Jennifer Marohasy

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Why Deny the Beautiful Coral Reefs Fringing Stone Island?

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We live in an era when it is politically incorrect to say the Great Barrier Reef is doing fine, except if it’s in a tourist brochure. The issue has nothing to do with the actual state of corals, but something else altogether.

Given that the Great Barrier Reef is one ecosystem comprising nearly 3000 individual reefs stretching for 2000 kilometres, damaged areas can always be found somewhere. And a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow – although neither the intensity nor frequency of cyclones is increasing at the Great Barrier Reef, despite climate change. Another reason that coral dies is because of sea-level fall that can leave some corals at some inshore reefs above water on the lowest tides. These can be exceptionally low tides during El Niño events that occur regularly along the east coast of Australia.

A study published by Reef Check Australia, undertaken between 2001 to 2014 – where citizen scientists followed an agreed methodology at 77 sites on 22 reefs encompassing some of the Great Barrier Reef’s most popular dive sites – concluded that 43 sites showed no net change in hard coral cover, 23 sites showed an increase by more than 10 per cent (10–41 per cent, net change), and 17 sites showed a decrease by more than 10 per cent (10–63 per cent, net change).

Studies like this, which suggest there is no crisis but that there can be change, are mostly ignored by the mainstream media. However, if you mention such information and criticise university academics at the same time, you risk being attacked in the mainstream media. Or in academic Dr Peter Ridd’s case, you could be sacked by your university.

After a career of 30 years working as an academic at James Cook University, Dr Ridd was sacked essentially for repeatedly stating that there is no ecological crisis at the Great Barrier Reef, but rather there is a crisis in the quality of scientific research undertaken and reported by our universities. It all began when he sent photographs to News Ltd journalist Peter Michael showing healthy corals at Bramston Reef, near Stone Island, off Bowen in north Queensland.

More recently, I personally have been ‘savaged’ – and in the process incorrectly labelled right wing and incorrectly accused of being in the pay of Gina Rinehart – by Graham Readfearn in an article published in The Guardian. This was because I supported Dr Ridd by showing in some detail a healthy coral reef fringing the north-facing bay at Stone Island in my first film, Beige Reef.

According to the nonsense article by Mr Readfearn, quoting academic Dr Tara Clark, I should not draw conclusions about the state of corals at Stone Island from just the 25 or so hectares (250,000 square metres) of near 100 per cent healthy hard coral cover filmed at Beige Reef on 27 August 2019. Beige Reef fringes the north-facing bay at Stone Island.

This is hypocritical – to say the least – given Dr Clark has a paper published by Nature claiming the coral reefs at Stone Island are mostly all dead. She based this conclusion on just two 20-metre long transects that avoided the live section of healthy corals seaward of the reef crest.

I will refer to this reef as Pink Plate Reef – given the pink plate corals that I saw there when I went snorkelling on 25 August 2019.

Acropora photographed by Jennifer Marohasy just beyond where Tara Clark and colleagues ran their transects. This reef, around the headland from Beige Reef, will feature in my second short documentary.

Dr Clark – the senior author on the research report, which also includes eight other mostly high-profile scientists – is quoted in The Guardian claiming I have misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study. In particular, she states,

We never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012.”

Yet this is really the only conclusion that can be drawn from the information presented in her report, which states in different sections the following:

Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.”

At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.”

For Stone Island, the limited evidence of coral growth since the early 19th Century suggests that recovery is severely lagging.”

… by 1994 the reef was covered in a mixture of coral rubble and algae with no living Acropora and very few massive coral colonies present …”

Clark and colleagues recorded the corals along two transects, which they explain included a section of the reef now stranded above the mean low spring sea level. The sections they studied are some metres away from healthy corals – Porites and Acropora species, including pink plate corals that I snorkelled over on 25 August 2019.

Fringing inshore reefs often show distinct zonation, with live and healthy corals growing along the seaward edge. At Pink Plate Reef, the reef edge extends for some 2 kilometres and is about 20 metres wide in parts, while much narrower in other sections.

This picture was taken with my drone, Skido, looking south east towards the edge of Pink Plate Reef
on 26th August 2019.

The more inshore section of such fringing inshore reefs, sometime referred to as ‘the lagoon’ between the beach and the reef edge, is usually muddy. This mud has a terrestrial origin. From the lagoon towards the seaward edge there may be an elevated section, which is often referred to as the reef crest.

It is uncontroversial in the technical scientific literature that there has been sea-level fall of about 1.5 metres at the Great Barrier Reef since a period known as the Holocene High Stand thousands of years ago.

