So I missed all the initial discussion, but apparently the New Scientist published a critique of a recent book by Matt Ridley called “The Rational Optimist”, who amongst other things believes that ocean acidification is ‘greatly exaggerated’. You can read his response to the critique over at his website. It’s an entertaining dialogue, but here’s where his argument starts to fall down:

My source was the Herfort et al 2008 paper, which Ridgwell says is irrelevant, because of its experimental design. That’s his opinion, which others in the field do not share (Read more)

His opinion? As Chris Langdon pointed out, the Herfort paper it is not relevant to predicting what will happen in the future. What Ridley misunderstands is that it isn’t based opinion. Journalism is based upon opinion, science is based upon fact. Here’s what Chris Langdon had to say about the Herfort paper:

In their experiments, they increased both the bicarbonate and the carbonate concentration. This is what happens when you add sodium bicarbonate to seawater. They have no way of knowing if the increase in coral calcification was due to the increase in the bicarbonate or the carbonate.

In the real world, and in the experiments that I and others have performed, the bicarbonate concentration is increased by 13 per cent and the carbonate concentration is decreased by 40 per cent. When you do this the calcification of the corals is observed to decrease.

Here’s what we had to say about the Herfort paper back in June 2008:

Herfort’s experiment focused on the effects of increasing bicarbonate concentrations on rates of photosynthesis and calcification of coral reef organisms. I hear some of you ask: “But, is that not the same as ocean acidification?” Well, in a nutshell – no. Ocean acidification is the result of declining pH caused by the uptake of atmospheric CO2. Herfort et al. kept their pH (the parameter that determines acidity) constant at 8.2 across all treatments. This also means that Herfort’s results are totally irrelevant to the major problems of ocean acidification – (1) carbonate saturation state and (2) acidosis of cellular mechanisms such as photosynthesis.

The lowered pH from ocean acidification leads to low concentrations of carbonate ions, the building blocks of all marine calcifying organisms, which can lead to critically low rates of calcification and even shift to net rates of calcium carbonate dissolution. Also, the proper functioning of cellular mechanisms such as photosynthesis are sensitive to pH change, so keeping pH constant would not capture those stresses.

Bottom line, Herforts’ experiment did the opposite of any realistic future scenario: by keeping pH constant while increasing bicarbonate (HCO3-) concentrations they boosted carbonate ion (CO3=) concentrations and thereby rates of calcification, and ignored any effects of acidosis. Idso et al (2008) is another sad example of uninformed propaganda, running with one of two sentences from a study they do not comprehend – and then leaping to their own naive conclusion that the overwhelming amount of good science predicting negative effects of ocean acidification, is simply alarmist (Read more)

Matt Ridley concludes with:

In conclusion, I rest my case. My five critics have not only failed to contradict, but have explicitly confirmed the truth of every single one of my factual statements. We differ only in how we interpret the facts.

Interpreting the facts? Oh well. I guess opinion sells books! See this paper released today in Science (Ocean Acidification Unprecedented, Unsettling) by Richard Kerr:

As hydrogen ion concentrations go up, more and more of the ocean’s carbonate ions—the building block of all carbonate shells and skeletons—combine with hydrogen ions to form bicarbonate, driving down the concentration of the essential carbonate. Organisms have a harder time extracting the carbonate they need from the surrounding water. In a compilation of controlled acidification studies, marine chemist Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and his colleagues found that all 11 species of tropical coral studied under falling pH slowed their aragonite production. Among noncoral calcifiers, most also slowed their carbonate building, though a few, such as certain coralline red algae and echinoderms, increased it.

Seems like Anthony Watts is a little upset over Ove and John’s appearance at his seminar here in Brisbane the other day. We mentioned earlier on the blog:

The Climate Shifts crew and other scientists will be there en masse to record and debunk the lies that will be told.

After the event, Anthony noted that the:

“en masse” was about 5, maybe 6 people by my count.

After seeing the event, i’m thinking that maybe Anthony is right, this isn’t all big oil funding. For a little context, here’s what the ‘lecture tour’ looked like:

As for Ove? See for yourself. More on the ‘lecture tour’ shortly…

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12637530&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Here’s a great piece by Graham Redfearn in CSIRO‘s sustainability magazine ECOS about science and blogging on climate change, with opinion from Tim Lambert (Deltoid) and John Cook (Skeptical Science):

As a journalist for the Courier-Mail in Brisbane, I started the GreenBlog in June 2008 to give readers a more in-depth perspective on environmental issues, especially climate change. By the time I quit that blog in February 2010, I had written more than 650 posts, moderated about 14 000 comments, blogged live with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, hosted guest posts from ministers and published a Q&A with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
I had also monitored the countless daily conversations between the likes of ‘polyaux’,‘sherlock’,‘badboybenny’and ‘PhilM’. I also incurred the wrath of the religious right in the United States who were not too happy with me for writing about a CSIRO scientist who had recommended the use of low-energy Christmas lights!

