

The two-day hearing continues.

<a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/uni-appeals-over-qld-academics-sacking-034707940--spt.html">SOURCE</a>   

Great Barrier Reef: Same old same old scares

Every couple of years we get the whines we read below:  The reef is being destroyed by global warming and farming.  But the reef is still there.  The prophecies of doom don't eventuate.

One should in fact gravely doubt the findings below.  Peter Ridd has shown that the JCU people routinely exaggerate reef damage.  There are always bare spots on the reef and these are attributed to global warming.  

But that is not so. It is the Crown of Thorns starfish that is responsible for most reef damage.  But from an aircraft you can't see starfish so the damage is all put down to global warming.  What you read below is therefore a travesty of science.  No effort was made to exclude competing explanations -- which is utterly basic in science.  They are propagandists, not scientists.


In another sad blow for the Australian environment, it has now been confirmed that once again climate change has taken its toll on one of its greatest natural wonders - the Great Barrier Reef.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system, home to some 600 species of coral.

But a recent aerial study has confirmed scientists' worst fears, concluding that the reef is experiencing its third large-scale bleaching event in five years.

Coral bleaching is the direct result of warming sea temperatures, which causes corals to become stressed. In this situation, coral expels the symbiotic algae which lives within its tissues, which is responsible for its bright colour.

Usually bright and colourful jewels among the reef, bleaching leaves a stripped-bare skeleton of the coral behind.

Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, led a team of researchers to assess the extent of coral bleaching across the reef.

Professor Hughes said: “We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Barrier Reef region.

“For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors."

Aerial surveys concluded that while some areas of the reef have remained unscathed, large swathes in other regions have been severely bleached, casting ominous doubt over the reef's future.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has described the phenomenon as a “matter of huge concern”.

So in order to preserve and protect the Great Barrier Reef for years to come, what is the solution?

How can the Great Barrier Reef recover?

Dr Mark Eakin, Coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, said while people “continue to spew carbon dioxide” the current phenomenon will become a much more common occurrence.

He said: “This is the third widespread, severe coral bleaching in less than five years.

“As long as we continue to spew carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, corals will continue to bleach and die.

“Local efforts to reduce pollution on the reef and to restore reefs piecemeal help keep corals alive.

“If we want to save the Great Barrier Reef and other reefs around the world, we have to move off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

According to Dr Richard K.F. Unsworth, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology at Swansea University, farming practices needs a significant overhaul in order for the reef to survive.

He said: “Although climate change is the primary cause of bleaching, the capacity of the reef to recover after bleaching events is improved when the water quality is high.

“This means low levels of nutrients, sediments and contaminants such as herbicides.

“The water quality in many areas of the inshore Great Barrier reef remains poor principally because of poor farming practices, reducing the capacity of the reef to recover after bleaching.”

Dr Unsworth added: “For the reef to have any chance of survival in the long-term, the water quality of the Great Barrier Reef region needs to improve through better farming practices, and global carbon dioxide emissions need to reduce rapidly.

Phil North at Dive Worldwide said some divers fear it “is not what it once was”, but all is not lost for the reef yet.

He added: “This having been said, the reef is vast. It is the largest living structure on earth that can be viewed from space.

“Not all of it is destroyed and there are some parts that are still quite beautiful.”

While the current bleaching event is undoubtedly a setback for the reef, Great Barrier Reef Foundation Managing Director Anna Marsden said the reef is a “resilient ecosystem” which can still recover.

She added: “We know that on mildly or moderately bleached reefs, there is a good chance most bleached corals will recover and survive.

“It’s heartening to hear that some of the key tourism reefs in the north and central areas are amongst those likely to bounce back from lesser levels of bleaching.”

<a href="https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/1265852/coral-reefs-great-barrier-reef-global-warming-coral-bleaching-climate-change">SOURCE</a>   

NOAA’s Bogus Climate Scare: “Near-Annual” Great Barrier Reef Bleaching

Climate alarmists are back with a new and far-fetched Great Barrier Reef scare, just a few years after their most recent claims of massive coral death in the Reef proved false. No, alarmists, we are not entering a period of “near-annual” widespread bleaching.

Mark Eakin, coordinator of Coral Reef Watch at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Australian edition of The Guardian that rising ocean temperatures may have pushed the world’s coral reefs into annual “mass bleaching” events from which corals can’t recover.