It is also uncontroversial that sea levels fall with the El Niño events that occur regularly along the east coast of Australia most recently during the summer of 2015–2016.

As a consequence, the reef crest at many such inshore fringing reefs may end up above the height of mean low spring sea level. This is too high for healthy coral growth; because of sea-level fall, corals in this section of these reefs are often referred to as ‘stranded’ and will be dead.

Dr Clark and colleagues clearly state that they began their transects at Stone Island at the reef crest, which they also acknowledge is at ‘the upper limit of open water coral growth’. It could reasonably be concluded that Dr Clark’s study set out to sample the section of this reef that could be referred to as stranded.

Our society places enormous trust in scientists. It is as though they are the custodians of all truth.

Yet, as recently reported in another article in The Guardian by Sylvia McLain on 17 September, entitled ‘Not breaking news: many scientific studies are ultimately proved wrong!’, most scientific studies are wrong because scientists are interested in funding their research and their careers rather than the truth.

So, while another The Guardian journalist, Graham Readfearn, may look to scientists like Dr Clark and colleagues to know the truth about the Great Barrier Reef, reef scientists may be inclined to report what is best for their career in the longer term. This is increasingly likely to be the case, given the recent sacking of Dr Ridd for daring to speak against the consensus.

This could also to be the case for film makers. The Guardian has reported my honest attempts at showing how beautiful and healthy one of the fringing coral reefs at Stone Island is – including through spectacular wide angle underwater cinematography – the headline:

Scientists say rightwing think tank misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study”.

This was the headline in The Guardian on Tuesday, accompanying the first review of my first film – Beige Reef. Many of the comments at YouTube now uncritically link to this misinformation.

It is not easy telling the truth when it comes to the state of corals at the Great Barrier Reef.

In my film Beige Reef, I show such a diversity of beautiful hard corals including species of Acropora and Turbinaria under dappled light at Beige Reef, which is a true coral garden fringing the north facing bay at Stone Island.

Meanwhile, Tara Clark and colleagues – lauded by journalists such as Graham Readfearn – write in their study published by Nature: ‘Only nine dead corals were found along transects 1 and 2, and that these corals were covered in mud and algae.’

Such a statement is perhaps politically smart, because it plays to the current zeitgeist that suggests humankind is having a terrible impact – destroying the planet everywhere, including at the Great Barrier Reef. So, the beautiful reefs that do fringe Stone Island – not just Beige Reef in the north facing bay, but also the reef along the south western edge, the reef that I’ve name Pink Plate – must be denied.

It seems an absolute tragedy to me that the beauty and resilience of these healthy coral reefs is not acknowledged. Further, the idea that the Great Barrier Reef is in peril creates tremendous anxiety throughout our community, particularly for the younger generation.

In another part of the same report, Dr Clark and colleagues state that coral cover was 0.09 per cent at Stone Island. This is not consistent with their ‘benthic survey’ only finding nine dead corals, and is certainly a lot less than the near 100 per cent coverage that I found at Beige Reef just around the corner. It is also a lot less than would have been found if their transects had been placed in that section of Pink Plate Reef with living corals – the section of reef at the seaward edge that extended for perhaps 2 kilometres.

********

Pink Plate Reef will be the focus of my next short film.

My travel to Stone Island and the film were funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation through the Institute of Public Affairs.

I snapped the picture of the sailing boat with Gloucester passage in the background, as featured at the top of this blog post, from Pink Plate Reef in the early afternoon on 25th August 2019.

Experts Now Agree: Is Acropora Coral at Stone Island

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APPARENTLY the Nature article I quote from in my new first film Beige Reef doesn’t claim there is no longer any Acropora at Stone Island. According to Graham Readfearn, writing today in The Guardian, I got it wrong.

In fact, he’s got it wrong.

Following are more direct quotes from the same Nature paper:

“Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.”

“At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.”

“For Stone Island, the limited evidence of coral growth since the early 19th Century suggests that recovery is severely lagging.”

“… by 1994 the reef was covered in a mixture of coral rubble and algae with no living Acropora and very few massive coral colonies present …”

The Nature article got it so wrong because the two transects were run across a section of reef where the corals are now dead, as I’ve explained in previous blog posts. The transect was run across the dead coral in front of our little boat as shown in the feature picture at the top of this blog post. At this reef, the live coral is at the reef’s edge, shown behind our boat in the picture. That edge of live coral runs for about two kilometres at varying widths around the south-western edge of Stone Island.

Following is the email I wrote to the journalist, Graham Readfearn yesterday with my four responses to his four questions.

Hi Graham,

Thank you for your email concerning my first film, Beige Reef. I reply to your four questions as inserts to your email, following.

