Author Archives: ovehblog

Science behind Great Barrier Reef water quality management

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Articles from Peter Ridd of James Cook University in newspapers and on blog sites and letters to the editor supporting his position (e.g. Tom Darlington, 9 February 2010 in the Townsville Bulletin) claim there is no scientific evidence agricultural pollution is damaging the Great  Barrier Reef. As well, claims are made that there is a body of research available (specifically from Peter Ridd’s work) that shows that runoff from farming is having no effect (or very little effect) on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Neither of these claims is true.

An example of a healthy reef (Princes Charlotte Bay, Far Northern GBR)

An example of a healthy reef (Princes Charlotte Bay, Far Northern GBR)

There is a large body of published results from hundreds of studies  showing that (with just a few of the possible references):

1. Water discharged from rivers to the GBR continues to be of poor quality in many locations. The main source of pollutants is agriculture (cropping and grazing) e.g Packett et al (2009),  Bainbridge et al (2009).

2. Land derived pollutants, including suspended sediments, nutrients and pesticides are present in the GBR at concentrations likely to cause environmental harm e.g. Lewis et al (2009) and  De’ath and Fabricius (in press).

3. Coral cover on the GBR is generally much lower (about 25%) now than 40 years ago (cover about 50%) e.g. Bruno and Selig 2007. Macroalgal cover appears to be greatly increased e.g. De’ath and Fabricius (in press) Wismer et al (2009)

4. This loss in coral cover has been caused by a combination of  factors – poor water quality (see references above), crown of thorns starfish damage also associated with poor water quality (Brodie et al 2005), bleaching associated with climate change, loss of calcification associated with increased carbon dioxide in the surface water (De’ath et al 2008) and some minor damage from fishing activities.

Most of these results up till 2008 are summarised in the following document (click through for a link to the site and pdf download)

On the other hand there are few published results of research showing that agricultural pollution is having no effect on the Great Barrier Reef – none that I can find. What can be found are unsupported (by research results) opinions. Now we all have opinions and I think mine are as good as anybodies but I don’t pass them off as facts when they are not supported by research results.

An example of a degraded macroalgal dominated reef (Russell Island, Wet Tropics, Northern GBR)

I make no statements about the recently introduced Queensland Government legislation or its likely effectiveness, which remain to be tested, but do claim that there is ample well-founded evidence that agricultural pollution of the GBR is occurring, the effects are severe and that management of this pollution is a necessity.

Jon Brodie
Catchment to Reef Research Group
Australian Centre for Tropical Freshwater Research
James Cook University, Townsville.

References:

Bainbridge, Z.T., Brodie, J.E., Faithful, J.W., Sydes, D.A. & *Lewis*, S.E. (2009). Identifying the land-based sources of suspended sediments, nutrients and pesticides discharged to the Great Barrier Reef from the Tully-Murray Basin, Queensland, Australia. Marine and
Freshwater Research, 60, 1081-1090

Brodie, J.E., Fabricius, K., De’ath, G. & Okaji, K. (2005). Are increased nutrient inputs responsible for more outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish? An appraisal of the evidence.
Marine Pollution Bulletin, 51:266-278

Bruno JF, Selig ER (2007) Regional Decline of Coral Cover in the Indo-Pacific: Timing, Extent, and Subregional Comparisons. PLoS ONE 2(8): e711

De’ath G. and Fabricius K. in press. Water quality as a regional driver of coral biodiversity
and macroalgae on the Great Barrier Reef. Ecological Applications

De’ath G, Lough JM, Fabricius KE, (2008) Declining Coral Calcification on the Great Barrier Reef, Science, 323, 116-119

Lewis, S.E. Brodie,  J.E. Bainbridge, Z.T. Rohde, K. Davis, A. Masters, B. Maughan, M.
Devlin, M. Mueller, J. Schaffelke, B. ( 2009) Pesticides: A new threat to the Great Barrier Reef. Environmental Pollution 157, 2470-2484

Packett, R. Dougall, C. Rohde, K. Noble, R. 2009. Agricultural lands are hot-spots for annual runoff polluting the southern Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Marine Pollution Bulletin 58, 976-985.

Wismer S, Hoey AS, Bellwood DR (2009) Cross-shelf benthic community structure on the Great Barrier Reef: relationships between macroalgal cover and herbivore biomass. Marine
Ecology Progress Series 376:45-54.

Peter Ridd is not the only reef expert at James Cook University

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Although you’d think so given how frequently he is quoted in the Australian media, almost exclusivly in stories arguing that the GBR is in “bloody brilliant shape” and that climate change, sediment pollution, and ocean acidification are not threats to the reef’s future.

