• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Australian tourism head attacks scientists for publishing science on coral bleaching.

Threegoofs

Sophisticated man-about-town
Supporting Member
DP Veteran
Joined
Mar 31, 2013
Messages
63,232
Reaction score
28,538
Location
The city Fox News viewers are afraid to travel to
Gender
Male
Political Leaning
Undisclosed
Yep.

All those protests about how corals are doing just fine on the Great Barrier Reef that the denialists have been posting over the last few years.... looks like its driven by the Australian Tourism Board, as we all suspected.

This is a classic case of shooting the messenger, but as we've seen here, the denialists have been all over that technique for years.

Great Barrier Reef tourism spokesman attacks scientist over slump in visitors | Environment | The Guardian
Great Barrier Reef tourism spokesman attacks scientist over slump in visitors
Col McKenzie calls on government to stop funding work of Terry Hughes, saying tourists ‘won’t do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead’


A Queensland tourism representative has called one of the Great Barrier Reef’s leading researchers “a dick”, blaming the professor for a downturn in tourism growth at the state’s greatest natural asset.

Col McKenzie, the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a group that represents more than 100 businesses in the Great Barrier Reef, has written to the federal government asking it to stop funding the work of Professor Terry Hughes, claiming his comments were “misleading” and damaging the tourism industry.

But the Australian Conservation Foundation said tourism representatives and operators like McKenzie should stop blaming scientists for reporting what was happening to the reef and start targeting major polluters to ensure change.

Hughes, who serves as the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the reef, has been warning of the damage rising water temperatures have been inflicting on the reef for years.

While not disagreeing there was work to be done on the reef’s health, McKenzie accused Hughes of exaggerating the damage, which he said has been detrimental to the region’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry.

“I think Terry Hughes is a dick,” he 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.”

McKenzie said in 2016, tourism growth in the region had returned to pre-global financial crisis levels, before “that growth died” in 2017, which he blamed on Hughes “negative comments”.

In April 2016 Hughes made international headlines after releasing his final report on extensive aerial and underwater surveys, which showed that of the surveyed reefs (911 individual reefs), only 7% had escaped coral bleaching.
 
Yep.

All those protests about how corals are doing just fine on the Great Barrier Reef that the denialists have been posting over the last few years.... looks like its driven by the Australian Tourism Board, as we all suspected.

This is a classic case of shooting the messenger, but as we've seen here, the denialists have been all over that technique for years.

Great Barrier Reef tourism spokesman attacks scientist over slump in visitors | Environment | The Guardian

Actually quite wrong.

Professor Peter Ridd leads the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia and has authored over 100 scientific papers.


Peter Ridd hits back at @jcu James Cook University – hard

This is a MUST READ op-ed. WUWT readers will recall that just a few days ago, we spearheaded an effort to make a legal fund go “over the top” to help Professor Ridd fight back against the bureaucracy at James Cook University that was censoring him. Today, he penned an op-ed that appeared on Fox…
Continue reading →
 
From the link in #2:

Around the world, people have heard about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef: some 133,000 square miles of magnificent coral stretching for 1,400 miles off the northeast coast of Australia.
The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging.
Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true.
 
Last edited:
More from the link in #2:

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.
Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.
These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.
By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.
The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.
Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.
 
More from the link in #2:

The conflicting realities of the Great Barrier Reef point to a deeper problem. In science, consensus is not the same thing as truth. But consensus has come to play a controlling role in many areas of modern science. And if you go against the consensus you can suffer unpleasant consequences.
The main system of science quality control is called peer review. Nowadays, it usually takes the form of a couple of anonymous reviewing scientists having a quick check over the work of a colleague in the field.
Peer review is commonly understood as painstaking re-examination by highly qualified experts in academia that acts as a real check on mistaken work. It isn’t. In the real world, peer review is often cursory and not always even knowledgeable. It might take reviewers only a morning to do.
Scientific results are rarely reanalyzed and experiments are not replicated. The types of checks that would be routine in private industry are just not done.
I have asked the question: Is this good enough quality control to make environmental decisions worth billions of dollars that are now adversely affecting every major industry in northeast Australia?
Our sugar industry has been told to make dramatic reductions in fertilizer application, potentially reducing productivity; our ports have dredging restrictions that threaten their productivity; scientists demand that coal mines be closed; and tourists are scared away because the reef is supposedly almost dead – not worth seeing anymore.
Last August I made this point on Sky News in Australia in promotion of a chapter I wrote in “Climate Change: The Facts 2017,” published by the Australian free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.
“The basic problem is that we can no longer trust the scientific organizations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies … the science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more,” I said.
 
