Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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The Madness of John Pandolfi and Michelle Gunn

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Next time you read that such and such a percentage of the Great Barrier Reef has already been destroyed by humankind, laugh out loud! I say that not to offend, and not because I don’t care about the corals, but because it is better to laugh than to be drawn into their madness.

According to a completely mad research paper published by John Pandolfi and ten other reef researchers – each a high-profile marine biologist including Terry Hughes from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Research – the Great Barrier Reef was pristine before the arrival of humans. According to Pandolfi et al. published in the prestigious journal Science in 2003 (entitled ‘Global Trajectories of the Long-Term Decline of Coral Reef Ecosystems’) a rather large 25 percent of the inner Great Barrier Reef was destroyed with the arrival of Australian aborigines.

Except that when the Aborigines arrived much of the region known today as the Great Barrier Reef was open Eucalyptus woodland.

There was no Great Barrier Reef!

Back then, the Pacific Ocean began at the edge of Australia’s continental shelf that is now 100 to 200 kilometres offshore.

Sea levels began to rise some 18,000 years ago, after the arrival of the Aborigines. In fact, 100 percent of the Great Barrier Reef was formed after the arrival of humankind.

The first Australians predate the Great Barrier Reef by some 40,000 years. The first Australian walked across from New Guinea during the depth of the last ice age when there was no Great Barrier Reef. In fact, sea levels were about 120 metres lower than they are today.

It is only in the last 10,000 years, since the beginning of this geological epoch known as the Holocene, that the Great Barrier Reef has formed. It formed after sea levels rose by more than 120 metres during a period from 18,000 to 10,000 years ago when the coastline was being eroded by up to 50 metres each year.

On the subject of laughing: next time one of those expert professors in the ilk of Pandolfi or Hughes tell you to be fearful of 36 centimetres of sea level rise, remember that since the arrival of humankind in Australia some 40,000 years ago, sea levels have risen not by some few centimetres, but by around 120 metres! Oh, and all of that was before the industrial revolution that was just a couple of hundred years ago.

If there is one thing that these experts lack, especially the professors running Great Barrier Reef research, it is perspective. While they lack perspective it is the case that they are successfully drawing much of our civilization into their madness.

Just yesterday, I read that News Ltd, which publishes The Australian newspaper, has changed its editorial policy and will now, like the rest of the legacy media, be cheering madly for net zero emissions. Whatever that means. Do you know what it means? Read yesterday’s editorial in The Australian (7th September, entitled ‘National must prepare to deal with Glasgow summit’) and mention is made of Australia being ‘carbon neutral’ preferably before 2050.

I wonder if the newspaper’s editor, Michelle Gunn, has any real appreciation of what that means in practical terms. My husband is an Imperial College trained chemist, I asked him what he understood it to mean. He said it means that there is to be no additional carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by us dreadful Australians, with the potential for offset through carbon capture and so on. He doesn’t believe any of this is realistic, unless the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, bans petrol cars, stops immigration and also childbirth. Though in yesterday’s editorial mention is only made of banning coal-fired powered stations in Australia. According to the editorial, given the rules governing such things, coal-fired powered stations will still operate in China, South Africa, Indonesia, Russia and Vietnam. Coal-fired power stations will just be banned in Australia and a few other countries. Yet I’m sure the sea level rise of some 40 centimetres since the Industrial Revolution that the university professors and newspaper editors profess to be so concerned about is a global phenomenon that shows no respect for national coastlines.

To be sure, they mostly write and publish politics and madness.

There are antidotes to such madness. You could begin by cancelling your subscription to the journal Science and The Australian newspaper.

Instead, spend more time at the beach and in the ocean. Australia has a long coastline and most of us live not far from a beach – from the ocean.

I visited Lady Elliot Island at the Great Barrier Reef earlier this year with my husband, John Abbot. Scuba diving, I was unable to find any coral bleaching. Walking along the seashore with John (Abbot, not Pandolfi) I could only find evidence of sea level fall, not sea level rise. Indeed, the image featured at the top of this blog post shows John looking at a Porites sp. microatoll whose growth is constrained by sea level. The coral colony is flat topped, and dead-on top. A thin veneer of live coral grows around it’s margin and down to the sand. The live coral would thus be invisible to the surveys by Terry Hughes from 150 metres up in an airplane. (That is another mad story written up in prestigious journals and repeated in the press. It is everywhere, the madness.)

There are so many microatolls at the Great Barrier Reef, which are live corals that can not grow-up because in reality there is no catastrophic sea level rise.
This is a close-up of the corallites with their tentacle extended, of a coral microatoll along the seashore at Lady Elliot Island.
I should love to go walking, along a shoreline, with Michelle Gunn and John Pandolfi, and show them how mostly in the real world along the east coast of Australia, which is where they live, it appears we have sea level fall not sea level rise. Should we believe what they write or what we can see with our own eyes when we get outside and into nature.

Fussing Over One Degree of Simulation

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I was at the Australian National University in October 2018, when the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere began running the simulations that have now been published as the IPCC’s Assessment Report No. 6 (AR6). It’s being touted as the most comprehensive climate change report ever. It is certainly based on a suite* of very complex simulation models (CMIP6).