By way of perspective, let me also comment that:

Beige Reef is a short film showing the condition and extent of an inshore coral reef that is part of the Great Barrier Reef.


We filmed this reef because, according to a scientific report in the journal Nature, there are no longer any Acropora corals at this location. The peer-reviewed article, coauthored by David Wachenfeld who is the chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, claims the corals at Stone Island have been destroyed by global warming and declining water quality.

Yet we found about 25 hectares of Acropora in the north-facing bay at Stone Island.

The underwater cinematography shown in this film is irreconcilable with the claims in the Nature article.

Beige Reef, my very first film, makes the point that Peter Ridd has been making for some time: that our scientific institutions are untrustworthy, that there is a need for some quality assurance of the science.

As a journalist I ask the you dispassionately consider the evidence, which should begin with you watching the film and then reading the article in Nature.

Kind regards
Jennifer Marohasy

1. In your video, you say that Dr Clark’s paper says there are “no living acropora colonies” at Stone Island. But Dr Clark says her paper did not say that, and in fact said there were some acroporas at the site of Saville-Kent’s original photographs. Clark says you have incorrectly placed emphasis on a 1994 finding from Wachenfeld, which is quoted in her paper. Your IPA colleague Gideon Rozner also repeats this claim in a promotional video.

RESPONSE FROM JENNIFER MAROHASY:

Clark et al. explain (page 11) that they took just two transects each of 20 metres at Stone Island. Based on this sampling they intended to categorized coral cover as ‘live hard coral’, ‘dead coral’, ‘soft coral’, ‘algae’, ‘other substratum’ (substrate and sediment), and ‘unknown’.

It is specifically stated that at Stone Island only nine dead corals were found along transects 1 and 2, and that these corals were covered in mud and algae.



2. Clark says that for Stone Island, her paper concentrated on the sites visited by Saville-Kent and Wachenfeld, which is a different location to much of your footage from a subtidal reef slope.

RESPONSE FROM JENNIFER MAROHASY:

Clark et al. explain (page 11) that only two short transects were taken because the reef environment was ‘highly consistent’. Based on these two transects Clark et al. draw conclusions about the situation at Stone Island in general. My first film is about Beige Reef that is just around the headland from the location of the two transects.

My second film will be about the reef to the south south-west of Stone Island.  Here there is an extensive area of coral (including Acropora spp.) just metres from the two transects from which Clark et al draw erroneous conclusions.


Acropora photographed by Jennifer Marohasy just beyond where Tara Clark and colleagues ran their transects. This reef, around the headland from Beige Reef, will feature in my second short documentary.

3. Clark says that her 2016 paper did not make any claims about other areas of the reef and no “ill-fated prognosis” was made in that paper.

RESPONSE FROM JENNIFER MAROHASY:

Following is just some of what Clark et al write about the corals at Stone Island:

“Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.”

“At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.”

“For Stone Island, the limited evidence of coral growth since the early 19th Century suggests that recovery is severely lagging.”

“… by 1994 the reef was covered in a mixture of coral rubble and algae with no living Acropora and very few massive coral colonies present …”

4. In the video you say you could not see any bleaching – yet Dr Clark says this is not surprising, because regardless, you visited in August 2019 – more than two years after the previous major bleaching episode.

RESPONSE FROM JENNIFER MAROHASY:

I am delighted that Tara Clark acknowledges that there is no bleaching of corals at Stone Island. I would like to film coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef, but no-one has been able to tell me where I can find bleached corals.

I would be happy to travel to any location at the Great Barrier Reef that shows significant bleaching for a future IPA short film. Could you, and/or Tara Clark could provide me with specific locations.

My First Film: Beige Reef

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FRENCH military general Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying that, “A good sketch is better than a long speech.” Then there is the expression, ”A picture is worth a thousand words.”

So, why have I spent so much of the last two decades writing, rather than sketching or painting or better still making movies — given my often overwhelming desire to communicate something.

I have sometimes placed ‘illustrations’ with my words, most usually time series charts that describe relationships by way of the number plane. I intend to keep doing this, and I am still working closely with Jaco Vlok on an historical temperature reconstruction for Australia that will include so many ‘sketches’ as time series charts of monthly temperate data.

But over the next couple of years I also want to support Peter Ridd as he battles James Cook University through the courts, and more generally communicate the beauty and resilience of the main point of contention: the Great Barrier Reef.

The best medium for doing this is surely underwater cinematography?

Back in April, I showed you some of my underwater snap shots from duck-diving off Bowen.

In that blog post I also wrote:

“Someone needs to go down with a good camera and a tank of oxygen and get extensive footage that shows the great diversity, and all the fish – there might even be a crocodile hiding somewhere.”