For example, in Jamie Walker’s piece last December on “How the reef became blue again” Ridd dismissed a range of threats to coral reefs, stating:

“Ten years ago, I was told that the coral was going to die from sediment, and we have proved that is complete rubbish,” Ridd says. “They are saying that pesticides are a problem, but when you look at the latest data that is a load of rubbish. They are saying that bleaching is the end of the world, but when you look into it, that is a highly dubious proposition.

“So when something comes along like the calcification problem, you are sort of left with this wolf story . . . they are crying wolf all the time . . . and it is very difficult for the public to have confidence in what they are saying.”

I don’t know what he is referring to when he says “we have proved that is complete rubbish” but i’ll email him and ask for a reference.

Also see Peter’s quotes in this recent story:

James Cook University researcher Peter Ridd recently accused Australian scientists of crying wolf over the threat of climate change reef, claiming researchers who predicted corals would be mostly extinct by mid-century had a credibility problem as the natural wonder was in “bloody brilliant shape.”

The Townsville-based Dr Ridd, who is an expert on marine physics, has previously claimed the Great Barrier Reef is as resilient to environmental change as a “cockroach is to a nuclear war”, with threats such as coral bleaching and agricultural run-off not as serious as commonly believed.

With a PhD in Physics and a thesis titled “The Input impedance of a horizontal dipole antenna over a layered halfspace” wouldn’t it be clear he isn’t the best source of information about the GBR at JCU?

JCU has more coral reef experts on one hallway than most countries have.  Certainly more than any other single institution I can think of, e.g., see the ARC Center for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.  Here is a list of a few of the internationally recognized coral reef experts based at JCU that reporters could be talking to, assuming they actually want to learn something and are not fishing for quotes to back up pre-determined conclusions:

Baird, Andrew
Senior Research Fellow
James Cook University
phone: 61 7 4781 4857
fax: 61 7 4781 6722
Andrew.Baird@jcu.edu.au

Bellwood, David
James Cook University
phone: 07 4781 4447
fax: 61 7 4725 1570
David.Bellwood@jcu.edu.au

Connolly, Sean
James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 4242
Fax: 61 7 4725 1570
Sean.Connolly@jcu.edu.au

Hughes, Terry
James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Fax: 61 7 4781 6722
Terry.Hughes@jcu.edu.au

Jones, Geoff
James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 4559
Fax: 61 7 4725 1570
Geoffrey.Jones@jcu.edu.au

Kingsford, Michael

James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 4345
Fax: 61 7 4725 1570
Michael.Kingsford@jcu.edu.au

Munday, Philip

Australian Research Fellow

James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 5341
Fax: 61 7 4725 1570
Philip.Munday@jcu.edu.au

Pratchett, Morgan
Australian Postdoctoral Research Fellow
James Cook University
Phone: 07 4781 5747
Fax: 61 7 4781 6722
Morgan.Pratchett@jcu.edu.au

Russ, Garry
James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 4432
Fax: 61 7 4725 1570
Garry.Russ@jcu.edu.au

Willis, Bette
James Cook University
Phone: 61 7 4781 5349 / 61 7 4781 5731
Fax: 61 7 4725 1570
Bette.Willis@jcu.edu.au

And at the nearby Australian Institute of Marine Science, there is:

Lough, Janice
Australian Institute of Marine Science
Phone: 61 7 4753 4248
Fax: 61 7 4753 4386
j.lough@aims.gov.au

McCook, Laurence
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Australia
Phone: 61 7 4750 0787
Fax: 61 7 4772 6093
l.mccook@gbrmpa.gov.au

Finally, here at UQ, reporters could talk to:

Anthony, Ken
University of Queensland
phone: 61 7 3365 9154
fax: 61 7 3365 4755
K.Anthony@uq.edu.au

Dove, Sophie
The University of Queensland
Phone: 61 7 3365 7229
Fax: 61 7 3365 4755
sophie@uq.edu.au

Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove
The University of Queensland
Phone: 61 7 3365 1156
Mobile: 040 110 6604
Fax: 61 7 3365 4755
oveh@uq.edu.au

Graham Readfearn-Monckton slayer-resigns from the Courier Mail

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Graham Readfearn has resigned as an environmental reporter at the Courier Mail. Graham has run a number of stories and editorials about climate change, such as this great post where he gives The Australian a spanking over their continued dodgy coverage of climate change science (which ill include in full below).

He also recently debated the infamous duo of Monkton and Plimer at UQ and was asked if the coverage of that event by his paper motivated his departure.

Earlier today, I got a call from a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald asking me if I had resigned because of the way my now former employer, The Courier-Mail, had reported the story about the high-profile climate change debate in Brisbane. My honest answer was that it wasn’t.

THIS IS HOW THE STORY WAS COVERED:

LORD Christopher Monckton, imperious and articulate, won yesterday’s climate change debate in straight sets.