However, this year’s bleaching hardly qualifies as the “mass bleaching” Eakin describes. Even The Guardian acknowledged, “Many areas of the Great Barrier Reef are known to have experienced severe bleaching this summer, likely killing many corals, but others, including tourist reefs near Cairns and the Whitsundays, only experienced mild bleaching. Most offshore reefs in the far north escaped bleaching entirely.”

The reefs in the far north, which have “escaped bleaching entirely,” are the ones closest to the equator and thus in the warmest water.

"Climate at a Glance" provides a summary of the scientific evidence regarding coral reefs and climate change. The summary documents that corals have existed continuously for the past 40 million years, surviving and evolving in temperatures and carbon dioxide levels significantly higher than what exists today. Indeed, corals thrive in warm water, not cold water. Among the myriad factors thought to have driven recent coral bleaching episodes are, “oxybenzone (a chemical found in sunscreen), sediment runoff from nearby coastal lands, and cold temperatures like those recorded in 2010 off the Florida coast.”

Australian coral reef expert Dr. Peter Ridd recently debunked claims in 2016 that up to 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef died during a bleaching event. “At the extreme, 8 percent died,” Ridd reported.

“There’s about the same amount of coral now as there was in 1995,” Ridd added.

“Of all the ecosystems in the world, in fact, the Reef is the one best able to adapt to increasing [temperatures], whether that’s natural or whether that’s anthropogenic. Half a degree temperature change certainly doesn’t cause mass bleaching events.”

Still other peer reviewed studies have indicated modestly warmer oceans cause an expansion of corals’ ranges. For instance, a team of Japanese scientists published a study in the peer-reviewed Geophysical Research Letters indicating corals off the coast of Japan expanded their range as water temperatures increased. The scientists, with access to 80 years of national records from temperate areas of Japan, found corals were expanding poleward as waters warmed, reporting, “[f]our major coral species categories, including two key species for reef formation in tropical areas, showed poleward range expansions since the 1930s, whereas no species demonstrated southward range shrinkage or local extinction.”

<a href="http://climaterealism.com/2020/04/noaas-bogus-climate-scare-near-annual-great-barrier-reef-bleaching/">SOURCE</a>   

Like polar bears, coral reefs are doing fine

 
Corals are animals, actually closely related to jelly fish but of course differing in that they have a limestone skeleton made up of calcium carbonate. Their growth rates can be studied to give us knowledge of the ocean and its sea level over thousands of years.

They have lived throughout the oceans of our planet for many thousand years. Over those many years they have experienced both much warmer and much colder periods of geologic time. The bleaching that they have experienced in the view of many climate alarmists is not a sign of their destruction or in fact ill health. It is not a sign that the end of the world as we know it is in sight,

The simple truth is that when a coral experiences any number of environmental changes which could be the chemistry of its surrounding water or its local temperature, the algae that inhabit and feed a coral are likely to find the environment less suitable and leave for greener pastures.

The change in color of the coral which alarmists call “bleaching “ is a result of one group of bacteria leaving and then another group of bacteria taking its place. When the first resident group is leaving the coral becomes whiter and as a new group moves in the coral takes on a new color. This new color is often mistaken as the corals death knell. The algae that moves in not only provides it a new color but is also the corals source of the food it needs to live.

While the Polar Bear has been the face of the global warming delusion, coral reefs have been close behind as an animal that will eventually go extinct if we do not stop using fossil fuels, emitting carbon dioxide and warming the planet, its atmosphere and its oceans. The reality is anything but that.

The Great Barrier Reef, stretching 1400 miles along the coast of Queensland, Australia is also a prominent “poster child “ for the supposed damage mankind is doing to our Earth. It is actually composed of nearly 3000 separate coral reefs, can be seen from space and is perhaps Australia’s greatest tourist attraction. It’s ultimate destruction by man-caused global warming (now called Climate Change of course), is used regularly to pull at the heartstrings of those who sadly buy into the delusion.

In fact, it is probable that no reef has received greater scrutiny, and been the subject of more research than the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), especially since the clamor to save it hit warp speed.

The late Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow of the Australian Institute of Public Affairs, who was considered the world’s leading expert on the reef, wrote extensively about it in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts. He explained that to quantify the trend in live coral cover of the GBR between 1995 and 2009, which the International Panel on Climate Change contends was the warmest decade and a half experienced by the planet in the past thousand years, annual surveys were performed. Marine biologists surveyed coastal communities each year on 47 reefs in six latitudes across about 700 miles of the GBR. They took samples at varying depths between 20 and 30 feet.