By August I had found that someone, Clint Hempsall. He has spent a lifetime capturing the beauty, the sometimes raw horror, and the resilience of life beneath the waves.

We loaded his camera gear into my land cruiser at Noosa and drove the 1,000 kilometres to Bowen. Clint filmed non-stop, and we now have so much footage of so many inshore reefs, including the reef with the crocodile.

This adventure would not have been possible without Rob McCulloch. Between so many overseas trips where he skippered important people on three-storey boats, Rob found time to discussed logistics for Bowen with me, and told me he would be there and with a boat from the very beginning. He is the perfect Skipper, and a great friend.

I am planning to make a lot more short documentaries — not just of these inshore reefs for which we already have footage including interviews with Peter Ridd at Bramston Reef — but also of more colourful corals in clearer waters at the outer ribbon reefs and from coral cays.

I have just confirmed a next adventure for January 2020. That diving and filming will be from a bigger boat and I will have a compressed air tank on my back.

This blog post, however, is about my very first film, it is about Beige Reef.

I still remember so vividly the dappled light and the rocking of the tide as I floated over the corals at this inshore reef in the north facing bay of Stone Island.

After snorkelling with Walter Starck, I launched my drone and some of that footage features in Beige Reef.

This was only the second time I had flown a drone from a boat, and conditions were thankfully calmer than the day before when there was quite a swell but I still managed to launch and catch. Rob filmed my very first launch, and he will be showing this to his Facebook friends in the next week or so.

Beige reef is a fringing coral reef of approximately 25 hectares in warm and shallow waters at the entrance to Bowen Harbour. It is an inshore reef that according to the scientific literature should not exist, as I explain in Beige Reef.

I am also grateful to the B. Macfie Family Foundation for their continuing financial support, and also to the Institute of Public Affairs especially John Roskam and Scott Hargreaves.

The film was shown just yesterday to some IPA members in Brisbane, and the first launch of Beige Reef was to a small group in the IPA board room in Collins Street in Melbourne.

Consider joining the IPA at https://ipa.org.au/join, so that you know about my next short documentary, and have the opportunity to join-in at future events.

Jennifer Marohasy with Emmy Award winning cinematographer Clint Hempsall in Melbourne at the first launch of Beige Reef.

Senate Inquiry into Water Quality at the Great Barrier Reef: My Submission

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Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport

Identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence-based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef

THIS submission relates to the first term of reference for the Senate inquiry: The existing evidence-base on the impact of farm water runoff on the health of the Great Barrier Reef and catchment areas.

STOP.

I have been advised that my submission has been received. Further I have been advised that:

A submission to a committee becomes a committee document, and it is for the committee to decide whether to receive it as evidence and whether to publish it. This means that you should not provide your submission to others or make it public prior to the committee’s decision to do so. While submissions to the committee are protected by parliamentary privilege, their unauthorised release or distribution is not.

So, I have removed the information that I had posted here concerning my submission and its recommendation.

GO. THE SUBMISSION HAS NOW BEEN POSTED ONLINE BY THE COMMITTEE, SO I AM REPOSTING HERE (JANUARY 2, 2020)

Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport

Identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence-based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef

This submission relates to the first term of reference for the Senate inquiry: The existing evidence- base on the impact of farm water runoff on the health of the Great Barrier Reef and catchment areas.

In order to address this issue it is necessary to have some water quality data. This data has been collected over decades by the many port authorities along the Queensland coast, by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), and various government departments that often change their name. For example, there was a report published in 1999 jointly by the Department of Environment and Heritage and the Department of Natural Resources entitled ‘Testing the Waters: A Report on the Quality of Queensland Waters’.

This report concluded:

“It is not possible to provide a simple summary of water quality across an area as large and varied as Queensland. However, a number of general comments can be made. Overall, the water quality maps indicate that while a significant proportion of sites reflect good water quality conditions, there are also a large number which indicate moderate (slightly impacted) conditions. Only relatively few are indicative of poor water quality conditions.

“Point discharge from many urban areas have impacts on water quality in their vicinity. Because urban areas are concentrated along the coastal fringe, most of these impacts occur in estuarine waters. However, these impacts are considerably less than they were 20 years ago and there is continuing management effort focussed on bringing point discharge under control…”

The report went on to state that future editions of statewide water quality reports will build on the information presented in what was then considered the ‘initial report’, with few reports likely to give a more definitive indication of long term trends in water quality.

