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PETER Ridd’s trial in the Brisbane Federal Circuit Court has just wrapped-up after three days. With Judge Salvadore Vasta presiding, Stuart Wood QC acting for Peter Ridd (the applicant) argued the case with great skill. However, on the most critical of issues the university (the defendant) and important media refused to engage at all. Chris Murdoch QC, acting for James Cook University, refused to outline to Judge Vasta what processes it has in place for quality assurance of scientific research, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) simply didn’t attend or report.

At the heart of this court case is the matter of Peter Ridd disputing media’s reporting of the health of the Great Barrier Reef back in 2015 and 2016. Specifically, Peter Ridd was first censured for proposing to a journalist in April 2016 that he investigate the state of the fringing reefs around Stone Island, which is part of the Great Barrier Reef.

Instead of investigating, the journalist sent Dr Ridd’s evidence that the reefs were in good health with spectacular coral, to his arch adversary at the university, Terry Hughes, who was claiming the exact opposite, and who promptly forwarded the evidence from Dr Ridd to university management. This began a disciplinary procedure that would eventually result in Peter Ridd’s sacking.

The trial opened on Tuesday with Mr Wood QC outlining Dr Ridd’s honestly held expert opinion that the Great Barrier Reef is in good health, but that many of his colleagues, particularly Professor Hughes, suggest otherwise, that their research is “untrustworthy” and is not subject to any “quality assurance”.

The Judge seemed genuinely interested in this issue of “quality assurance” of the research. Towards the end of Day 2 he specifically requested that Mr Murdoch QC explain to the court what quality assurance procedures were in place.

I had assumed that Mr Murdoch QC, the Barrister acting for the University, would thus begin Day 3 with some explanation of this – but he didn’t. The University continued to refuse to engage on any matters of science, particularly the issue of quality assurance. Rather the University simply argued that because there is a code of conduct that expects professors to be collegial – they thus had a right to sack Peter Ridd because he had become disrespectful of his colleagues and also had broken confidentiality.

At the beginning of Day 2 Peter Ridd clearly explained that he was concerned about the trustworthiness of the science, and the lack of quality assurance because it was having a significant negative economic impact on rural and regional economies – because of the bad publicity for tourism and increasing government regulation of farming.

It is generally agreed that modern, cohesive democracies work because there is an independent judiciary (legal system), impartial media, and a government that makes public-policy based on evidence. The judiciary and the media are generally educated university-graduates.

Universities are expected to be dominated by intellectuals, who are curious and dispassionately seek out the truth. Mr Wood QC, acting for Dr Ridd, emphasized the importance of intellectual freedom in his closing remarks today – that it is integral to a university.

Universities are expected to be places where there is vigorous discussion of contentious issues. It would be expected that where there is disagreement – for example about the condition of the fringing coral reefs at Stone Island – there could be a debate that followed rules of logic and considers evidence in an attempt to arrive at the truth.

This requires both sides to engage.

Back in 2016, and again today, instead of considering Dr Ridd’s evidence and concerns, the University choose to look away. It showed no interest in finding out about the real state of the corals surrounding Stone Island, or at the Great Barrier Reef in general.

There is a crisis in our democracy and as clearly illustrated by this court case, it is at least in part because the mainstream media and our universities too often refuse to engage in any real discussion with those who hold an opinion contradicting their own.

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Calum Thwaites was also at the Federal Circuit Court today, to lend some moral support. Calum had his life turned upside down when he was sued by a Queensland University of Technology staffer under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, for allegedly complaining about segregation of computer facilities. It is never easy taking on an institution, or defending yourself against a popular meme, but more of us must do it, and more often, lest ideological fanaticism and/or the robber barons win.

THE Australian Broadcasting Corporation – the most significant source of news and current affairs for Australia – is not reporting on Peter Ridd’s trial in the Federal Circuit Court in Brisbane. A key point made by Dr Ridd this morning is that there is absolutely no quality assurance of Great Barrier Reef research – research that they report on almost daily.

Changes in temperature, acidity, and also turbidity (muddiness) are consequences of physical processes. Yet the media mostly interview biologists who assume changes, without actually measuring them and then set about establishing effects in fish tanks.