I wonder why the scientists don’t listen to the experts in the tourist industry and stop forming organizations devoted to solving this nonexistent issue?

Coral Scientists Eye ?Radical Intervention? To Save The World?s Reefs

Except there are scientists who disagree. From the link in #2:

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.
Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.
These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.
By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.
The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.
Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.
 
Seems to me that respectable scientists wouldn’t be writiNg blog posts at WUWT.

Your prejudice is showing. The "blog post" is actually a reprint of an op-ed that appeared on Fox News online[FONT=pt-serif-1, pt-serif-2, sans-serif]. Professor Ridd is involved on an ongoing freedom of speech case against James Cook University, where he is a member of the faculty.[/FONT]
 
Your prejudice is showing. The "blog post" is actually a reprint of an op-ed that appeared on Fox News online[FONT=pt-serif-1, pt-serif-2, sans-serif]. Professor Ridd is involved on an ongoing freedom of speech case against James Cook University, where he is a member of the faculty.[/FONT]

Seems like respectable scientists wouldn’t have to do op-eds for smarmy news sites like Fox News online.
 
Seems like respectable scientists wouldn’t have to do op-eds for smarmy news sites like Fox News online.

Uninformed commenters would do well to respect those fighting for academic freedom and free inquiry.

Prof Peter Ridd - Research Portfolio - James Cook University

https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/peter.ridd/


Oct 9, 2014 - Peter Ridd is a geophysicist with the following interests: coastal oceanography, the effects of sediments on coral reefs, instrument development, geophysical sensing of the earth, past and future climates, atmospheric modelling. In addition with his group in the Marine Geophysics Laboratory ...

[h=3]Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great ...[/h]www.foxnews.com/.../science-or-silence-my-battle-to-question-doomsayers-about-great-...
4 days ago - What we do know for certain is that we have an academic freedom crisis that threatens the true life of science and threatens to smother our failing university system. Professor Peter Ridd leads the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia and has authored over 100 scientific papers.




[h=3]Reef row scientist Peter Ridd snubs uni gag order - The Australian[/h]https://www.theaustralian.com.au/...peter-ridd.../b532d613d6466dd2d598209a5d27cb0...
Feb 1, 2018 - Marine scientist Peter Ridd has refused to accept a formal censure and gag order from James Cook University and expanded his Federal Court action to defend academic freedoms and free speech. A revised statement of claim alleges JCU trawled through private email conversations in a bid to bolster its ...



 
More from the link in #2:

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.
Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.
These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.
By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.
The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.
Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.

He is a huge liar. Coral bleaching is known to be caused by overheated water and is directly caused by AGW's heating of the oceans. It is not "cyclical" except that it happens when water temperature reaches the breaking point. No where are the effects of AGW so clear as in this chart of sea surface temperatures. 90% of the excess heat from AGW is absorbed by our seas.

sea-surface-temp-figure1-2016.png
 
Uninformed commenters would do well to respect those fighting for academic freedom and free inquiry.

Prof Peter Ridd - Research Portfolio - James Cook University

https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/peter.ridd/


Oct 9, 2014 - Peter Ridd is a geophysicist with the following interests: coastal oceanography, the effects of sediments on coral reefs, instrument development, geophysical sensing of the earth, past and future climates, atmospheric modelling. In addition with his group in the Marine Geophysics Laboratory ...