Forget facts and fictions, numbers and statistics, this British high priest of climate change sceptics is a polished performer, even against the most committed of scientists.  Aided by Adelaide’s Professor Ian Plimer, Lord Monckton cruised to victory before a partisan crowd of suits and ties, movers and shakers.

There’s very little to say, in fact, about the debate at the Brisbane Institute. I’m not claiming victory, because there was no contest in the first place. Both Professor Plimer and Lord Monckton repeated all their well-rehearsed pseudo-science. In a room full of supporters, it’s hardly surprising their rhetoric was cheered.

But as a journalist or a commentator, going to Lord Monckton and Professor Plimer for a view on climate change is akin to asking the Faroe Islands soccer team if the Australian cricket captain’s training regime is good enough to win them the Ashes.

Monckton and Plimer are clearly the Faroe Islands soccer team (apologies to FIFA) of the climate change advisory industry. Neither have published a single peer-reviewed article on anthropogenic climate change and every science academy in the world disagrees with the thrust of their argument. Their errors are continually pointed out from credible scientists, but they repeat those errors, ad nauseam.

As I said to people in the audience, if they choose to buy their climate science from non-qualified sources continually shown to be incorrect, then that’s their choice. It would make an interesting psychology study to understand their willingness to accept such views.

As for how the climate change issue is being reported in some quarters, I’ve made my thoughts pretty clear on that too.

—————

Why our leading climatologist won’t talk to The Australian any more

Graham Readfearn

Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 01:41pm

ANOTHER day, another predictable and regurgitated dog’s brekky of a climate change editorial from The Australian.

This time, The Australian gives a virologist and computer modeller a turn at being a climate change expert.

Before we get to the real shocking part of this story (and please pardon me for keeping you in suspense until the end, but it’s worth it so hang on in there) let’s first look at just a couple of the assertions made by Jon Jenkins, the aforementioned virologist.

“…prior to the 1970s, surface-based temperatures from a few indiscriminate, mostly backyard locations in Europe and the US are fatally corrupted and not in any sense a real record.’’

Mr Jenkins doesn’t say where he gets this stunning conclusion from, but it’s fair to say he is ignorant of Australia’s network of more than 100 land-based thermometers which provide our Bureau of Meteorology with its records.

Next, Mr Jenkins states confidently how satellite measurements are the only ones which count, which he says started in the 1970s (actually, they started in 1979, so he was only just right). He then claims they only reveal “minuscule warming” which stopped in 2000 and had completely reversed by 2008.

This one simple graph shows how wrong he is. Below is a chart which plots all the four major global temperature records against each other – two of which use satellite data (RSS and UAH) and the other two (GISS and HadCRU) land-based measurements.

all_temps_thumb.jpg
Thanks to the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media for this graph.

So what of these accusations from Jenkins? I asked Australia’s acting chief climatologist Dr Michael Coughlan at the Bureau of Meteorology for his view.

“It’s nonsense,’’ says Coughlan.”No matter how you cut the cloth, the temperatures are going up.’’

Coughlan was one of two review editors for the Australian chapters of the latest IPCC report. So what does he make of one of Jenkins other accusations – that the IPCC is a clique?

“My job was not to write the report, but to make sure that the authors who were writing it had paid attention and responded to the comments from other scientists. That included all the sceptics that we could find. They were given the opportunity to comment, but many chose not to.’’

Of climate change contrarians such as Jon Jenkins, Coughlan has this to say.

“We have produced rebuttals of all of these arguments – they have all been addressed. But they just keep trotting them out. No matter how many times you tell them they’re wrong, they just keep going. The general approach seems to be – if we keep banging away at an untruth, people will start to believe it’’.

Let’s not forget that these contrarian views are not being expressed on a bit of street press or some fringe web site somewhere – they’re being repeated over and over in Australia’s only national newspaper. So now comes the revelation – and that is Coughlan’s view of The Australian newspaper itself.

“The Australian clearly has an editorial policy. No matter how many times the scientific community refutes these arguments, they persist in putting them out – to the point where we believe there’s little to be gained in the use of our time in responding.’’

There. Told you it was worth waiting for.

A Plastic Future: the Midway Story

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Check out this new video about the hideous effects of plastics on the oceans and sea birds by Clare Fieseler.  Clare is an MEM student at Duke University’s Nicholas School for the Environment and is a quasi-Bruno lab member.  She is doing her thesis project with my lab on the efficacy of MPAs in Belize.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PiNaJjAX8A&w=560&h=340]

See a related post about plastics here and here.

UPDATE: Clare sent me some text, live from Midway Island!, describing her visit and the marine plastics problem:

When Rolling Stone magazine ran an article this past October titled “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” I received exactly two text messages and three emails. Family and friends thought I might know something about this plastic vortex. Is this true?  Is it really the size of Texas?  Can you see it from space? After spending two weeks on Midway Atoll with nine other graduate students, I now feel more comfortable answering these questions.  I’ve seen it first hand.