Ocean acidification, for example, is an area of research where, in less than 20 years, the number of published papers has increased from zero to 800 each year. Sometimes the biologists have even added hydrochloric acid to artificially reduce the pH of the water in their fish tanks to mimic what their computer simulation models have determined must surely be our dystopian future. The media headlines then incorrectly report the result as the current situation at The Great Barrier Reef – this makes for more and more fake news.

Meanwhile, physicist Peter Ridd has been studying and measuring actual changes at the Great Barrier Reef for more than 35 years – contributing to a deeper understanding of many of the most important physical processes.

For example, if we are to measure the impact of sugarcane farming then we need to know how much muddier reef waters are now, relative to before European settlement.

In the wake of the very high-profile launch of the WWF Save the Reef Campaign back in June 2001, there was a flurry of newspaper articles. They reported that sediment was literally smothering the corals of the Great Barrier Reef. Yet there was no evidence for this beyond some fake photographs that were exposed yesterday in the Federal Court by Peter Ridd’s Barrister, Stuart Wood QC. You can see these photographs in my last blog post.

Over the years many biologists have been claiming that muddiness (caused by excess sediments) is a problem, and yet no one from the Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University has been interviewed about this. At this laboratory there are physicists studying ocean tides, currents, waves and their effect on the concentration and distribution of the sediments, which are supposedly causing the problem.

Peter Ridd joined the laboratory in 1989, as one of the first four post-doctoral fellows employed there. He is the only one to survive several decades as an academic at James Cook University, being promoted to Professor in 2008 and becoming the Head of Physics in the same year.

Professor Ridd began his career undertaking detailed measurements of turbidity with different instruments. He was interested in how to measure the advection of sediment (mud) and its resuspension by wave generated shear stresses. This requires an understanding of Newton’s laws of motion and wave theory. So obsessed was he with the accuracy of these measurements that he invented new equipment so that more accurate measurements of turbidity (muddiness) could be recorded under the variety of different natural conditions – considering the vastness of the reef.

Once Peter Ridd had mastered this, he moved on to understand in more detail how sediments potentially carry pollutants, including fertilizers and pesticides, from farmland into reef waters. He was most interested in how these pollutants could potentially be mixed through turbulent diffusion and dilution, which are also complex physical processes.

He has also studied temperatures: heat fluxes from the sun, infrared radiation from the surface (Stefan Boltzmann Law), evaporative fluxes and latent, vertical mixing of hot water into the water column by waves (another physical mechanism). These processes are now well documented including in some of his over 110 scientific publications.

It is now understood how pH (acidity) varies on a daily, seasonal and inter-annual basis, including with large fluctuations in temperature that is common across bodies of water, and also with water depth. Yet the experiments in fish tanks, which some biologists persist with, fail to incorporate this variability into their design, or the interpretation of results.

The Great Barrier Reef is a vast and complex ecosystem. It is the case that the considerable daily variations in temperatures, pH and turbidity from natural processes still dwarf any measurable human impact. While there are trends of increasing water temperature and pH at some locations, it is unclear to what extent these longer-term trends are part of existing natural cycles.

Peter Ridd’s life’s work has been focused on understanding real physical processes in extreme detail. In all of this, his interest has been on understanding the potential impacts of human activity on biological processes.

One of his most recent peer-reviewed publication is entirely about a biological phenomenon: coral calcification rates. He measured coral extension and density and determined that corals like it hot!

It is a fact that most species of coral that live on the Great Barrier Reef also live in much warmer waters, closer to the Equator around Indonesia and Thailand. Coral growth rates are closely linked to temperature, and both appear to have increased ever so slightly at the Great Barrier Reef over the last 100 years. This is good news – unreported. The increase in growth rates may all be part of a natural cycle, or there may be an anthropogenic (human-cause) effect linked to global warming.

Peter Ridd has been keen to find a human-impact in the many and varied research projects that he has been involved with, many including biologists. If he had found a negative impact, he would no doubt still have a job doing what he is best at – teaching, and scientific research. But science is currently funded and reported in such a way that inconvenient facts are ignored while Dr Ridd who has persisted with the truth – explaining that The Great Barrier Reef is healthy and reef research has no proper quality controls – finds himself in a law court and fighting for his job back.