In fact, since 1999 despite increasing expenditure in the area of water quality monitoring it is increasingly difficult to access basic water quality data. The situation is absurd, and I am told it reflects the state and federal government’s desire to maintain the perception of declining water quality, while in reality, the situation is improving. There could be general improvement because local governments have spent large amounts of money on better sewerage treatment, and rural industries have received significant funding to fence riparian areas, and more generally improve their land management practices.

Yet we are told that water quality continues to deteriorate, and this claim underpins increasingly regulation of industries that is the subject of this senate inquiry.

The first term of reference of this inquiry assumes an impact from farming on the Great Barrier Reef. It is important that the committee actually establish the nature and magnitude of this impact
by way of real evidence. Ideally a detailed assessment of changes in key water quality parameters at relevant geographical and temporal scales will be provided.

So far key reports, for example a much quoted recent technical study by Marine Ecological Consultant Dr Daniela Ceccarelli, rely on overseas datasets that use obscure methods for measuring water quality. It is difficult to understand why the GBRMPA collects detailed water quality data, and then scientists like Ceccarelli and colleagues extrapolated from indirect measures.

Given the importance of understanding changes in water quality over time it is important that this inquiry ensure the following information be made publicly available without delay:

Relevant water quality data including nutrient concentrations (e.g. chlorophyll a) and sediment loads (turbidity, e.g. Kd4010) at a daily, monthly and annual time scale for every major port, and every major inshore coral reef, along the Queensland coast since at least 1975. This is when this water quality data was first collected in a comprehensive and regular way.

Just today, Friday 8th November 2019, I was diving the HMAS Brisbane Wreck off Mooloolaba close to my home in south east Queensland. My mind is still buzzing with the extraordinary diversity of reef fish (so many of all shapes and sizes) and corals (such diversity and so colourful) that I saw. This inshore reef just to the south of the Great Barrier Reef is so new: the old war ship having only been sunk into 28 metres of water 14 years ago in July 2005.

This new healthy coral reef ecosystem, with so much diversity, has come to be over the same period of time that studies by Ceccarelli and others claim there has been wide spread deterioration in water quality affecting off shore coral reefs. The impression is that if we don’t tackle ‘water quality locally’ and ‘climate change globally’ all reefs will continue to see a significant decline in coral coverage. It also follows that new inshore reefs, like the coral reef that I visited yesterday, that was teeming with colour and new life could not exist.

In August I spent 10 days snorkelling, paddle boarding, and droning over the coral reefs of the northern and southern Whitsundays. I started at Horseshoe bay that is right in Bowen township, in fact there is a coffee shop within perhaps 250 metres of the southern headland where there are a great diversity of colourful corals growing on the granite.

I was surprised to see such colourful, healthy corals straight-off the beach and so accessible from the mainland/a north Queensland town. A family can train/bus/drive to this local beach at Bowen and go snorkelling and find many of the corals found throughout the Great Barrier Reef. Indeed, the bays and headlands around Bowen offer an opportunity for anyone to see corals, without spending a lot of money. Yet newspaper headlines quoting leading academics including Professor Terry Hughes claim inshore corals in this region have been destroyed by global warming.

About two kilometres from Horseshoe Bay at the entrance to Bowen Harbour, at the southern end of Stone Island, scientists curtailed a long transect across a reef flat of dead corals. The scientists ended it just 30 metres from the reef’s edge where there is so much live coral to be found.

The edge of this fringing reef slopes to the sea floor with prolific growth and great diversity of hard and soft corals species. This reef edge, perhaps 20 metres wide in some places, extends for perhaps 2 kilometres around the western edge of Stone Island. Yet in the research report published in the prestigious journal Nature, it is claimed there are no live Acropora at this reef and describes only dead corals along the transect.

As reported by Graham Lloyd in The Weekend Australian (7 September 2019), I saw and photographed healthy branching Acropora and also large pink plate coral on 25 August 2019 — some of the plate corals were more than 1 metre in diameter at this reef edge. David Wachenfeld, the chief scientist at GBRMPA is an author of this most misleading study that appeared intent on finding only that part of the fringing reef system with dead corals.

It is the case that in nature, as in life, we can sometimes find whatever we are looking for and this is especially the case at some inshore reefs where there is only live coral at that reef’s edge.
At some inshore reefs, if we look only for disaster and catastrophe it can be found in the rubble of the back reef from previous cyclones or from sea level fall.

Cyclones and sea level change – especially localised dramatic falls in sea level associated with El Niño events that cause widespread bleaching – will destroy individual coral gardens. But reef communities can recover if they are healthy and are spread over a critically large area. It is reefs that become infested, for example with crown-of-thorn star fish, that lack resilience and may not recover from natural disasters.