The patch is actually not easily visible, like an oil slick or the Great Wall of China might be. The problem of ocean plastics reveals itself in much more discreet and destructive ways: ingestion by marine mammals, coral reef entanglement, or beach litter.  (NOAA has a great myth-buster website about the “garbage patch”). Where I sit now in Midway’s old navy barracks, I am a few hundred miles south of the hyped “patch.”  Still, the gravity of the plastic problem revealed itself today during our marine debris beach survey.

Comprised of ten beachcombers and ten bloated bags of plastic, our group was suddenly approached by a critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal. The yearling hauled out from the white water about 20 yards from us. At once, we were experiencing the majesty of the ocean and its abuse.  The contrast was truly striking.

Indeed, the media often misinforms us about the effects of marine debris on survivorship of marine animals. Rolling Stone claims that 100,00 marine mammals die each year from plastic debris. Our trip leader and marine mammal scientist Dr. Andy Read argues that this mortality effect is inconclusive. Plastics are certainly a growing problem in the North Pacific – the media has made that known – but its definitive sources and end effects on ocean residents are less certain.

Midway Atoll is trying to quantify this problem.  A current island study shows that 23% of the marine debris that the tide brings in has a land origin, 18% has a fisheries origin, and the remainder is unknown, mostly unidentifiable shards of plastic.  Midway Atoll Nation Wildlife Refuge deputy site manager John Klavitter crunched some statistics on the atoll’s yearly atoll accumulation.

– 8 tons of plastic debris washes up on the beaches of Midway Atoll

– 8.6 tons of netting from fisheries becomes entangled on reefs or sand

– 4.5 tons of plastic are brought in by seabirds and fed to their chicks

Plastic is present but how does it affect the island’s ecological balance? There is no conclusive evidence that albatross chicks are dying directly from plastic ingestion; its most likely that plastic ingestion contributes to other natural forces – like dehydration and starvation – to decrease chick fitness and cause higher mortality rates.  Given that almost all of Midway’s albatross chicks having plastic in their gut, scientists hypothesize that this phenomenon could likely impact population size in the future.

Since the resident Black-footed Albatross and Laysan Albatross forage on different species in different ranges of the North Pacific, it’s also hypothesized that the two species bring in different amounts of plastic. Perhaps the current species composition of the island’s seabird population may shift due to variable plastic forces, suggests Klavitter.

Rolling Stone provided the “shock,” but what the media doesn’t make clear is that we need still to clarify the “awe”  – and extent – of this problem.  Now, I am no rock star. But I made this video to use music and images to best communicate my own awe.

Oarfish: the largest fish in the deep oceans

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The BBC posted a pretty neat video about a rare giant deep sea fish called an ‘oarfish’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The footage is pretty neat as it’s one of the first times an oarfish has been filmed in the deep – most tend to wash up half dead or dying on shorelines (BBC don’t allow embedded footage, so click on image above to follow through to their site).

To be honest, I figured the video was a little underwhelming (these things are supposed to be 17m long and giants of the sea, right?) so I followed through to a Google search and came across these unbelievable photographs taken in Buena Vista, Mexico a few years back:

Here’s an even bigger one (23 foot) that washed up off a US Navy base in California back in ’96:

and one more from Baja California:

Jamie Walker’s response to Media Watch

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Editorial writer, AKA “journalist” for The Australian Jamie Walker has responded to reports (e.g., see the coverage by Media Watch here) of inaccuracies in his piece last week on the GBR and climate change.  We noted many of these problems and the broader media is now taking a second look at Jamie’s work and the editorial policies of The Australian.  (For those of you living outside Oz, The Australian is a local Murdoch/NewsCorp-owned right-leaning paper.)

Reporters, particularly working for Murdoch/NewsCorp vehicles such as Fox News, regularly lie about the science of climate change.  (see the roundup on this over at Media Matters here).  There are countless newspaper “reporters” whose writing is driven largely by their political ideology, e.g., see George Will.  Such denial of fact and science is harmful to society.  But it is usually restricted to the editorial pages where ideologues of all varieties are free to spout off and help sell newspapers. What is so surprising about Jamie’s GBR story is that it was clearly a barely disguised editorial published on the front page as a regular news story.   Jamie has now admitted as much in a letter to the paper’s editor (see below), saying that the main point of the article was based merely on his opinion.  What disciplinary action the paper will take or what internal editorial policy changes will occur are unclear.  As is typically the case, the repsonsibility lies as much with the editor  Paul Whittaker himself for deciding to put the piece on the front page as a “news item” rather than on the editorial page where opinion-based articles belong.  Yet Whittaker is also the one responsible for disciplining Walker and to do so would be an admission of fault and an acceptance of responsibility.