They found that coral cover increased in about half the regions and decreased in the other half as one would expect when nature operates without human intervention. Overall they concluded that coral cover was stable and that there was no evidence of “consistent system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995”.

Other research throughout the world has confirmed that corals are capable of reproductive activities under extreme environmental conditions. There is now a growing body of evidence to support the notion that corals inhabiting more thermally unstable habitats outperform reefs characterized by more stable temperatures.

In sum and a little more erudite: coral bleaching is an adaptive strategy for shuffling symbiont genotypes to create associations better adapted to new environmental conditions, as opposed to a breakdown of stable relationships that serves as a symptom of degenerating environmental conditions.

In the words of the late Robert Carter “the Great Barrier Reef is in fine fettle”.

<a href="https://www.cfact.org/2020/03/14/like-polar-bears-coral-reefs-are-doing-fine/">SOURCE</a>  

New wave of coral bleaching raises concerns for Great Barrier Reef

Given the Greenie lies about the last bleaching  -- Peter Ridd won a court case over his criticisms of them --  this report is fit only to be ignored

Perhaps the most amusing part of the previous scare was when the Federal minister visited the reef to see for herself how bad it was.  She found it looked fine.  We read:  "The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has supported Environment Minister Sussan Ley's appraisal that the reef is "good" and has "a vibrant future"."

They completely walked back their cries of doom.  I guess not all Greenies are crooks but most of them seem to be


Another wave of coral bleaching is hitting the Great Barrier Reef as temperature levels surge above average.

The federal government’s lead reef protection agency on Wednesday discovered significant bleaching on three reefs in the far north of the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem.

“That is the first time we’ve seen significant bleaching so far this summer,” said David Wachenfeld, chief scientist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

“It is a confirmation of our growing concern about what is happening out on the reef at the moment.” Heat stress that has built up on the far northern, central and southern parts of the reef over the summer has intensified over the last week. “These levels of heat stress are definitely capable of causing coral bleaching and we are now at a heightened level of alertness for what is happening out there in the park,” Dr Wachenfeld said.

A bleaching warning has been issued for large parts of the Torres Strait and far northern management areas of the marine park, where significant bleaching across multiple hot spots is likely.

Most of the area covered by the marine park was 0.5 to 1.5C above average as of February 11, with some central and southern parts being 2 to 3C warmer. “February is the hottest month of the year on the reef so these anomalies are really very concerning,” Dr Wachenfeld said.

The reef authority has been told of bleaching in other areas and is sending staff to survey the damage.

Further heat stress is expected over the next few weeks as temperatures remain high.

SOURCE  

James Cook university crookedness in support of global warming continues

We see now why JCU resisted Peter Ridd's call for validation  of their alarming "dying reef" studies.  Ridd knew that they were fudging the facts but, in good scientific form, did not say exactly that.  He just called for their studies to be validated, where replication is a major form of validation.

JCU illegally fired him for saying that and are still challenging him in the courts.  After one verdict against them, you would think that they would cave in.  But they cannot afford to. Admitting that they had no legal grounds to fire him would open up a whole can of worms about why they DID fire him.

Replication studies are the death of crooked or negligent research and the need for them has come to the fore in recent years after lots of high profile studies in both medicine and psychology have failed careful replication. Much of what we thought we knew was wrong.

So a big replication of some JCU research is of great interest. And the replication was an abject failure.  The JCU results could not be repeated.  Peter Ridd implied that their findings about the reef were nebulous and we now hear that their findings about reef fish were nebulous.  It's a disturbing coincidence.

The chief JCU author on this occasion complains that the replication was not exact but the differences he points to should have been trivial in their effects.  If an effect is real it should emerge in a variety of contexts.  It did not

My best guess about how JCU got their alarming results is that they used much higher levels of acidification than is realistic. Less detectably, they may have manipulated every one of their parameters until they got the result they wanted


Over the past decade, marine scientists published a series of studies warning that humanity’s burgeoning carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could cause yet another devastating problem. They reported that seawater acidified by rising CO2—already known to threaten organisms with carbonate shells and skeletons, such as corals—could also cause profound, alarming changes in the behavior of fish on tropical reefs. The studies, some of which made headlines, found that acidification can disorient fish, make them hyperactive or bolder, alter their vision, and lead them to become attracted to, rather than repelled by, the smell of predators. Such changes, researchers noted, could cause populations to plummet.