Corals at inshore reefs are particularly subject to natural extremes of temperature, sea level change, and other environmental hazards, such as outbreaks of crown-of-thorn starfish.

Given that the Great Barrier Reef, as one ecosystem, comprises nearly 3000 individual reefs stretching for 2000 kilometres, damaged areas can always be found somewhere. And a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today, may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow — though neither the intensity nor frequency of cyclones is increasing at the Great Barrier Reef despite climate change.

Dr Jennifer Marohasy, PO Box 692, Noosa Heads Q 4567 8th November 2019

Me, underwater diving HMAS Brisbane earlier today, on 8th November 2019. I took the photograph of the two ‘Nemos’ on the front deck of the wreck a few minutes after this photograph was taken, the two ‘Nemos’ feature at the top of this blog post.

Towards a New Theory of Climate with a New Book

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AS the editor of the last book, and the next book, in the Institute of Public Affairs’ Climate Change: The Facts series I spend a lot of time pondering the nature of ‘facts’. 

A fact is something that has become known as true.  A fact may be dependent on accumulated knowledge.  Facts are considered superior to an opinion or an interpretation.   But sometimes the facts change.  

There is the famous quote variously attributed to John Maynard Keynes, and sometimes Winston Churchill: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

Right up until the city of Brisbane in my home state of Queensland was flooded back in January 2011 — flooded following the emergency release of water from the overflowing Wivenhoe Dam — the considered opinion from Australian experts was that the dams would never fill again. This was accepted by many as a ‘fact’.

After that exceptionally wet summer, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology continued to forecast below average rainfall even for Australia’s Murray Darling Basin through the exceptionally wet spring of 2016.    Now there is drought again across much of eastern and southern Australia, and what farmers really need to know is: “When will it rain again?”  

Of course, droughts in Australia always break, and with flooding rains.  But there is no indication from the Bureau when we can expect this break.


Many claim such flood events are unpredictable. In which case, we arguably don’t have a scientific theory of climate.  A scientific theory is something substantiated: a body of facts that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation and that can be confirmed through accurate prediction.  

There is no doubt that the Western World is currently being significantly affected by climate change activism.  But, the more rational amongst us — who are not necessarily those with a more formal education — can perhaps already see that very little of what is currently being articulated by this populist movement resembles fact.  

Currently what we see from activists is more prophecy than numerically verifiable prediction — certainly no testing of falsifiable theory through what might be considered the scientific method.  

Indeed, the leaders of the current populist movement against climate change seem unaware of the history of science or the history of climate change embedded in the geological record. And while obsessed with climate, they seem unable to make a practical forecast for next week or next year when it comes to issues such as when the drought here in Australia might break.  

This is a long introduction to the next book in the IPA’s Climate Change: The Facts series, which will be available for sale early next year.  

It will be a book by dissidents, obsessed with facts, who understand that the climate is always changing.  

As Editor, I get to choose chapter authors.   The four most important chapters will be on ‘water’ and it is my intention that they will move us towards a new theory of climate.  

The four chapters are variously about cosmic rays, cloud cover, tropical convection and water vapour.  Indeed, water — in its many forms rather than carbon dioxide — will be dominant in the new emerging theory of climate.

This theory perhaps has its origins in a little noted paper written by Richard Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou and Arthur Hou back in 2001.  It got physicists like Peter Ridd thinking.  

Dr Ridd is contributing one of the four seminal water chapters in the next book.  He will explain how deep convection, which can be thought of as a huge heat engine — is an alternative pathway for the upward transfer of energy from greenhouse gases.  The other important chapters in this section on water are by Henrik Svensmark, Geoffrey Duffy and the great Richard Lindzen.  

I am seeking your support for the book’s publication.  

The IPA has a dedicated appeal page at www.ipa.org.au/cctf2020.  


If you can spare more than A$400, you have the option of your name being printed in the book. I am proud that will be my own name will on the front cover of the book alongside Duffy, Svensmark, Ridd, Lindzen and other fine scientists. 

The last book in the ‘Climate change the facts’ series sold more than 30,000 copies.  It has made a difference, in a small way. 

My hypothesis is that this next book will sell three times as many copies, and eventually be recognised as articulating the beginning of a new theory of climate, with Peter Ridd’s contribution significantly building on the earlier work of Richard Lindzen. 

But these four water chapters will be controversial, with technically complex elements, but 
the book will also include chapters that are easier to digest, and a few that are more philosophical. 

One of the most popular chapters in the last book (our 2017 edition) — and the least technical, and most literary chapter — was by legendary poet and writer, Clive James, which was an amusing poke at ‘climate change’ and catastrophism as popular culture. 