[h=3]Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great ...[/h]www.foxnews.com/.../science-or-silence-my-battle-to-question-doomsayers-about-great-...
4 days ago - What we do know for certain is that we have an academic freedom crisis that threatens the true life of science and threatens to smother our failing university system. Professor Peter Ridd leads the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia and has authored over 100 scientific papers.




[h=3]Reef row scientist Peter Ridd snubs uni gag order - The Australian[/h]https://www.theaustralian.com.au/...peter-ridd.../b532d613d6466dd2d598209a5d27cb0...
Feb 1, 2018 - Marine scientist Peter Ridd has refused to accept a formal censure and gag order from James Cook University and expanded his Federal Court action to defend academic freedoms and free speech. A revised statement of claim alleges JCU trawled through private email conversations in a bid to bolster its ...




He is lying and a paid shill for sure. We know what causes bleaching and it is not "normal".

Two-thirds of the corals in the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef have died in the reef’s worst-ever bleaching event, according to our latest underwater surveys.

On some reefs in the north, nearly all the corals have died. However the impact of bleaching eases as we move south, and reefs in the central and southern regions (around Cairns and Townsville and southwards) were much less affected, and are now recovering.

In 2015 and 2016, the hottest years on record, we have witnessed at first hand the threat posed by human-caused climate change to the world’s coral reefs.

Heat stress from record high summer temperatures damages the microscopic algae (zooxanthellae) that live in the tissues of corals, turning them white.

After they bleach, these stressed corals either slowly regain their zooxanthellae and colour as temperatures cool off, or else they die.

The Great Barrier Reef bleached severely for the first time in 1998, then in 2002, and now again in 2016. This year’s event was more extreme than the two previous mass bleachings
.

How much coral has died in the Great Barrier Reef's worst bleaching event?
 
More from the link in #2:

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.
Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.
These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.
By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.
The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.
Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.

You argument would be a lot more credible if you were to post links to the actual "numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated" rather than to the claim in WUWT that such papers exist. Which papers is he talking about?
 
He is a huge liar. Coral bleaching is known to be caused by overheated water and is directly caused by AGW's heating of the oceans. It is not "cyclical" except that it happens when water temperature reaches the breaking point. No where are the effects of AGW so clear as in this chart of sea surface temperatures. 90% of the excess heat from AGW is absorbed by our seas.

sea-surface-temp-figure1-2016.png

Maybe he just knows more than you do.


 
He is lying and a paid shill for sure. We know what causes bleaching and it is not "normal".



How much coral has died in the Great Barrier Reef's worst bleaching event?

Here is #6 repeated. Maybe he just knows more than you do.

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.
Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.
These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.
By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.
The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.
Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.
 
You argument would be a lot more credible if you were to post links to the actual "numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated" rather than to the claim in WUWT that such papers exist. Which papers is he talking about?

A link to his recent publications was provided in #13. I guess clicking on that was too much trouble for you.


 
A link to his recent publications was provided in #13. I guess clicking on that was too much trouble for you.



I guess actually reading any of these papers was too much trouble for you. As far as I can see, none of them support the claim that "much of the science claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated". So which of his papers are claiming this? A citation perhaps?
 
I guess actually reading any of these papers was too much trouble for you. As far as I can see, none of them support the claim that "much of the science claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated". So which of his papers are claiming this? A citation perhaps?

Ridd, Peter V., da Silva, Eduardo Teixeira, and Stieglitz, Thomas (2013) Have coral calcification rates slowed in the last twenty years? Marine Geology, 346. pp. 392-399.