Many are frightened by the official analysis of the model’s results, which claims global warming is unprecedented in more than 2000 years. Yet the same modelling is only claiming the Earth is warming by some fractions of a degree Celsius! Specifically, the claim is that we humans have caused 1.06 °C of the claimed 1.07 °C rise in temperatures since 1850, which is not very much. The real-world temperature trends that I have observed at Australian locations with long temperature records would suggest a much greater rate of temperature rise since 1960, and cooling before that.

Allowing some historical perspective shows that the IPCC is wrong to label the recent temperature changes ‘unprecedented’. They are not unusual in magnitude, direction or rate of change, which should diminish fears that recent climate change is somehow catastrophic.

To understand how climate has varied over much longer periods, over hundreds and thousands of years, various types of proxy records can be assembled derived from the annual rings of long-lived tree species, corals and stalagmites. These types of records provide evidence for periods of time over the past several thousand years (the late Holocene) that were either colder, or experienced similar temperatures, to the present, for example the Little Ice Age (1309 to 1814) and the Medieval Warm Period (985 to 1200), respectively. These records show global temperatures have cycled within a range of up to 1.8 °C over the last thousand years.

Indeed, the empirical evidence, as published in the best peer-reviewed journals, would suggest that there is no reason to be concerned by a 1.5 °C rise in global temperatures over a period of one hundred years – that this is neither unusual in terms of rate nor magnitude. That the latest IPCC report, Assessment Report 6, suggests catastrophe if we cannot contain warming to 1.5 °C is not in accordance with the empirical evidence, but rather a conclusion based entirely on simulation modelling falsely assuming these models can accurately simulate ocean and atmospheric weather systems. There are better tools for generating weather and climate forecasts, specifically artificial neural networks (ANNs) that are a form of artificial intelligence.

Of course, there is nowhere on Earth where the average global temperature can be measured; it is very cold at the poles and rather warmer in the tropics. So, the average global temperature for each year since 1850 could never be a direct ‘observation’, but rather, at best, a statistic calculated from measurements taken at thousands of weather stations across the world. And can it really be accurately calculated to some fractions of a degree Celsius?

AR6, which runs to over 4,000-pages, claims to have accurately quantified everything including confidence ranges for the ‘observation’ of 1.07 °C. Yet I know from scrutinising the datasets used by the IPCC, that the single temperature series inputted for individual locations incorporate ‘adjustments’ by national meteorological services that are rather large. To be clear, even before the maximum and minimum temperature values from individual weather stations are incorporated into HadCRUT5 they are adjusted. A key supporting technical paper (eg. Brohan et al. 2006, Journal of Geophysical Research) clearly states that: ‘HadCRUT only archives single temperature series for particular location and any adjustments made by national meteorological services are unknown.’ So, the idea, that the simulations are based on ‘observation’ with real meaningful ‘uncertainty limits’ is just not true.

According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), which is one of the national meteorological services providing data for HadCRUT, the official remodelled temperatures are an improvement on the actual measurements. This may be so that they better accord with IPCC policy, with the result being a revisionist approach to our climate history. In general they strip the natural cycles within the datasets of actual observations, replacing them with linear trends that accord with IPCC policy.

The BOM’s Blair Trewin, who is one of the 85 ‘drafting authors’ of the Summary for Policy Makers, in 2018 remodelled and published new values for each of the 112 weather stations used to calculate an Australian average over the period 1910 to 2016, so that the overall rate of warming increased by 23 %. Specifically, the linear trend (°C per century) for Australian temperatures had been 1 °C per century as published in 2012 in the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network − Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) database version 1. Then, just in time for inclusion in this new IPCC report released on Tuesday, all the daily values from each of the 112 weather stations were remodelled and the rate of warming increased to 1.23 °C per century in ACORN-SAT version 2 that was published in 2018. This broadly accords with the increase of 22% in the rate of warming between the 2014 IPCC report (Assessment Report No. 5) which was 0.85 °C (since 1850), and this new report has the rate of warming of 1.07 °C.

Remodelling of the data sets by the national meteorological services generally involves cooling the past, by way of dropping down the values in the first part of the twentieth century. This is easy enough to check for the Australian data because it is possible to download the maximum and minimum values as recorded at the 112 Australian weather stations for each day from the BOM website, and then compare these values with the values as listed in ACORN-SAT version 1 (that I archived some years ago) and ACORN-SAT version 2 that is available at the BOM website. For example, the maximum temperature as recorded at the Darwin weather station was 34.2 °C on 1 January 1910 (this is the very first value listed). This value was changed by Blair Trewin in the creation of ACORN-SAT version 1 to 33.8 °C. He ‘cooled’ this historical observation by a further 1.4 °C in the creation of ACORN-SAT version 2, just in time for inclusion in the values used to calculate a global average temperature for AR6. When an historic value is cooled relative to present temperatures, then an artificial warming trend is created.