My colleague at the IPA, Scott Hargreaves has already written something literary for the next edition (CCTF2020) and he has drawn on Clive’s James’ translation of Dante’s Inferno to help describe the nine circles of ‘climate skepticism’.  This will perhaps be the last chapter in this next 2020 edition.  What Scott has written is so insightful and also fun. 

There will be about 20 chapters in total in the next book, including several chapters on Antarctica.  So of course, there is a chapter on penguins, and perhaps two on volcanoes. 

Antarctica is twice the size of Australia, and has a complex climate that is central to understanding global atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns — including drought and flood cycles in Australia.  

The history of science suggests that paradigms are never disproven until they are replaced. So, now more than ever, it is important that you back this book that will challenge the current consensus, which is the current dominant paradigm. 

Physicist and philosopher, the late Thomas Kuhn, explained that competition within segments of the scientific community is the only process that historically has ever actually resulted in the replacement and then eventual rejection of one previously accepted paradigm or theory.  It is so important that alternative voices are heard, that there is opportunity for a new theory of climate to emerge.

If you are at all sceptical of the catastrophist’s claims that the current drought in Australia is the very worst on record, sea levels at record highs, and the planet about to melt — and most importantly, if you would like to contribute in a practical way to a fact-based new theory of climate change — then make a financial contribution to the IPA’s next book in the ‘Climate Change the Facts’ series via the dedicated appeal page at:  www.ipa.org.au/cctf2020

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

***
A version of this article was first published at The Spectator and subsequently at WUWT. I appreciate many of the comments in the WUWT thread, there are so many, and I intend to action some of the recommendations.

How to Evaluate the Evidence of Contrarians – Scientifically

By

FUNDAMENTAL to the scientific method is the assumption that reality exists independently of our belief systems; that there is such a thing as evidence, and that it matters.

There seems to be general agreement on this point from both the left and right sides of Australian politics.

Indeed, in an article in The Weekend Australian newspaper (page 18) written by Graham Lloyd entitled ‘No place in debate for contrarian hijackers’, Misha Ketchell who is the editor of the influential academic publication The Conversation is quoted claiming to care so much about the evidence that the opinions of ‘sceptics’ must be excluded.

But this begs the question: how do we define scepticism, and on what basis do we discount the opinion of a so-called sceptic?

If their opinions are at complete odds with the evidence: then wouldn’t it be more useful to show this? To use them, and their wrong claims, to explain the truth within the theory of human-caused global warming?

It is claimed that sceptics like myself have an undue and powerful political influence, repeatedly successfully thwarting attempts to implement necessary public policy change.

Indeed, if my arguments are so devoid of evidence, this should be easily proven. Except that the skills scores from my rainfall forecasts, when compared with reality, are far superior to anything forecast by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

There has always been a role in science for models and predictions — that can be objectively tested against reality/the evidence —- so the predictions of sceptics could be juxtaposed against predictions from the consensus.

Another way of finding universal truths is through simple observation. If we have catastrophic sea level rise, for example, then this should be evident when we visit the beach, or somewhere like Sydney Harbour. It should be evident in our coastal landscapes. I explained some of this in a recent talk I gave at the Maroochydore Surf Life Saving Club that the Institute of Public Affairs had filmed and that is now available on YouTube.

Given science is about real world phenomena, it should not be that difficult for Misha Ketchell to test the evidence repeatedly being put forward by particular individuals, like myself, against what comes to pass in the real world — what is observed.

But instead of relying on such simple tests of the truth — in my rainfall forecasts or in a coastal landscape or at a coral reef — those in authority, and who edit important journals and websites, have decided that I should be banned.

As Graham Lloyd explains on page 18 of today’s Weekend Australian, I’m listed, in, of all places, the journal Nature as a dangerous dissident who must be shunned, and denied, because, it is claimed, that I misrepresent the evidence. That so many of us are actively de-platformed is only just now being acknowledged, and I am grateful that it has today been explained in The Weekend Australian.

The conspiracy against me dates to at least 2008 when Bryant MacFie gifted $350,000 to the University of Queensland (UQ) in a donation facilitated by the Institute of Public Affairs to pay for environmental research scholarships. After I set all of this up, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (FASTS) intervened and told the Law and Agricultural facilities that if the program was to go ahead it must be without me … because as someone sceptical of global warming I lacked integrity.

I was replaced by Richard Burns, as the team leader. And more recently, in January just this year, after another strategic intervention perhaps involving the Bureau this time, I was removed as team leader from a project with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The University of Queensland program did go ahead without me back in 2008.

