Andrew Bolt’s latest slander claims that CSIRO, BOM and the Australian government are in a conspiracy. Who is the fraud here? Thousands of scientists or Andrew Bolt?
Update: Here we go again. When will Mr Bolt be honest about the actual facts of the matter! Either he isnt reading the responses to his fraudulent accusations or he is doesnt care about truth. This piece was first published back on Feb 10th, 2009 – I thought it would be worth bringing up to the top to highlight Andrew Bolt’s ongoing war against science.
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After last nights airing of the Australian Story the columnist Andrew Bolt has decided to play the wounded soldier, accusing ABC Australian Story of bias. Like me, you might find this a little amusing coming from someone who spends most of his time spinning the truth on all number of issues at the expense of his unable-to-respond victims. Apart from failing to tell you that the ABC went to great lengths to put up the full video of our exchange (which is up on their website, and the fact that he got the last word), he continues to accuse the ABC of bias and scientists like me of being eco-alarmists. In a very tiresome way he has trotted out the same old accusations despite the fact that he has been corrected endlessly. So much for his adherence to the truth!
After last nights airing of the Australian Story the columnist Andrew Bolt has decided to play the wounded soldier, accusing ABC Australian Story of bias. Like me, you might find this a little amusing coming from someone who spends most of his time spinning the truth on all number of issues at the expense of his unable-to-respond victims. Apart from failing to tell you that the ABC went to great lengths to put up the full video of our exchange (which is up on their website, and the fact that he got the last word), he continues to accuse the ABC of bias and scientists like me of being eco-alarmists. In a very tiresome way he has trotted out the same old accusations despite the fact that he has been corrected endlessly. So much for his adherence to the truth!
Read on: https://climateshifts.org/?p=1105
Billy Vaughn said:
Hi Professor,
Just one simple question. Did you make this statement in 2006?
“In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s great Barrier Reef could die within a month”.
Yes or no, please.
# 17 March 2010 at 10:36 pm
OveHG (author) said:
This is about risk. If we had reached higher temperatures, we would have seen higher coral mortalities than we did. This has happened in the past and is a consequence of the simple relationship between the size and length of a temperature anomaly. In 1998, for example, waters in the Indian Ocean reached the sorts of sea temperatures that I feared might occur in 2006, and many coral reefs across the vast western Indian Ocean area lost over 90% of their corals. Warming sea temperatures as a result of anthropogenic climate change increase the risk that we will see these sorts of sea tempeartures on the Great Barrier Reef. Just look at the steady rise in Coral Sea temperatures (https://climateshifts.org/?p=4324 and https://climateshifts.org/?p=4369) – not to be concerned given the trends in sea temperature and what we know about the sensitivity of corals would be foolhardy.
Its clear that unless you are a scientist that says there is nothing wrong anywhere, everything is all good, nothing to see here, then you are a hysterical alarmist & scaremonger. People seem to think that if you tell the truth or tell it how it is, then you are seeing the glass half empty, not being optomistic & being a defeatist. Instead its realism & people like Andrew Bolt are scared of it.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_the_10_worst_warming_predictions/
Looking at the paragraph below from Bolts in the first link you provided Ove makes one unquestioningly think the global coral reef monitoring network backs Bolt & opposes Ove. But looking carefully at Bolts phrasing you have to see it for what it is. Just cherry picking manipulation of facts.
No “BIG” damage & for “FOUR” measly years? Most of Bolts readers would have taken this as fact & not bothered to look up what the global coral reef monitoring network REALLY has to say about the health of the worlds reefs, in particular Australias barrier reef & the effects of climate change. Here is their statements on the health of the reefs.
http://www.gcrmn.org/pdf/P1%20Status%202009%20Brochure%207th%20draft.pdf
http://www.gcrmn.org/
Now looking at that document. How could one possibly turn what the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network has to say about the reefs into what Andrew Bolt turned it into?
The piece de resistance, was :
Are Bolt readers this gullible to pit various scientific instituions & scientists, of whom the majority disagree with Bolt against…..ben cropp…a diver? Then somehow think this is good enough? Is this all we need to overturn science in every field? Some professional enthusiast, aka Ben Cropp & Lee Bowman ( but not an expert scientist) to give their opinion on the science & this somehow debunks empirical research?
Re your comments on p=1105
Dear Professor,
You answer to my question of “Most Probably” is the basic problem surrounding the AGW debate. Every scientist who makes a statement regarding AGW says the recent warming is “Most Probably, Most Likely, Almost Certainly” caused by manmade CO2 emissions. As of yet, no positive proof has been forthcoming.