I am from northern Australia, I was born in Darwin, so I take a particular interest in its temperature series. I was born there on 26th August 1963. A maximum temperature of 29.6 °C was recorded at the Darwin airport on that day from a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen, which was an official recording station using standard equipment. This is also the temperature value shown in ACORN-SAT version 1. This value was dropped down/cooled by 0.8 °C in the creation of ACORN-SAT version 2, by Blair Trewin in 2018. So, the temperature series incorporated into HadCRUT5, which is one of the global temperature datasets used in all the IPCC reports shows the contrived value of 28.8 °C for 26th August 1963, yet the day I born a value of 29.6 °C was entered into the meteorological observations book for Darwin. In my view, changing the numbers in this way is plain wrong, and certainly not scientific.

The BOM justifies remodelling because of changes to the equipment used to record temperatures and because of the relocation of the weather stations, except that they change the values even when there have been no changes to the equipment or locations. In the case of Darwin, the weather station has been at the airport since February 1941, and an automatic weather station replaced the mercury thermometer on 1 October 1990. For the IPCC report (AR5) published in 2014, the BOM submitted the actual value of 29.6 °C as the maximum temperature for Darwin on 26th August 1963. Yet in November 2018, when the temperatures were submitted for inclusion in the modelling for this latest report (AR6), the contrived value of 28.8 °C was submitted.

The temperature series that are actual observations from weather stations at locations across Australia tend to show cooling to about 1960 and warming since then. This is particularly the case for inland locations from southeast Australia. For example, the actual observations from the weather stations with the longest records in New South Wales were plotted for the period to 1960 and then from 1960 to 2013, for a presentation that I gave to the Sydney Institute in 2014. I calculated an average cooling from the late 1800s to 1960 of minus 1.95 °C, and an average warming of plus 2.48 °C from the 1960s to the present, as shown in Table 1. Yet this new United Nation’s IPCC report claims inevitable catastrophe should the rate of warming exceeds 1.5 °C, yet this can be shown to have already occurred at many Australian locations.

This is consistent with the findings in my technical report as published in the international climate science journal Atmospheric Research (volume 166, pages 141-149) in 2015, which shows significant cooling in the maximum temperatures at the Cape Otway and Wilsons Promontory lighthouses, in southeast Australia, from 1921 to 1950. The cooling is more pronounced in temperature records from the farmlands of the Riverina, including at Rutherglen and Deniliquin. To repeat, while temperatures at the lighthouses show cooling from about 1880 to about 1950, they then show quite dramatic warming from at least 1960 to the present. In the Riverina, however, minimum temperatures continued to fall through the 1970s and 1980s because of the expansion of the irrigation schemes. Indeed, the largest dip in the minimum temperature record for Deniliquin occurs just after the Snowy Hydroelectricity scheme came online. This is masked by the remodelled by dropping down/cooling all the minimum temperatures observations at Deniliquin before 1971 by 1.5 °C.

In my correspondence with the Bureau about these adjustments it was explained that irrigation is not natural and therefore there is a need to correct the record through remodelling of the series from these irrigation areas until they show warming consistent with theory. But global warming itself is not natural, if it is essentially driven by human influence, which is a key assumption of current policy. Indeed, there should be something right-up-front in the latest assessment of climate change by the IPCC (AR6) explaining that the individual temperature series have been remodelled before inclusion in the global datasets to ensure a significant human influence on climate in accordance with IPCC policy. These remodelled temperature series are then incorporated into CMIP6 which is so complex it can only be run only a supercomputer that generates so many scenarios for a diversity of climate parameters from sea level to rainfall.

In October 2018, I visited the Australian National University (ANU) to watch CMIP6 at work on the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. It was consuming obscene amounts of electricity to run the simulations for this latest IPCC report, and it is also used to generate medium to long range rainfall forecasts for the BOM. The rainfall forecasts from these simulation models even just three months in advance are, however, notoriously unreliable. Yet we are expected to believe rainfall forecasts based on simulations that make projections 100 years in advance, as detailed in AR6.

There are alternative tools for generating temperature and rainfall forecasts. In a series of research papers and book chapters with John Abbot, I have documented how artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be used to mine historical datasets for patterns and from these generate more accurate medium and long-range rainfall and temperature forecast. Our forecasts don’t suggest an impending climate catastrophe, but rather that climate change is cyclical, not linear. Indeed, temperatures change on a daily cycle as the Earth spins on its axis, temperatures change with the seasons because of the tilt of the Earth relative to its orbit around the Sun, and then there are ice ages because of changes in the orbital path of the Earth around the Sun, and so on.

Taking this longer perspective, considering the sun rather than carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change, and inputting real observations rather than remodelled/adjusted temperature values, we find recurrent cycles greater than 1.07 degrees Celsius during the last 2000 years. Our research paper entitled ‘The application of machine learning for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change’, published in GeoResJ in 2017 (volume 14, pages 36-46) shows a series of temperature reconstructions from six geographically distinct regions and gives some graphic illustration of the rate and magnitude of the temperature fluctuations.