This same issue has flared up again and again in the MSM, e.g., see the well-covered examples in the Washington Post, where editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has gotten hammered (also see here) over allowing George Will to publish nonsense about climate change.  Yet an important difference is that even the WaPost restricts such foolishness to the editorial section.  The papers serious reporters regularly contradict and correct Will’s false claims.  Due to their ideological alignment and the conflict of interest, Hiatt has never corrected any of Will’s mistakes.  Will Paul Whittaker follow suit or stand for the standards and ethics of honest and professional journalism at The Australian?

—

Jamie’s letter is addressed to Paul Whittaker, Editor of The Australian and starts out by citing Ove’s post about the article:

February 7, 2010

Mr Paul Whittaker Editor The Australian

Dear Paul,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond to the issues raised by Media Watch. I note that the language used by the Media Watch representative is uncannily similar to that of Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who blogged on my piece last week. https://climateshifts.org/?p=4329

Then quickly gets into trouble:

A few points:

We contrasted comments by the Prime Minister against latest research findings on coral bleaching.

Scientist often wonder whether the science is really that confusing or whether biased “journalists” are purposefully confusing things.  Media Watch got this story exactly right. Jamie Walker took the AIMS report totally out of context and the inferences he made are not supported by the science or the scientists nor by logic. AIMS found that a handful of reefs on the southern GBR did not bleach as expected last summer. They explained why (storms cooled the water down).  Simple, right? Somehow Jamie took this as evidence that FUTURE global warming/increases in ocean temperature would not harm the GBR. Huh???  Do I need to explain the fallacy in that logic?  Well here is it anyway;

1) The reef didn’t warm, due to storm activity, as expected, so not much can be learned about future warming (obvious right?)

2) Even if it did warm and corals didn’t bleach, so what?  This would not have nullified the large body of science that the report Rudd was citing is based on.  It is an easy, child-like experiment.  Warm corals up in a tank by 1C and they bleach, by 3C and they die.  Questioning that this happens or would happen more frequenty if the ocean warmed by 4-6C is idiotic; it isn’t a sign of skepticism, it is instead demonstrating a striking degree of truculence and denial of establish fact.  Sometimes warmed corals in nature don’t bleach due to a variety of other factors that influence bleaching severity, e.g., the species and genotypic composition of the coral assemblage, current velocity, light, cloudiness, the recent thermal history, etc.  Scientists know this and we have considered all that in our projections of future bleaching under AGW.

3) Not a single scientist or anyone at all backed up Jamie’s faulty interpretation of the AIMS report.  In fact AIMS wrote the Australian to complain (here) that Jamie misrepresented their science and to explain why Jamie’s broader argument was flawed;  “AIMS has found that the science is pointing to potentially severe consequences for the Great Barrier Reef from climate change. Current observations of the state of the Reef this year do not contradict this.”  Neither Jamie nor The Australian have responded in print.  Since the argument is based merely on Jamie’s non-expert judgement, is it not obvious that this is editorialism rather than journalism?

Perhaps Media Watch should ask the PM’s office his sourcing: I certainly referred to the IPCC in my report, and also detailed the basis of the concern about long-term bleaching of the reef.

The story said Mr Rudd’s assertions “grate with’’ the findings that the reef was likely to escape bleaching, again, this year; it did not say it undermined the “view’’ that global warming could destroy the Great Barrier Reef.

The point here is unclear (the writing is tortured), but I think Jamie is suggesting that the main point of his article was not to cast doubt on whether AGW is a threat to the GBR and coral reef in general.  Really?

Rudd’s “assertion”, i.e., communication of published findings by scientists, does not “grate” / contradict the finding that last year, a handful of reefs didn’t bleach as expected. Magic Johnson has lived with HIV for 19 years, but that doesn’t “grate” against the fact that HIV is a human travesty or predictions that it will kill millions of people in the future.  [Although given the lack of warming on the reefs in question, the more appropriate analogy would be to argue that a guy who didn’t contract HIV and didn’t die from AIDS was proof that HIV-AIDS is not a threat]

I “could’’ get hit by a bus tomorrow; that does not mean this will happen.

True, but I doubt Jamie walks into the street without looking both ways, i.e., he applies the precautionary principle to avoid a bad outcome.

Furthermore, Jamie seems to be portraying the science here as mere speculation; imagine evil-left-wing scientists sitting in pub, dreaming up bad stuff that could happen (OK, we actually do do that).

There is concern, modelling and various projections as to how the reef could be destroyed as early as 2030 under worst case scenarios for climate change.