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Gideon Rozner is tweeting live from the Court: https://mobile.twitter.com/GideonCRozner

If you would like to read an update from me later today/tonight subscribe for my e-news: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/subscribe/

You will get more, and different news at: https://ipa.org.au/peterridd

The research projects detailed in this article can be explored in more detail at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Ridd

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EARLY last year a professor of physics at James Cook University was sacked – after a successful career spanning some forty years. Peter Ridd had won many university awards, including the inaugural ‘Supervisor of the Year’, presumably nominated by one or more of his thirty-something PhD students. He published over 100 scientific papers and earned the university millions of dollars through consultancies. Some claim that it all came to a sorry end because he dared to question the consensus of scientific opinion concerning the health of the Great Barrier Reef – particularly the impact of global warming. The university claims it was because he had become “un-collegial” and did not follow various directives while disclosing confidential information. These issues will be argued in the Federal Circuit Court in Brisbane on Tuesday, when the matter is heard by Judge Salvatore Vasta. Very few people realize that at the heart of the case are a couple of what might be best described as “fake-news” photographs.

If Peter Ridd had become un-collegial and disclosed confidential information, it was because he was fed-up with the fake-news many of his colleagues continued to spread. As he wrote in chapter 1 of the book that I edited two years ago, a chapter entitled ‘The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Corals, and Problems with Policy Science’:

“I [Peter Ridd] have carried out half-a-dozen audits on some of the science claiming damage to the Great Barrier Reef, and in every case I have discovered serious problems.”

Ridd was censored a final time by the University soon after the book chapter was published, and then, when he refused to remain silent about this, he was sacked. His first censoring by the University had been two years earlier, just after he sent Peter Michael, a News Ltd journalists, photographs that showed spectacular and healthy corals growing off Stone Reef not far from Bowen in Central Queensland.

Ridd has spent his entire university career studying the reef – the first decade as part of a team measuring water quality in the inner Great Barrier Reef, including port facilities and river mouths. Ridd was responsible for the invention of three instruments, all built at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University and concerned with measuring the muddiness, technically known as turbidity, of water.

His colleagues, Piers Larcombe and Ken Woolfe, published several seminal papers concluding that the turbidity of the inner reef waters is controlled by the size of the waves varying with the wind and weather, not adjacent land use.*

Yet the popular message from prominent scientists has been that sediment from farming and mining is killing corals. In particular, the “before and after photographs” of Stone Reef have been acclaimed and were promoted by Terry Hughes of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies as evidence that sediment has destroyed the fringing coral reefs off Stone Island.

The photographs have now become an iconic symbol of reef ruin, but as Ridd wrote to journalist Peter Michaels:

“I have always been highly sceptical of these photographs … My own work has shown that this explanation is virtually impossible especially for locations such as this. In addition it does not take account of the fact that these inshore reefs can change dramatically with time especially with the passage of cyclones which can temporarily obliterate them. Ten years after a cyclone they may have fully recovered.

“The presentation of the photographs also gives us the impression that we know where the original 100-year-old picture was taken. In fact, we can only guess within a kilometre or two, and in this area it would not be unusual to find great coral in one spot and nothing a kilometre away. The selection of the position of where the modern photo was taken can thus decide what message we see. Finally, seeing dead reef does not necessarily mean that it died recently. In fact there are literally hundreds of square kilometres of dead reef-flat on the GBR which was killed due to the slow sealevel fall of about a meter that has occurred over the last 5000 years. This has left a lot of coral high and dry at low tide which kills the coral. It is easy to take a picture of a dead reef, but it does not mean it died recently.

“A month or so ago I decided to see if there was good coral in the area that these pictures were taken so I asked a couple of my field technicians to take some photographs in the area with the same island backdrop as the two original pictures. You will note that there is spectacular coral living there – at least in many spots within the area that the original photos were taken.” End quote.