ANNs are at the cutting edge of AI technology, with new network configurations and learning algorithms continually being developed. In 2012, when John Abbot and I began using ANNs for rainfall forecasting we choose a time delay neural network (TDNN), which was considered state-of-the-art at that time. The TDNN used a network of perceptrons where connection weights were trained with backpropagation. More recently we have been using General Regression Neural Networks (GRNN), that have no backpropagation component.

A reasonable test of the value of any scientific theory is its utility – its ability to solve some particular problem. There has been an extraordinary investment into climate change over the last three decades, yet it is unclear whether there has been any significant improvement in the skill of weather and climate forecasting. Mainstream climate scientists, and meteorological agencies continue to rely on simulation modelling for their forecasts such as the CMIP6 models used in this latest IPCC report – there could be a better way and we may not have a climate catastrophe.

* Following comment in the following thread from Greg Goodman on 15th August, I have added in the word ‘suite of’ because it is the case that CMIP6 is a project rather than a model, it is a project that runs a suite of simulation models.

Further Reading/Other Information

The practical application of ANNs for forecasting temperatures and rainfall is detailed in a series of papers by John Abbot and me that are listed here: https://climatelab.com.au/publications/

Chapter 16 of the book ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020’ provides more detail on how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology takes a revisionist approach to Darwin’s history, click here:
https://climatechangethefacts.org.au/2021/08/09/rewriting-australias-temperature-history/

There is an interactive table based on the maximum and minimum values as originally recorded for each of the 112 Australian weather stations used to calculate the official temperature values as listed in ACORN-SAT version 1 and version 2 at my website, click here:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/acorn-sat-v1-vs-v2/

The feature image, at the top of this blog post, shows Jennifer Marohasy in front of the supercomputer at the Australian National University in October 2018, which was running simulations for the latest IPCC report.

In Adelaide, for Krish

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Last Wednesday my son-in-law Christian, who I call Krish, rolled his Toyota Landcruiser about 6 hours to the southwest of Nhulunbuy near a place called Bulman. My daughter, who was in the passenger seat, went into brace position and escaped the crash relatively unscathed, even able to run into Bulman for help. They had just set off on their honeymoon that was planned as a camping adventure all the way across the top-end of Australia to the remote Kimberly region.

Of course, many of us worry about Krish and his risk taking. He has been known to go surfing in crocodile infested waters, but this time he had only packed his fishing rod and had just bought new tyres for the vehicle. I had helped him wash the vehicle (the first time in over a year – obviously bad luck) and he had been up late just before the wedding soldering wires so the main interior light worked again.

He has driven that dirt track out of Nhulunbuy to Katherine many times, but it is well known to be treacherous. He was apparently not even driving that fast, having just got going after stopping to watch buffalo cross the red dirt.

The track not far from Bulman, on the way to Katherine from Nhulunbuy.
Christian and Caroline were evacuated from near Bulman in remote East Arnhem Land to Darwin and then Adelaide.

Anyway, all of that is incidental to the fact that Krish is now recovering at the spinal unit of Royal Adelaide Hospital in South Australia with 8 screws, a plate and a bone graft, all skilfully insert by Dr YH Yau. The operation was very successful and Kris is already able to take some steps, but managing the pain and other complications is going to take some time.

I am so grateful to Careflight for evacuating Krrish and Caroline to Darwin. I am also so grateful to the doctors in Darwin for recommending an immediate subsequent evacuation to Adelaide because of the specialist spinal unit here headed by Dr YH Yau.

I was meant to fly from Nhulunbuy to Cairns, last week but instead flew to Darwin and then onward to Adelaide. I have been here a week now. I would stay forever, or leave tomorrow, if I thought it could take away the pain that Krish is having to endure.

There is a specialist spinal unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital that has performed what could be considered a miracle, so Christian can walk again.

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Update 7 August, nickname changed to more traditional spelling of Krish. 🙂

The Idea of Academic Freedom, Explained by Stone and Forrest*

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Does the principle of academic freedom protect Australian academics who engage in pointed public criticism of their academic colleagues, and university governance? A case in the High Court this week provides a rare opportunity to consider academic freedom in Australian universities.

The case has its origins in an academic dispute about the threat climate change poses to the Great Barrier Reef. Peter Ridd, a professor at James Cook University, believed his academic colleagues at a research centre at the University and at a partner institution, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, overstated the risk.

In comments to print journalists and in appearances on television, Ridd criticised reports produced by those researchers as flawed and untrustworthy. Specifically, he said that his colleagues knew they were ‘likely … telling a misleading story’, and that they would ‘wiggle and squirm’ under questioning.

A disciplinary process began. Ridd was directed to maintain the confidentiality of the process and, more unusually, not to ‘trivialise’, ‘satirise’ or ‘parody’ the process. Perhaps predictably, Ridd ignored these directions and continued both to publicise and disparage the proceedings against him. After two formal censures, the University terminated Ridd’s employment.

Ridd’s action against the University succeeded in the Federal Circuit Court but that judgment was overturned on appeal by the Full Federal Court. This week, the High Court heard Ridd’s final appeal.

There has been a lot of media focus in recent years on freedom of speech in universities. But this case raises questions about a related but distinct idea: academic freedom. That is, the case concerns the freedom of academics to discuss their field of research and to challenge the work of others as part of the process of academic inquiry. This freedom is unique to universities and protects their core and most important function: the advancement of knowledge through teaching and research.