This paper reports a reanalysis of calcification rates of 328 Porites cores from the Great Barrier Reef from which previous workers have concluded that a 14% reduction in calcification rates has occurred between 1990 and 2005. In this reanalysis it is shown that the apparent reduction in the Porites spp. calcification rate in the last two decades is at least partly due to a combination of (a) ontogenetic effects (disregarded in the previous analysis), combined with a highly variable age distribution of the coral growth bands with time, and (b) a systematic data bias clearly evident in the last growth band of each core. When the outermost growth band in addition to bands which have record age less than 20 years was excluded from the analysis, the dramatic fall in calcification after 1990 was no longer evident.
Item ID:32622
Item Type:Article (Refereed Research - C1)
Keywords:coral; calcification; Great Barrier Reef; ocean acidification; ocean pH
ISSN:1872-6151
Date Deposited:22 Apr 2014 04:55
FoR Codes:04 EARTH SCIENCES > 0405 Oceanography > 040503 Physical Oceanography @ 100%
SEO Codes:96 ENVIRONMENT > 9605 Ecosystem Assessment and Management > 960503 Ecosystem Assessment and Management of Coastal and Estuarine Environments @ 100%
Downloads:Total: 1
More Statistics
Actions (Repository Staff Only)​
Item Control Page







 
Ridd, Peter V., da Silva, Eduardo Teixeira, and Stieglitz, Thomas (2013) Have coral calcification rates slowed in the last twenty years? Marine Geology, 346. pp. 392-399.


This paper reports a reanalysis of calcification rates of 328 Porites cores from the Great Barrier Reef from which previous workers have concluded that a 14% reduction in calcification rates has occurred between 1990 and 2005. In this reanalysis it is shown that the apparent reduction in the Porites spp. calcification rate in the last two decades is at least partly due to a combination of (a) ontogenetic effects (disregarded in the previous analysis), combined with a highly variable age distribution of the coral growth bands with time, and (b) a systematic data bias clearly evident in the last growth band of each core. When the outermost growth band in addition to bands which have record age less than 20 years was excluded from the analysis, the dramatic fall in calcification after 1990 was no longer evident.
Item ID:32622
Item Type:Article (Refereed Research - C1)
Keywords:coral; calcification; Great Barrier Reef; ocean acidification; ocean pH
ISSN:1872-6151
Date Deposited:22 Apr 2014 04:55
FoR Codes:04 EARTH SCIENCES > 0405 Oceanography > 040503 Physical Oceanography @ 100%
SEO Codes:96 ENVIRONMENT > 9605 Ecosystem Assessment and Management > 960503 Ecosystem Assessment and Management of Coastal and Estuarine Environments @ 100%
Downloads:Total: 1
More Statistics
Actions (Repository Staff Only)​
Item Control Page








Yes — Coral calcification rates have decreased in the last twenty-five years!

"Outermost bands of corals were under-estimated in De'ath et al. (2009), and we have identified the cause of this problem as incomplete formation of some of the outermost bands. Correcting for this problem reduces our previous estimate of the decline in calcification over the period 1990–2005 from 14.2% to 11.4%. The claim that ontogenic effects account for part of the observed decline in calcification is false since (1) the hypothesised ontogenic effect was not present in colonies pre-1985, and (2) the decline in calcification is observable in the short cores that largely determine the decline, and are not subject to ontogenic effects. The adjusted decline of 11.4% (0.76% yr− 1) remains high and suggests a bleak future for corals of the GBR due to climate change."
 
Yes — Coral calcification rates have decreased in the last twenty-five years!

"Outermost bands of corals were under-estimated in De'ath et al. (2009), and we have identified the cause of this problem as incomplete formation of some of the outermost bands. Correcting for this problem reduces our previous estimate of the decline in calcification over the period 1990–2005 from 14.2% to 11.4%. The claim that ontogenic effects account for part of the observed decline in calcification is false since (1) the hypothesised ontogenic effect was not present in colonies pre-1985, and (2) the decline in calcification is observable in the short cores that largely determine the decline, and are not subject to ontogenic effects. The adjusted decline of 11.4% (0.76% yr− 1) remains high and suggests a bleak future for corals of the GBR due to climate change."

Refuted by Ridd, et al above.
 
. . . suggests a bleak future for corals of the GBR due to climate change."

We're not going to settle the question here, and I'm going to stop indulging your attempt to change the subject. The premise of the thread was that any debate about the Great Barrier Reef was between scientists and the Australian Tourism Board. The simple existence of Ridd's work decisively refutes that.
 
Back
Top Bottom