I am quoting extracts from the email that Ridd sent to Peter Michael three years ago. He also commented in that email:

“Any decent marine scientist or boat owner around Bowen, could have told you there is lots of coral around Bowen and that it is spectacular.”

Rather than investigate, Peter Michael sent the photographs and correspondence from Ridd to Terry Hughes, the scientist who had been claiming these same corals off Stone Island were all dead. That correspondence was immediately passed to university administrators, and then used to censor Peter Ridd for being un-collegial. This began the process which eventually resulted in Peter Ridd’s sacking last year, in early 2018.

Seeing is believing, yet the truth in the 2015 photographs showing healthy corals was ignored.

I’m hoping that Peter Ridd’s correspondence to journalist Peter Michael will be tabled in the Federal Circuit Court this week for all to see, and for all to judge. There is no need of scientific qualifications to see that there is still spectacular fringing coral reef around Stone Island.

This is but one example of the fake news continually propagated about the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef.

Sixteen years ago, I wrote about how a naturally occurring dioxin was incorrectly classified as a pesticide from sugarcane farming and then blamed for the death of two dugongs that had been killed in fishing nets.

A two-year investigation by the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology concluded that this specific dioxin was common in soils along the entire Queensland coastline, and predated the era of European settlement … however, the fake news about “pesticide kills dugongs” continued to be repeated by the media and was added to a key report by Queensland’s then Chief Scientist, Dr Joe Baker.

The litany of false claims when it comes to the Great Barrier Reef is as spectacular as the many healthy clown fish that continue to amuse and entertain anyone who dives into its warm waters.

I’m hopeful that Peter Ridd will win his case this week, but it is likely to be argued on the basis of an academic’s right to intellectual freedom. It is unclear how much evidence about the actual state of the Great Barrier Reef will be heard – if any.

If Ridd wins, the assumption may be that this academic is nevertheless wrong in detail – and the Great Barrier Reef is ailing, if not from bad farming practices then from catastrophic human-caused global warming. To report that the Great Barrier Reef may be in good health – or at least that the fringing corals off Stone Island have not been harmed by farming – would be to admit that much of what has been reported over recent decades is fake news. It is. Fake news, and sometimes accompanied by fake photographs.

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* Specifically, the prevailing south-easterly trade winds have a dominant influence. The wind and resulting waves produce a current that flows northward. The current traps sediment in north-facing bays because they are relatively protected from winds blowing from the south-east. Importantly, this research established that any additional sediment coming down the rivers will have no effect on the muddiness of the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

One of the most important technical papers is ‘Increased sediment supply to the Great Barrier Reef will not increase sediment accumulation at most coral reefs’ by P. Larcombe and K.J. Woolfe in the journal Coral Reefs, volume 18, page 163-190, published in 1999.

Quoting directly from this technical paper:

“The interplay between coral reefs and terrigenous sediment along the inner-shelf of the GBR shelf can be discussed in terms of two principle components, sediment accumulation and suspended sediment (the latter being the main regional contributor towards turbidity). Sediment accumulation describes the increase in thick- ness of a sediment body, caused by addition of material at its upper surface. In this context, accumulation is a regional geological phenomenon, and has probably played a significant role in controlling the distribution of coral reefs within the GBR at various stages of sea level, primarily because accumulating sediments blanket substrates otherwise suitable for colonisation by corals.

In contrast, turbidity is a transient oceanographic phenomenon, that is temporally and spatially variable because it is largely related to physical forces acting on the sea bed. The role of turbidity in influencing the distribution of corals is thus also spatially variable, related to regional variations in turbidity regimes, and, also on a regional scale, is probably partly controlled by the location of accumulations of muddy sediments.

It is also necessary to distinguish between changes in the turbidity of rivers entering the GBR lagoon and changes in turbidity in the lagoon itself. Few coral reefs occur near river mouths, because of the high turbidity, rates of sediment accumulation, and low availability of suitable substrates generally associated with such environments.

… In most places on the inner shelf, the thickness of the sediment wedge means that there is ample (muddy) sediment immediately available for resuspension. Sediment availability does not limit the concentration of suspended sediment (and largely, turbidity) in the water column, rather the controls are hydrodynamic in nature.

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