The academic freedom issue is contained within a more prosaic legal question. At its core it concerns the interaction between two employment instruments. The first, the University’s Enterprise Agreement, contains a commitment to ‘intellectual freedom’ and provides staff rights to, for example, pursue critical inquiry, participate in debate, and express opinions, including on university operations and policy. The right to express opinions extends to expressing ‘unpopular or controversial views’ but not to harassing, vilifying, bullying or intimidating those who disagree. The second is the University’s Code of Conduct. Among other things, the Code obliges staff to treat fellow staff with ‘courtesy’ and ‘respect’ and to uphold the University’s reputation.

Neither instrument is unusual. Similar or equivalent instruments are found in many other Australian universities. In simple terms, the question in the case is: do these conflict, and if so, which instrument gives way to the other? Ridd, of course, argues that the commitment to intellectual freedom contained in the Enterprise Agreement is the primary commitment. The University argues that there is no conflict and that the Code is fully consistent with the Enterprise Agreement.

It is not a simple question, and there is not space in this piece to address the legal complexities of the case in full. In our view, the resolution of the legal question requires returning to the more fundamental idea: academic freedom. It has a long provenance and internationally well-recognised elements, including:
1. the freedom of academics to freely research, critically inquire and teach;
2. autonomy of universities; and
3. the involvement of academics in university governance, whether through formal participation in governance or through the freedom to criticise university governance.

While the way in which these principles are implemented necessarily varies, the principles themselves are well-recognised in Australia including by the Independent Review conducted by former Chief Justice Robert French into freedom of speech in universities and in the very law which established James Cook University.

The commitment to ‘intellectual freedom’ found in the Enterprise Agreement must be understood against this backdrop. The rights comprising the commitment to ‘intellectual freedom’ are entirely familiar elements of the principle of academic freedom. The use of the term ‘intellectual freedom’ indicates not a narrowing or rejection of the principle of ‘academic freedom’ but an expansion: in the Enterprise Agreement, the principle of academic freedom is extended beyond academic staff to include non-academic staff.

With that in mind, the commitment to ‘intellectual freedom’ is better understood as the primary commitment, to which the obligations of the Code must give way in some circumstances. This view gives priority to the core purposes of a university, and the practical realities of the exercise of academic freedom. Some essential expressions of academic freedom, such as allegations of academic fraud or of university mismanagement or maladministration, are simply unavoidably discourteous and reputation threatening.

Here, Ridd’s conduct, however unpleasant, involved the exercise of two important elements of the principle of academic freedom: the expression of opinions on scientific matters, and criticism of university governance.

As a matter of principle, limits on such expressions of academic freedom should be rare, carefully confined and very well justified. Neither inconvenience, irritation, disputation between colleagues, nor the embarrassment of university partners is justification enough. Given the importance of the principle of the academic freedom, the burden on justifying restrictions to it should be very heavy indeed. In this case, that burden was not met.

*This article by Adrienne Stone and Joshua Forest was first published by Graham Young at On Line Opinion, click here, and is republished here with permission. Adrienne Stone is the Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Law at the University of Melbourne and the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow. Joshua Forrest is Research Associate at the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School.

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The feature image was taken by Clint Hempsall in January 2020 at a place called Gotham City, which is a well known dive site at The Ribbon Reefs. It shows Red Bass and Giant Trevally circling the top of a bombie before one smashed corals to extract a smaller fish, its prey.

The Injustice of Blowing-Up Turtles, for Convenience

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It is World Ocean Day, an opportunity to learn more about the Great Barrier Reef and also artificial reefs in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is an injustice that turtles are blown-up in the Gulf of Mexico because American oil companies choose a particular and inappropriate method for undertaking surveys before setting explosives. If they did underwater, rather than aerial surveys, it would be difficult to ever justify blowing-up biological diverse artificial reefs that are old spent oil rigs. It is also an injustice when aerial surveys are undertaken to falsely conclude the Great Barrier Reef is more than 60 percent bleached, when underwater surveys give a completely different and true assessments. It is also an injustice that the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) had a perfectly good methodology for coring corals under-the-water and calculating an accurate overall average coral growth rates for the Great Barrier Reef, but then they changed the methodology and when the new methodology was shown to be flawed by Peter Ridd they did nothing about it. Last week I was told a new and better overall coral growth rate will soon be published for the Great Barrier Reef – but the methodology is not, and will not, be available for scrutiny, especially not to Peter Ridd who was sacked by James Cook University for suggesting there needs to be some checking – some quality assurance. Let me explain in more detail, including about the turtles.

Late last year I went to sea for a week with Shaun Frichette. I’m a biologist, and I was searching for 400-year-old corals that can be 10-metres wide and have annual growth rings, like tree rings, they are in the genus Porites. Large and very old Porites corals used to be cored to calculate an overall coral growth rate for the Great Barrier Reef. Shaun came on the trip at short notice, wanting to know first-hand the state of the Great Barrier Reef; he had heard it was dying. He was working as a volunteer at a turtle rehabilitation centre on Fitzroy Island, which is just to the south-east of Cairns and part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Ten years ago, he worked as a deep-sea diver in the Gulf of Mexico.