I accept your reply that “. At this point, with temperatures like that and evidence that they were continuing to increase rapidly, there was no other way to call it but to say that there was a significant risk of mass coral bleaching on a wide scale.’
However, your original statement:
“… between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef could die within a month”
was linked to the then alarmism of AGW.
In your reply regarding the recovery of the reef you state:
“This led to comments regarding this unusual phenomena – which has not been reported in other reefs, which have not been so lucky (e.g. many of the Western Indian ocean reefs have still not completely recovered from the impacts of 1998). I made the comments at this point that the team was genuinely surprised/relieved about how quickly some of these coral colonies had recovered – leading to these the same comments been taken out of context by Andrew Bolt.”
Acknowledging that your team was surprised/relieved could be taken by many observers as an admission that your team is still lacking knowledge as to the reef’s intricate ecology.
You must also accept that the ensuing outcome of your statements regarding the coral reef event, and the current recovery, has left you in a position of ridicule, a position that is being exacerbated by your continued exchanges with Andrew Bolt.
In your reply you state that the call you made (which was treated as alarmist) was incorrect and that you were surprised by the outcome. For that I wish to say thank you. For a man who admits he is fallible is a man of honour.
Yours sincerely
Billy Vaughn
Billy, I think you are intentionally not getting it. We cannot know for sure what the future brings. And science works in the realm of probability. We can’t give you a yes/no answer. I know this is frustrating to the public, policy makers and politicians.
“Acknowledging that your team was surprised/relieved could be taken by many observers as an admission that your team is still lacking knowledge as to the reef’s intricate ecology.”
I can’t speak for Ove, but I agree, absolutely, there is heaps we don’t know yet and may never know. Reef ecosystems are wildly complex. You probably can’t imagine all the moving parts. It make the space shuttle or a human city look like a tinker toy. I am surprised by stuff, including my own scientific findings all the time! But you would be foolish to extrapolate that to argue we know nothing. Some things we know very well, beyond any doubt. One is that corals are very sensitive to temperature. Warm the water up by a degree C, they bleach. By a little more, they die.
“You must also accept that the ensuing outcome of your statements regarding the coral reef event, and the current recovery, has left you in a position of ridicule, a position that is being exacerbated by your continued exchanges with Andrew Bolt.
In your reply you state that the call you made (which was treated as alarmist) was incorrect and that you were surprised by the outcome. For that I wish to say thank you. For a man who admits he is fallible is a man of honour.”
Billy, reef scientists are more relieved than you can imagine when reefs escape a big hit like a cyclone or a big warm spell. if you actually look at Ove’s statement, he said “could”. He didn’t say “will”. Thus his statement was correct. We cannot know if bleaching will occur next year but we are pretty certain that it will become more frequent and severe throughout this century, possibly in the coming decades. But frankly, you, Andrew, Ove and I are unlikely to live long enough to really see who was right and whether Ove really is a “alarmist”. With the solar maximum predicted to peak in about 10 years, we might know sooner rather than later. But I think the real test will come in 50-70 years, when we inch towards 600 or 700 ppm and 2-4 C more warming.
Well said John. There is a gulf between the word ” would” and “will”.
Thanks. And another point Iv’e heard Ove and many of reef scientists make, is that as corals become more scarce, bleaching, disease, etc will become less common, not more. Primarily, because there will be a lot less coral to bleach, get sick or die. But secondly because reefs are becoming dominated “in relative” terms by more resistant species. They will be the “last men standing” and will by no means functionally replace the species we are loosing. In 50 years, I imagine Andrew Bolt junior, snorkeling on the GBR, on a reef with 10% cover, in water that is 32.5C in June. He might proclaim “see that idiot alarmist OveHG was wrong! There are still corals and they are not bleaching!” See why that would be a pretty narrow perspective? Something we call a “shifted baseline” see here: http://www.shiftingbaselines.org/
But thanks for your questions Billy. I think the misunderstanding is at least as much our fault for not properly explaining our science, warnings and concerns in normal english. But we are trying! Hearing where we are screwing up is a big help.
Thanks John and Billy.
There’s thousands more scientists who have woken up to the global warming scam … and even more who look at the facts:
1. Warming since the Little Ice Age
2. A DECREASE in the rate of warming after 1945, when man’s CO2 output increased 1200%.
3. No warming in the past 15 years
4. No evidence that man’s CO2 has contributed to warming
5. Lots of faked temperature data (eg Darwin)
6. Oceans cooling for the past 5 years.
7. Sea levels rising for the past 6000 years with less increase in recent years.