But in a Nature paper published today, researchers from Australia, Canada, Norway, and Sweden challenge a number of those findings. In a major, 3-year effort that studied six fish species, they could not replicate three widely reported behavioral effects of ocean acidification. The replication team notes that many of the original studies came from the same relatively small group of researchers and involved small sample sizes. That and other “methodological or analytical weaknesses” may have led the original studies astray, they argue.

“It’s an exceptionally thorough replication effort,” says Tim Parker, a biologist and an advocate for replication studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Marine scientist Andrew Esbaugh of the University of Texas, Austin, agrees that it’s “excellent, excellent work.”

But marine biologist Philip Munday of James Cook University, Townsville, in Australia, a co-author of most of the papers the Nature study tried to replicate, says there are “fundamental methodological differences” between the original and replication studies. “Replication of results in science is critically important, but this means doing things in the same way, not in vastly different ways,” he wrote in an email.

Munday helped launch research on the behavioral impacts of ocean acidification together with Danielle Dixson, now at the University of Delaware. In 2009, their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that orange clownfish (Amphiprion percula) reared in seawater with elevated CO2 levels no longer recognized the chemical cues that could help them find a suitable habitat on the reef. (“Losing Nemo” was a popular headline for stories about the paper.) That study was followed by dozens of others showing similarly striking, and often large, behavioral effects in clownfish and other species, mostly from tropical waters.

Timothy Clark, the first author on the Nature paper and a marine scientist at Deakin University, Geelong, in Australia, says he initially set out to probe the physiological mechanisms behind those behavior changes. But after he failed to reproduce the changes—let alone explain them—he invited other scientists to set up a systematic replication attempt. It focused on three reported effects of acidified waters: making reef fish prone to swim toward their predators’ chemical cues rather than fleeing them, increasing their activity, and altering the fish’s tendency to favor either their left or right sides in some behaviors. The researchers didn’t seek to repeat each previous experiment one for one, but Clark estimates the entire effort covers the research reported in at least 20 studies.

Overall, the group reports, exposing fish to seawater with acidification levels predicted for the end of the century had “negligible” effects on all three behaviors. The Nature paper also reports the results of a statistical analysis called a bootstrapping simulation, designed to calculate the probability that Munday and co-authors could have found the striking data on chemical signal preference presented in seven papers. The authors say the odds are exceedingly low: “0 in 10,000,” as they put it.

Clark declined to elaborate on the implications of the bootstrap finding, but says he “would encourage any other avenues of investigation to find out what has caused the stark differences between our findings and theirs.” Esbaugh calls the bootstrap analysis “a little concerning,” but he objects to the “somewhat nefarious undercurrent” in the Nature paper. “I know both of these research groups,” he says, “and they’re both very, very good.”

Munday stands by his papers and plans to detail many “critically important” differences in the designs of the two sets of experiments in a response to the Nature paper. For instance, he notes the replication group didn’t study clownfish, used different water volumes and experiment durations, and used a different setup to study chemical cue avoidance. Dixson—who presented her findings at a 2015 White House meeting—also says methodological differences make a direct comparison between the studies “inappropriate.” But the Nature authors say some methods had to be adapted because they didn’t work as described in the original papers. They add that they could not catch enough clownfish, so used six other species also used in the previous studies.

Replication studies often cause quibbles about methods, Parker says. But, he argues, “If the original finding is reasonably robust,” then researchers using even somewhat different methods should be able to replicate it. And he notes that the replication team went to great lengths to be transparent. Unlike the original authors, the team released video of each experiment, for example, as well as the bootstrap analysis code. “That level of transparency certainly increases my confidence in this replication,” Parker says.

Researchers say the Nature paper allays one fear about the impact of ocean acidification. But Josefin Sundin of Uppsala University in Sweden, the Nature paper’s last author, stresses that climate change still poses a serious threat to sea life. “If the oceans were as acidic as we have been testing, it would also be much warmer, and that’s a huge issue,” she says.

Although replication efforts have blossomed in psychology, biomedicine, and other fields, they’re still rare in ecology, says biologist Shinichi Nakagawa of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The new paper “sets a great example,” says Nakagawa, who hopes it “will instigate and inspire more replication studies—not to prove previous results wrong but to make our science more robust and trustworthy.”

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The journal abstract

Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes

Timothy D. Clark et al.

Abstract

The partial pressure of CO2 in the oceans has increased rapidly over the past century, driving ocean acidification and raising concern for the stability of marine ecosystems1,2,3. Coral reef fishes are predicted to be especially susceptible to end-of-century ocean acidification on the basis of several high-profile papers4,5 that have reported profound behavioural and sensory impairments—for example, complete attraction to the chemical cues of predators under conditions of ocean acidification.