He got into deep sea diving in his late twenties because he had developed a passion for environmental issues especially marine conservation. At the time, he figured if an oil pipe was leaking on the sea floor it took a diver to go down and fix it, so he trained as a commercial diver and went to Louisiana. He did lots of diving on the oil rigs as well as working topside on saturation systems and diver tending. His goal at the time was to become a saturation diver and live life ‘like an astronaut’ except on the sea floor. To achieve that goal, Shaun knew he would have to put in years of hard work proving himself in the industry, but he never realized that the industry would meanwhile prove to care so little for life under-the-sea. For example, the oil companies, trained him to cut through steel with torches that burn at over 10 thousand degrees so that spent oil rigs could be dismantled safely – but instead they sent him down to the bottom of the ocean to plant explosives because it was faster to decommission a rig that way.

Shaun remembers:

The oil companies would send ‘turtle girls’ up in a helicopter to scout dolphins and sea turtles and if they gave the ‘all clear’ charges would go off and we would return to location. The problem was those oil rig platforms become like coral reefs after years of being submerged and the sea life around them is so biodiverse and special.

The turtle girls could only see 5 meters underwater on a good day so what I witnessed was horrific. Turtles cut in half, wounded dolphins and thousands of floating fish stunned from the explosions.

Something changed inside of me after seeing that and it’s altered my life path ever since.

Shaun quit and soon found himself back in California, in the High Sierra, at Lake Tahoe where he first learnt to Scuba dive. He bought into a dive business doing boat salvage and dock repairs during the summer months – while volunteering for marine conservation projects during the winter months when the lake froze over. The bushfires happened in Australia during the 2019-2020 ‘off season’ and after hearing news reports, Shaun volunteered as a fire fighter and came to Australia. Covid hit, and so he stayed-on. First helping with wildlife rescue, before travelling north to see the Great Barrier Reef.

I met Shaun late November 2020 at a café in Cairns. It was the day before we set-off with underwater photographer Stuart Ireland on a hurriedly arranged week at sea. The plan was to look for, and film, a particular type of coral known as Porites with annual growth rings, like tree rings, so they are potentially a time capsule of the ocean’s climate history. We wanted to find the oldest and largest of these corals that AIMS used to core, all the way to Myrmidon reef where there was once an extensive coral coring program.

Some of these Porites corals are huge. Just last year I measured a healthy Porites coral seven metres in width and three metres high, at an inshore reef called Pixie Reef just 40 kilometres to the northeast of Cairns. This is a reef that is classified in the peer-reviewed literature as one of the very worst bleached (more than 60%), yet I’ve struggled to find any bleaching at all at that reef. I’ve also seen Porites large and healthy, in fact dozens of them, in Bowen Harbour where all the corals are meant to be dead from global warming and ocean acidification and poor water quality – yet they are very much alive, or were, when I was there in April and then August 2019. Just three weeks ago at Lady Elliot Island to the east of Bundaberg I found a Porites that was 4 metres in height and so healthy. I asked the local divers if it has ever bleached and I was told by an old guy who has worked on the island for thirty years that it once went blue in colour after a cold snap, that was a few years ago, but that it has never bleached.

Shaun swimming over massive Porites at the Great Barrier Reef in November 2020.

We are repeatedly told, most recently by the Australian Academy of Science, that most (somewhere between 50 and 99%) of the hard corals of the Great Barrier Reef are now dead yet this is not my experience as someone who snorkels and dives. I have seen very large and dead Porites, but not often. Perhaps as often as a I see a dead tree in my favourite national parks.

One of my frustrations with the official reporting on the health of the Great Barrier Reef is that much of it is based on aerial surveys. Not by turtle-girls, but by a university professor. Like the aerial surveys in the Gulf of Mexico, the surveys might be best described as convenient. They are certainly not scientific; despite being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The fly-past aerial surveys give the impression they are quantitative and claim that the entire Great Barrier Reef is more than 60% bleached, but the only numbers actually recorded by Professor Terry Hughes looking out the plane window are rankings of 1, 2, 3 or 4 based on his impression of the state of the corals from that high altitude.

At 150-metres altitude he might be just able to just make-out the very large Porites at Pixie Reef on a good day. I sent my drone up and took photographs at 40 and 120-metres altitude of that monster coral that measures 7 metres in width on 25th November 2020. It appeared white and possibly bleached from the air. Yet under the water and up-close it was beige in colour, with healthy zooxanthellae. There was absolutely no bleaching. I gave the coral a score of D3 on the University of Queensland Coral Watch Health Chart (www.coralwatch.org). But who else actually goes to check?

To lament the dying Great Barrier Reef is politically correct, to question this is to risk being labelled a climate change contrarian. Yet my experience over 50 years of diving at the Great Barrier Reef – since January 2020 I have had the opportunity to SCUBA dive almost the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef from the Ribbon Reefs to Lady Elliot Island including dozens of reefs in-between – is that they are still exceptionally diverse and beautiful. The 2016 bleaching event was reportedly the most severe on record, particularly in the northern section including at the Ribbons Reefs, yet most of the reefs appear to be fully recovered.