We are actually exceeding the “worst case scenarios” Jamie speaks of in terms of the rate of CO2 output and concentration increase, which is what the IPCC emissions scenarios are based on.  So these aren’t somehow outlandish predictions from a Hollywood movie.  They are merely the worst case, in relative terms.  I think the more conservative (and comforting to governments) emissions scenarios like the A1 are unlikely – at best – to occur.  Here are some of the assumptions underlying the A1:

The A1 scenarios are of a more integrated world. The A1 family of scenarios is characterized by:

  • Rapid economic growth.
  • A global population that reaches 9 billion in 2050 and then gradually declines.
  • The quick spread of new and efficient technologies.
  • A convergent world – income and way of life converge between regions. Extensive social and cultural interactions worldwide.

Exactly how realistic does that sound, even to an optimist?

I think, however, it is a long bow to present this outcome as a certainty.

Jamie has a right to think that or anything else.  But what he or anyone “thinks” in no way influences or questions the science at hand.  And basing a newspaper article, not clearly labeled as an editorial, on his opinions is journalistically unethical and fraudulent.

A number of senior scientists working on the reef argue this – and we quoted some of them last December.

A point on the semantics here:  if you really asked reef scientists whether “this outcome is a certainty” I suspect a large majority including me would say no.  But not because we don’t think it is highly likely.  Nearly all do.  Science never provides certainty about anything.  It only deals with probability.  Future projections are all probabilistic by nature, thus their outcome cannot by definition be “a certainty”.  Point being, if Jamie cleverly phrased the question this way, he might get honest scientists to agree “yes we are not 100% certain of this outcome”.

Also note, none of the scientists Jamie mentions were asked about the AIMS study at hand or about the inferences he took from it, as he seems to imply.   The issue now under investigation is whether Jamie misled his audience in his Feb 3 article, which took things a lot further than his article in December.  His is trying to sidestep the issue and questions about his Feb story by focusing on his earlier piece.

At that time, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said the Great Barrier Reef had never been healthier (as per my feature article of Dec 19, 2009).

GBRMPA did not in fact state this and I have published science showing this clearly is not the case as have many other more esteemed and locally-knowledgable scientists.

This is a free country, and maintaining a healthy scepticism about doom and gloom projections about anything, including climate change, is entirely in order with engendering informed and full debate.

I fully agree.  Fair point.  But that is Jamie’s right and duty as a citizen.   As a reporter, his duty and ethical responsibility is to report the truth and not lie about or otherwise misconstrue the facts and scientific issues.

I have invited Dr Hoegh-Guldberg to be interviewed; he was to phone me at 10.30am last Friday, but didn’t. I had a response from him by email yesterday, in which he suggested it would be easier for him if I email him questions to which he will respond. I will continue to seek to interview him.

Good.  I am sure Ove and hundreds of other reef experts (and probably most of his readers) could explain why the main point of Jamie’s story was mistaken.  I mentioned to Ove last week that it would be fun to have Jamie over to UQ for lunch and beers.  Maybe we could talk some sense into him.  (But I may have killed that opportunity with this sarcastic and somewhat mean-spirited post.)

What led me to say the findings will entrench scepticism about the effects of climate change is, in part, that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority issued a publicly warning last summer that a mass coral bleaching episode on the reef was imminent, but this never happened.

I do see Jamie’s point here and I think he is correct.  The public wrongly takes short-term weather events as evidence refuting that the earth is even warming and to question forecasts of future impacts of AGW.  We have covered this phenomena recently extensively (e.g., see here and here).  But a trained, educated science reporter should know the difference between science and weather.  Here is an anecdote to hopefully illustrate the logical flaw in Jamie’s argument:  Scientists say that tobacco and alcohol  are likely to shorten your life.  My maternal grandfather “Gap” was a life-long heavy smoker and drinker, but lived well into his 80s.  Does this observation “grate” against the predictions of epidemiologists?

Perhaps Media Watch would care to explore why GBRMPA has been more circumspect this year, when conditions were broadly similar to those early in the summer of 2008-09.

Well for one, the name of the series is Media Watch not Scientist Watch.

A bit of legwork by Media Watch would have pulled up a piece The Courier-Mail published on December 19, 2009, warning that coral bleaching was likely this summer.

Right, and given the warm El Nino conditions, that is a reasonable expectation.

You can’t have it both ways, especially in the context of the issues that have emerged with the IPCC’s 2007 report on the Himalayas and Amazon rainforest.

Oh boy.  Here we go.  Emailgate, the IPCC is corrupt, the earth is really cooling, the glaciers aren’t meling… Is any more evidence needed that Jamie is a committed ideological climate change denier?

And I don’t understand what “You can’t have it both ways” refers to.