Blogs are hugely influential in communicating climate change. They are nimble and cheap to run, and they get news, information and new research out fast. Unfortunately, they are also being used to push populist unsubstantiated arguments around the globe quicker than you can say ‘Himalayan glaciers’, ‘climategate’ or ‘Al Gore’. Everyone from world leading climate scientists at NASA to fossil-fuel lobbyists, journalists, politicians, campaigners, activists and countless other global citizens are writing thousands of posts every day. Unfortunately, some of the most popular blogs have misrepresented the science – sometimes innocently and sometimes not.

However, some scientists are taking up this communication challenge. Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, started his blog Climate Shifts after seeing a ‘growing distortion of the information’. He says: ‘Some of this is simply a consequence of online “experts” being ill informed, while others stem from a well- organised and well-funded disinformation campaign proliferated by special-interest groups who, for example, do not want action on human-driven climate change.’

Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales, has seen his blog Deltoid rise to become one of the most popular science-based blogs on the planet. ‘Journalists are generalists and not experts and it is very hard for them to get everything right,’ he says. ‘The problem is worse in technical and scientific areas and even worse in an area like climate science where many people want to believe that the scientists have it wrong. ‘Before blogs, I might have complained to a colleague or written a letter to the editor, but in my blog I can explain exactly what they got wrong and provide links to original sources.’
Another Australian-based blog to make global waves is Skeptical Science, created by John Cook, a University of Queensland physics graduate. In recent months, his blog, which uses peer-reviewed science to explore misconceptions about climate change, has been featured on the websites of the Guardian and the New York Times. ‘I’m trying to inform people in everyday language what the peer-reviewed science is telling us about climate change – both through the blog and a free iPhone app we have released.’ The iPhone app is designed to give instant science-based answers to queries on climate change and has been described by one World Wildlife Fund Canada blogger as a ‘pocket-sized miracle’.
‘I have a 10-year-old daughter,’ says Cook. ‘The latest science tells me she’ll see 1 to 2 metres of sea level rise in her lifetime. I want to be able to look her in the eye when I’m an old man and say that although my generation dithered on acting on climate change, at least I tried to change things. That motivates me.’

I recommend listening to this piece from Ockham’s Razor 9 May 2010 which is about the truly sceptical nature of science.  Basically, the President of the Australian Skeptics Society, Eran Segev, outlines importance of the skepticism within science and why many ideas that are circulating in society that pass to pass the test of true skepticism.  Not surprisingly, one of those examples explored is the issue of climate denialism:

The term ‘scientific consensus’ is often misused or misunderstood. A consensus arises when a significant majority of working scientists in the relevant field or fields, and the majority of scientific organisations in those fields, and the majority of scientific papers published in credible peer-reviewed scientific journals, all point in roughly the same direction. It does not mean a vote was held, and there is no suggestion that there are no dissenting voices or even that the consensus could not be wrong (as it most certainly can be). What it does mean is that those who are most able to judge the evidence, the experts, have largely been convinced by it.

Here’s an interesting paper published in the free-access journal PLoS ONE, discussing the growing pressures on scientific objectivity:

The growing competition and “publish or perish” culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce “publishable” results at all costs. Papers are less likely to be published and to be cited if they report “negative” results (results that fail to support the tested hypothesis). Therefore, if publication pressures increase scientific bias, the frequency of “positive” results in the literature should be higher in the more competitive and “productive” academic environments.

The author (Daniele Fanelli from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland) introduces my definite word-of-the-week: HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known). Anyhow, Fanelli analysed 1316 scientific papers from the United States to determine the percentage of ‘positive’ results (i.e. supporting the hypothesis) vs negative (null) results. Interestingly, the percentage of positive results varied considerably between the states (between 25-100%):

ercentage and 95% logit-derived confidence interval of papers published between 2000 and 2007 that supported a tested hypothesis, classified by the corresponding author's US state (sample size for each state is in parentheses).

Seemingly, >90% is a pretty impressive ‘positive’ rate (NC sits somewhere towards the upper end – good effort JB!). Interestingly though, papers were:

…more likely to support a tested hypothesis if their corresponding authors were working in states that produced more academic papers per capita.

“Positive” results by per-capita R&D expenditure in academia.

So where did all the non-results go? This doesn’t necessarily imply that all results are positive as they are made up, but the lack of reporting of negative results (stuff that simply didn’t work, or wasn’t worth writing about) is surprising:

What happened to the missing negative results? As explained in the Introduction, presumably they either went completely unpublished or were somehow turned into positive through selective reporting, post-hoc re-interpretation, and alteration of methods, analyses and data.

So what does this all mean? Fanelli concludes that:

..these results support the hypothesis that competitive academic environments increase not only scientists’ productivity but also their bias. The same phenomenon might be observed in other countries where academic competition and pressures to publish are high.

Interesting.