When university professor Peter Ridd explained the extent of the misrepresentation back in 2015 in an email to a News Ltd journalist, specifically that there are still healthy live corals in Bowen Harbour, while calling out a colleague claiming otherwise, he was reprimanded by James Cook University. To publicly demand some quality assurance of claims the reef is dead and dying is professional suicide. The professor’s dismissal from James Cook University in 2018 – essentially on the basis that he broke the enterprise bargaining agreement by being un-collegial – has been appealed all the way to the High Court of Australia, with that hearing scheduled for 23rd June 2021. The Peter Ridd case is focused on issues of freedom of speech. Not because Peter does not care about the truth, but because the only way we might be able to get to the truth about the health of the Great Barrier Reef is if he can put his evidence – he needs to first have the opportunity to be heard beyond the academic journals that are behind paywalls.

Back in 2013 Peter Ridd published an analysis of how the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences (AIMS) has changed the method they use for coring the Porites corals to calculate an average growth rate for the Great Barrier Reef. The method has essentially been changed for convenience. The data then showed a drop after 1990 that is conveniently consistent with the narrative that the Great Barrier Reef is dying – never mind that the new method is flawed.

Coral growth rate (calcification rate) on the GBR for the 20th century. Left Chart: Coral growth rates calculated by AIMS showing drastic reduction after 1990 and prediction (red dot) for 2020. Right Chart: Reanalysed to account for measurement errors and sampling problems by Peter Ridd. Green dot is the alternative prediction for 2020.
Note: There is no data of the GBR-average growth rate since 2005.

In the 2013 research article in Marine Geology, Peter Ridd explains that firstly there are instrumental errors with the measurements of the Porites annual growth rings undertaken in the early 2000s. This is especially the case for the last layer at the surface of the coral, which was often measured as being much smaller than the reality. This created an apparent drop in the average calcification for the corals that were collected in the early 2000s – falsely implying a recent calcification (growth rate) drop. Secondly, an ‘age effect’ was not acknowledged, specifically the coring program in 2003, 2004 and 2005 focused on smaller colonies, many just a few tens of centimetres in diameter. In summary, while coring in the 1980s focused on large old corals and their growth bands were accurately measured, coring in the early 2000s focused on small young corals and when some of the measurements were checked they were found to be in error.

Yet the two datasets (from the 1980s and early 2000s) were spliced together, and wholly unjustifiable assumptions were implicitly made, but not stated – in particular that there is no age effect on coral growth. Coral growth rates are a potential measure of reef health, but the methodology needs to be consistent. When the data to 2005 is filtered for only the largest and oldest Porites corals, it shows an increase in calcification rates (coral growth rates).

I have made a short film about all of this: showing the Porites, how they used to be cored with archival footage, and also Peter Ridd is interviewed explaining the inconsistencies in the methodology. Towards the end of the film Peter Ridd is actually interviewed by turtle-man Shaun Frichette, and Shaun shows what we found during that week at sea last November all the way to Myrmidon reef in search of the oldest and largest Porites. Myrmidon is nearly 200 kms to the north north-east of Townsville. It is a detached coral reef exposed to the full force of the Pacific Ocean and to continual upwellings from the deep.

In the film we lament that the large old corals at Myrmidon are no longer cored by AIMS to know the climate history of this coral reef on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Last Thursday (3 June 2021), I received a phone call from an AIMS scientist, who told me that he still cores some of the old and healthy Porites. He claimed my new film is potentially misrepresenting the AIMS coring program.

I had been trying to talk with someone at AIMS about their coring program for months. In an email sent to AIMS director Paul Hardisty on 10 November 2020, Peter Ridd asked permission for me to film their largest and oldest coral cores and interview Janice Lough for my film – Peter Ridd began his career at AIMS in the 1980s, and was once a colleague of Janice, which was back when many of these cores were first collected. Paul Hardisty never replied to that email.

The scientist who phoned me last Thursday morning explained AIMS will soon be publishing a new overall coral growth rate for the Great Barrier Reef, and that the coring program has not stopped. I was appreciative of the phone call and asked to see the data since 2005 because in my new short film, Peter Ridd explains the coring program to calculate an average coral growth rate for the Great Barrier Reef stopped in 2005 – and that the data to this point is flawed.

In response to this request, I was sent a research paper about coring young Porites corals that was published in 2014, based on coral coring data collected in 2003, 2004 and 2005. I replied to the scientist that it is now 2021! Where is the data for the last 16 years – and how does the new data address the methodological issues detailed by Peter Ridd in his paper published in Marine Geology back in 2013?

What I found most interesting about the technical paper sent to me last Thursday afternoon, is that it laments coral bleaching as something that can cause a ‘growth hiatus’ in the large old Porites, but nowhere does it suggest coral bleaching actually kills these old corals. Also, the paper claims bleaching is a new phenomenon while presenting no data for the period before 1980. Yet AIMS has coral cores that date back to the 1600s, potentially providing 400 years of data including on the incidence of coral bleaching.