Professor Peter Ridd, who we quoted in my December articles on the reef, and who has conducted research on issues involving the reef for 25 years,

Right.  Peter Ridd.  Reef expert. See our posts here, here and here on Peter Ridd’s view of the GBR.

has said that he was concerned about scientists “crying wolf’’ over threats to the reef. This, he said, had happened in relationto the crown of thorns starfish, and projections about the impact on the reef of sedimentation and pesticide runoff.

Peter Ridd’s “concerns” and what Jamie Walker “thinks” are totally irrelevant to the issue and debate.  This is a scientific debate.  It is supposed to be based on science, i.e., facts, scientific findings, published and peer-reviewed scientific studies, etc.  NOT on what Crocodile Dundee thinks.

Hopefully, the representative of Media Watch had bothered to read my lengthy coverage on December 19.

Well we read it.  See Jez’s coverage of it here.

If so, she would know that in addition to quoting Professor Ridd,

Don’t know what “she” he is referring to here…

the coverage in news and the Inquirer section set out at considerable length how water temperature increases do pose an acknowledged threat to the reef. The piece, however, detailed how the Keppel reefs had bounced back in a much more robust way than was generally expected after bleaching in 2006.

Somewhat fair point, but again, see Jez’s point about that study, on which he was a coauthor here.

Further, we took the time to go out on to those reefs off central Queensland with Dr Ray Berkelmans of AIMS, who is highly regarded for the work he has done on these systems, dating back to the 1980s.

True.  Ray Berkelmans is a great scientist.

He had absolutely no problem with what I reported – I know that, because I checked back with him.

In summary, No one is suggesting that the potential threat to the reef should be underestimated.

Really?  Because, that is precisely the message I got from Jamie’s two stories on the GBR and climate change.

However, it is quite in order to question some of the more breathless forecasts about its imminent demise.

If Media Watch wants to review my work – that is fine and entirely appropriate; the Climate Change debate will be all the better for it. To premise its questioning on one self-interested view, however, is quite unreasoanble. I stand by my reporting.

Of course you do.

Best wishes,

Jamie Walker Queensland Bureau Chief The Australian

Spinning the science: Media Watch reports on the The Australian’s misunderstanding of coral science

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http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9308641&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

It seems that we were not the only ones to be alarmed by the serious errors on the front page of The Australian last week.  ABC Media Watch explores journalist Jamie Walker’s illogical and fact-free rampage, identifying severe shortcomings in his story and any support for the conclusion that, “Report undercuts PM’s reef wipeout”.

As we blogged last week, there was no such report or conclusion by AIMS scientists.  In a continuation of The Australian’s war on science, it appears that the truth again has been the first casualty.

Media Watch does an excellent job of checking sources and exposing the poor reporting by the Australian.  And the conclusion is pretty clear.  In the words of AIMS Director Dr Ian Poiner,

“Based on… rigorous peer-reviewed research, AIMS has found that the science is pointing to potentially severe consequences for the Great Barrier Reef from climate change. Current observations of the state of the Reef this year do not contradict this.”

Media Watch seem to hit the nail squarely on the head:

Yes Jamie, but your views – which aren’t shared by the scientists you’re quoting – don’t belong in a news story.

The Australian’s opinion pages have openly favoured climate change sceptics for years. That’s the paper’s right.

But this sort of reporting – and it’s by no means the first example – entrenches scepticism, shall we say, about The Australian’s ability to separate its news coverage from its editorial views.

Click here for the full transcript. I wonder if Andrew Bolt will have anything to say on the matter?

Christopher Monckton: yet another lie exposed

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http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9306194&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

As part of his $100,000 tour around our great brown land, Christopher Monckton has claimed a great knowledge about the Great Barrier Reef. In an interview with Jon Faine of ABC Radio 774, Monckton claimed that he had a chart which showed that the temperature on the Great Barrier Reef have not changed for 30 years. He even claimed that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority itself had made the measurements itself (a fact disputed by senior GBRMPA scientist David Wachenfeld).

Going with Australia’s leading experts at the Bureau of the Meteorology, nothing could be further from the truth.  Sea temperatures in the Coral Sea are marching ever upward (see our posting here).  Not even our self-proclaimed marine expert Andrew Bolt can refute this one (unless, of course, there is a massive conspiracy as he claims that involves every Australian scientist that knows anything about sea temperature! Yeh, right Andrew!).

ABC Media Watch also caught up with this fabrication as well. For some amusing and revealing moments see the video above for Monckton’s fabrications or read the transcript here.

Reducing resilience of the Great Barrier Reef to increased temperature stress

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I wanted to add a little to Ove’s continued defence against ‘The Australian’ on going war against science. Whilst most people see the Great Barrier Reef as being one large coral reef, it also contains an array of other habitats including seagrass meadows that are critical to the overall ecosystem. Seagrasses, amongst there many roles in the GBR, are critical in supporting biodiversity and fisheries productivity. These seagrass meadows, like coral reefs, are also under threat from increasing seawater temperatures.