Here, we comprehensively and transparently show that—in contrast to previous studies—end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes, such as the avoidance of chemical cues from predators, fish activity levels and behavioural lateralization (left–right turning preference).

Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. Together, our findings indicate that the reported effects of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fishes are not reproducible, suggesting that behavioural perturbations will not be a major consequence for coral reef fishes in high CO2 oceans.

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Note: At roughly the same time as I first put up the above (on Facebook) Peter Ridd himself put up a critique very similar to mine above. Peter also mentions the dodgy work on Lionfish done by Oona Lonnstedt, a PhD student at JCU. Making stuff up would appear to be a major feature of the culture at JCU

Great Barrier Reef truth may be inconvenient but it is out there


PETER RIDD points out where the Australian Institute of Marine Science has got it wrong.  They cannot admit it or it would completely destroy their most trumpeted claims.  Their allies at JCU even fired Ridd to protect their claim of reef damage.  It's now political.  A lot of careers are at risk if Ridd is right

We have no data of Great Barrier Reef coral growth rates for the past 15 years. Has growth collapsed as the Australian Institute of Marine Science claims?

Is the Great Barrier Reef being affected by climate change, the acidification of the ocean, and the pesticides, sediment and fertiliser from farms?

One way to tell is to measure the coral growth rates. Our science institutions claim that coral growth rates collapsed between 1990 and 2005 due to stress from human pollution.

Remarkably, despite having data of coral growth rates for the last few centuries, there is no data for the last 15 years. We don’t know how the GBR has fared since 2005.

Corals have yearly growth rings similar to tree rings. By drilling cores from large corals, scientists can measure the growth rates over the life of the coral.

The yearly rings are roughly 10 millimetres thick so a coral many metres across can be hundreds of years old. In a landmark study, AIMS took cores from more than 300 corals on the GBR and concluded that for the past 300 years coral growth was stable, but in 1990 there was an unprecedented and dramatic collapse of 15 per cent.

With Thomas Stieglitz and Eduardo da Silva, I reanalysed the AIMS data and, in our opinion, AIMS made two significant mistakes.

The first was incorrect measurement of the near-surface coral growth rings on most of the corals that were giving data from 1990 to 2005. After years of argument AIMS has begrudgingly agreed that it made this mistake. The other problem is that it used much smaller and younger corals for the 1990-2005 data compared with the mostly very large and old corals of the pre-1990 data — it changed its methodology and this is what caused the apparent drop at 1990. When we corrected this problem, the fall in growth rate disappeared.

AIMS continues to dispute this second error and still claims there was a worrying reduction in growth rate from 1990 to 2005. This disputed work is quoted in influential government documents such as last year’s reef outlook report. I am not cherrypicking a minor problem. It is a fundamental problem with a keystone piece of GBR science.

We thus have a situation that arguably the most important data that tells us about the health of the GBR is highly questionable from 1990 to 2005.

What is far worse is that we have no data since 2005.

The science institutions have not only failed to investigate probable major errors in their work, they have also failed to update measurement of this fundamental parameter while claiming, in increasingly shrill tones, that the GBR is in peril.

But ironically, this failure provides a fantastic opportunity

The coral challenge.

For the past 15 years we don’t know what growth rates have been. It is easy to fill in the missing data, and check the previous data, by taking more cores from the reef. AIMS has effectively stated that coral growth is falling at 1 per cent a year.

According to the AIMS curve, growth should now be 30 per cent lower than it was in 1990 — which would be a disastrous fall. I predict it has stayed the same. Either way, it would be nice to know what has happened — is the reef really in danger or not?

But a second and almost equally valuable outcome of measuring the missing data is that it will be an acid test of the trustworthiness of our major science institutions. AIMS has dug in its heels and denied it made a major methodological mistake. Let’s do the experiment and see if it is right, or untrustworthy.

Same for me. If this measurement is done, and done properly, and it shows there has been a major reduction in coral growth rates, I will accept I was wrong and that there is a disaster happening on the reef.

The coral challenge is a measurement that will have to be done sooner or later. The longer it is neglected the worse it will look to the public. Farmers accused of killing the reef are especially interested.

We need to make sure these new measurements are done properly and without any questions about reliability. They must be supervised by a group of scientists that are acceptable to both sides of the agricultural debate on the reef to ensure the methodology and its execution are impeccable.

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