Deceit when it comes to issues of great public interest is not new. We have the choice as individuals to close our minds to new information that doesn’t necessarily accord with established narratives, or alternatively reflect on information that at a first glance appear anomalous. We are no better than those who choose to do aerial surveys knowing full well that turtles live under-the-sea, if we only hear and read that which accords with preexisting narratives that keep us conveniently connected to the status quo while misunderstanding the true state of the Great Barrier Reef. If we really care about something, we should want to know everything about it.

Today, on World Ocean Day, my short film starring both Peter Ridd and also Shaun Frichette, will premiere at The Majestic Theatre, in Pomona, not far from where I live. I am so grateful to the ninety people who have already bought their tickets. The bar opens at 2pm, the screening will be at 3pm.

Last Thursday I did extend an invitation to the AIMS scientist who phoned me, I suggested that he come to this screening. I explained that it would be possible to hold a questions and answers session after the screening, that we could even invite some local media so AIMS could clearly explain and hopefully show the last 16 years of data. I was told that this would not be possible.

On 10 June 2021, the IPA will premiere ‘Finding Porites’ on YouTube and also Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/Inst.ofPublicAffairs/videos/1223155594867184/

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The feature image, at the very top of this blog post, shows Jennifer Marohasy with a turtle at the Great Barrier Reef in April 2006.

Jennifer Marohasy and Shaun Frichette onboard Kiama during the filming of ‘Finding Porites’

In Search of Monster Corals – My Latest Film and Underwater Adventure

By

Marlin fisherman Rob McCulloch, and I, talked about going searching for the monster corals. I wanted the skipper to take me all the way to Myrmidon Reef, where I knew The Australian Institute of Marine Sciences had once cored these largest Porites. Peter Ridd had told me some of the stories.

Underwater cinematographer Stuart Ireland agreed to come with us, and helped turn this adventure into a film. I had a shot list, that Stuart noted, and then expanded on. He not only filmed non-stop underwater, but took so much drone footage and recorded interviews and also me when I emerged so excited from the dives.

Our short film, Finding Porites, will premiere at the local Majestic Theatre on 8th June. And we now have a short 45-second trailer:

People generally think of corals as delicate and vulnerable, perhaps thin, branching and colourful – easily smashed by large waves during storms, and even worse during cyclones. Then there are the bolder corals that have the scientific name Porites. These monster corals are domed or helmet in shape, and can grow to 10 metres in diameter of dense calcium carbonate so an individual colony weights more than a bus! These are resilient corals that are the foundation of many coral reefs. They have annual growth rings, like tree rings, and so they are time capsules of the ocean’s history.

The Australian Institute of Marine Sciences used to calculate an overall growth rate for the Great Barrier Reef based on coring these corals with the oldest core dating to the year 1572. So, there was more than 400 years of climate history in this coral.

The prediction back in the 1980s was that as global temperatures increased so would coral growth rates. But forty years later we don’t actually know. Because AIMS changed their methodology for coring the massive Porites corals after 1990, and then, after the error was pointed out by recently sacked University Professor Peter Ridd in a study published in Marine Geology (volume 346), AIMS stopped this coring work altogether.

I was repeatedly told the coral coring work had stopped, not because of Peter’s published study but because all the really large and old Porites are now dead from coral bleaching.

It was in October last year, just after Professor Terry Hughes from James Cook University came out with yet another study claiming half the Great Barrier Reef is dead, and just after the skipper (Rob) told me he had no charters/no work because of Queensland border closures due to Covid, that I convinced IPA Executive Director John Roskam to let me go to sea with Rob and two other Marlin fishermen (Wizzy and Denis) to see if we could find the large old Porites – the type of coral that Peter Ridd wished AIMS would core so that we had up-to-date data on coral growth rates.

Marine biologist, and underwater cinematographer Stuart Ireland did agreed to come and film whatever we found. The day before we departed Cairns, Stuart introduced me to Shaun Frichette, a conservationist and deep-sea diver from California who had heard the reef was dead and dying and was keen to come see for himself.

At that lunch I learnt that Shaun didn’t eat fish – he explained that his life mission was to save marine life, not consume it.

Shaun nevertheless was keen to come on the fishing boat, understanding the three Marlin fishermen taking us to sea for a week were as committed as Stuart and me to finding the Porites and knowing the true state of these corals. Shaun just wouldn’t be eating any of the fish we caught along the way! The story of that week at sea together is told in our new film.

The film includes never-before-seen archival footage of AIMS scientists coring one of these monster corals with an hydraulic drill under the sea, and then extracting a core.

I am so excited that this 22-minute documentary will premiere at The Majestic Theatre in Pomona on World Oceans Day – Tuesday, 8th June 2021. I so hope you can make it!

Purchase your tickets at https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing?eid=766421&

Jen and Shaun on little Kiama, that got us all the way to Myrmidon Reef in search of Porites.
Little Kiama under a boomerang cloud at Myrmidon Reef on 1 December 2020.