I moved to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The Blue Mountains is, of course, a great place for bush walking, which is a great way to reconnect with the natural world. It is in nature that we find evidence for the universal truths that exist independently of any and everything Misha Ketchell, and other such Australian opinion leaders, choose to publish — or not.

So, while I have repeatedly tried to escape to nature, it draws me back to science … as a method for transcending the chatter now everywhere in our scientific institutions and their publications.

I have kept showing that David Jones and Blair Trewin at the Bureau of Meteorology keep changing the temperature record, and more recently that the journal Nature publishes incorrect information from David Wachenfeld, the chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, as detailed in the article that follows.

Science is a method, science is never settled. We must therefore always be open-minded, tolerant and ready to be proven wrong. But history will eventually show that it is Misha Ketchell who is wrong and that this editor is not using a reasonable, or in any way evidence-based, criteria for deciding what should be published. This is so very wrong and so very harmful to science, democracy and the capacity of other opinion leaders and academics to evaluate the evidence which is so necessary if they are to get to the truth in such matters as climate change.

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The following article was published in The Weekend Australian on 7th September 2019.

Coral death knell exaggerated, says rebel quality assurance survey

The death of inshore corals near Bowen had been greatly exaggerated, according to the findings of a rebel quality assurance survey by reef-science outsiders Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy.

The shallow reef flats of Stone Island have played a key role in divisions over the health of the – inshore Great Barrier Reef and the impact of run-off from agriculture.
Dr Ridd was disciplined for attempting to blow the whistle on the widespread use of before and after pictures taken a century apart near Stone Island that suggested coral cover had disappeared.


A follow-up paper by Queensland University reef scientist Tara Clark, co-authored by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chief scientist David Wachenfeld, confirmed the coral loss.

Despite winning his unfair dismissal case against JCU and being yesterday awarded more than $1.2m by the Federal Court, Dr Ridd effectively has been dismissed as a crank by other scientists.

An expert scientific panel last month accused him of spreading scientific misinformation like pro- tobacco lobbyists and anti-vaccination campaigners.

But Dr Ridd and Dr Marohasy have spent the past two weeks documenting the corals around Stone Island, which they found were still very much alive.

The in-the-water quality assurance snapshot of onshore corals near Bowen and the Whitsundays has been partly funded by the Institute of Public Affairs.

The hundreds of hours of aerial and aquatic footage will be archived and some of this made into a documentary.

Dr Marohasy and Dr Ridd repeated the transects used in the Clark research which found there had been a serious decline in reef health from historical photographs in the late 19th century to the present.

Dr Marohasy said if the transects used in the Clark analysis had been extended by 30m to the south of Stone Island they would have found a different story.

An annotated aerial photograph of Clint’s Reef, taken with my drone Skido on about 25th August 2019, for planning underwater photography and aerial mapping.

“I saw and photographed large pink plate coral on August 25 — some more than 1m in diameter — at the reef edge just 30m from where Tara Clark and colleagues ended their transect as published in Nature,” Dr Marohasy said.

Several hundred metres away, across the headland, in the northern-facing bay, was an area of 100 per cent coral cover stretching over 25ha.

Dr Ridd said the finding of the survey was that there was “good coral all over the place” around Stone Island.

“What we saw was not consistent with the proposition that the inshore reefs have been destroyed by farm run-off,” Dr Ridd said.

He said the findings were at odds to those of Dr Clark and her team.

The survey results follow a report by GBRMPA last week that downgraded the long-term outlook for the reef from poor to very poor with particular concern about run-off in onshore reef areas.

Dr Ridd said there were “lots of people around Bowen who get very angry when people say all their coral is wiped out”.

“How would people in Sydney feel if everybody was saying that the water in Sydney Harbour has turned brown from pollution, the bridge was rusting scrap and the Opera House was crumbling ruin,” he said.

Dr Wachenfeld said it was always great to see evidence of healthy coral in inshore areas.
“The body of published science tells us most of our inshore reefs are extensively degraded,” he said. “When we find healthy patches that’s good news.”

Dr Wachenfeld said a paper published in 2016 contained information about coral around Stone Island and nearby Middle Reef.

This article was first published in The Weekend Australian, and can be viewed online here.

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The feature image, at the top of this blog post, is of me flying Skido, just south of Bowen over mudflat to the west of Bramston Reef. This drone aerial cinematography may be included in an upcoming documentary (yet to be scripted), that could be made following a short film called ‘Most Corals are Beige’ (directed by Clint Hempsall, written by Jennifer Marohasy) that is planned for release mid-October in Melbourne.

To be sure to know more about the short film and possible documentary consider subscribing for my irregular e-news.

Me under the water at Beige Reef, off Stone Island, at the entrance to Bowen Harbour.