The potential 4°C increase in global temperature by the end of the century, that the leader of the opposition recently described as “not a big moral challenge”, would have an enormous detrimental impact upon seagrass meadows, particularly the abundant intertidal meadows present throughout the GBR. Research published back in 2006 found how seagrasses of the GBR suffer irreparable effects from short-term or episodic changes in seawater temperatures as high as 40–45 °C. Although these temperatures sound high, intertidal pools can commonly approach and exceed these temperatures for short periods throughout the GBR, and seagrasses are observed to ‘burn’. If temperatures were to increase by 4°C, such ranges would be exceeded too regularly to allow for recovery, and seagrass meadows are likely to deteriorate with huge detrimental impacts upon fisheries and coastal productivity.

The Great Barrier Reef described to be “blue again” by ‘The Australian’ is under continued stress. Seagrasses although important in their own right make excellent ‘coastal canaries’ and their tissues are good time integrated indicators of the coastal nutrient environment. Monitoring throughout the GBR continues to find coastal seagrasses containing highly elevated C:N:P ratios, indicating rich and potentially eutrophic environments that are continuing to be enriched. Increasing nutrients onto the reef and into seagrass will continue to promote algae and reduce the resilience of coral and seagrass to future climate change and increasing temperatures.  The combination of elevated nutrients and increased temperatures are of concern as greater temperatures increase metabolic rate, resulting in increased light requirements for seagrass. Such light requirements are not possible when increasing nutrients reduce light availability due to increased epiphytes and phytoplankton, resulting in eventual loss of the seagrass.

As Ove said previously, there exists no evidence to suggest that the GBR is “blue again”, and to the contrary, seagrass biomonitoring suggests nutrient conditions are continuing to deteriorate, with many coastal locations becoming increasingly eutrophic (see Figure 1 taken from the latest Seagrass-Watch magazine). The available evidence suggests that seagrasses and the coastal environment of the GBR are under increasing nutrient stress, reducing future resilience to climate change.

NASA deliberately crashes CO2-sensing satellite on take-off to avoid revealing that climate change is a complete hoax

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No really, i’m not kidding. Remember that CO2 satellite NASA lost after a launch failure last October? (click here for the video). Well, according to Lord Monckton, the crash was “extremely dissapointing” for other more nefarious reasons:

”Not greatly to my surprise – indeed I predicted it – the satellite crashed on take-off because the last thing they want is real world hard data,” he told a climate sceptics’ lunch in South Yarra yesterday.

NASA understood that getting the satellite into orbit would have demonstrated ”the whole darn thing” – climate-change science – ”is nonsense”.

Now we’ve established that Lord Monckton is pedelling a conspiracy theory where NASA deliberately destroys their own infra-structure to hide evidence of global warming, we can pretty much declare that anything Monckton has to say from here on in is null and void. For entertainments sake, here are a few other highlights from his Australian tour courtesy of The Age newspaper:

Bold claims are stock-in-trade for Lord Monckton, a hereditary peer and one-time adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher who swung through Melbourne yesterday as part of a two-week national speaking tour.

He said he was the first to explain the theory of global warming on British television in the late 1980s; that the United Nations wanted to use climate change policy to create a world government; that today’s environmentalists were just yesterday’s communists in different clothing.

His biggest laugh at the first of his two Melbourne speeches came when he said describing environmentalists as ”green” was a misnomer. ”I tend to call them the traffic-light tendency – greens too yellow to admit they’re really red.”

His interests stretch beyond climate change. He makes the extraordinary claim, one that he admits sounds ”bonkers”, that he has also manufactured a cure to a long-term illness that attacked his endocrine system and patented the cure in conjunction with a British surgeon.

Though stressing it was in its early stages, he said the drug had had positive results treating HIV and multiple sclerosis. ”It also has been used to cure cases of colds, flu,” he said.

Lord Monckton’s stump speech is built around attacks on the science underpinning man-made climate change and the scientists and those that believe them. Though not a climate scientist, he said he had uncovered flaws through his understanding of mathematics – ”the language of science”.

He described government attempts to tackle climate change as ”a plot by the rich against the poor” that would ”kill 5 billion, 6 billion people”.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was guilty of ”systematically telling lies” and exaggerating by up to 15 times the global warming that was likely by 2100.

Scientists associated with the UN panel dismiss his claims. Even Senate leader Barnaby Joyce, probably Federal Parliament’s most prominent climate sceptic, has described Lord Monckton as being on ”the fringe”.

In the blogosphere, where the climate science debate thrives, his views are reviled and celebrated in roughly equal enthusiasm.

Yesterday he drew about 100 people -mostly retirees – to his lunch-time speech and an estimated 1000 to an evening address at the Sofitel.