Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Government Funding Corrupts

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“There’s an assumption that private funding must always be acknowledged because it’s dirty, while public funding never needs to be acknowledged, because it’s pure.”

Michael Duffy from ABC Radio National Counterpoint made that comment yesterday when he interviewed me about the Murray Mouth barrages.[1]

Biologist Walter Starck [2] replied today with the following comment:

“A telling point to consider in relation to government sponsored research is that when generous funding is made available to study a purported problem, one outcome is certain. It will never be discovered that there really isn’t one.

“The implicit assumption that government funded research is unbiased is nonsense.

“On the contrary, it virtually guarantees the manufacture of problems to be studied in that researchers have learned that suggesting a link to a possible problem greatly improves the probability of funding approval. This has become so dominant in the environmental sciences that basic research has almost ceased to exist and nearly all effort is now directed at investigating purported problems. Worse yet, the dominance of problem-oriented research has created an environment wherein the normal scientific process of rigorous critical examination of claims has been suppressed in environmental matters. Now even the most poorly founded, and often even absurd claims, regularly pass peer review and are published in leading journal. Then, if challenged by anyone, the critic is denigrated while the substance of the criticism is ignored.

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But Jonathan Holmes: Your Report Has Not Been Peer-Reviewed and It’s Wrong

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LAST Monday on ABC TV’s Media Watch the sniggering Jonathan Holmes suggested that there was something wrong with Peter Ridd peer-reviewing my technical report ‘Plugging the Murray’s Mouth: The Interrupted Evolution of a Barrier Estuary’.

Today I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint and Michael Duffy commented that Professor Peter Ridd said he might have not seen flaws in it.

I replied that Peter Ridd told me a Media Watch research person had phoned him. Apparently she spent a lot of time talking with him about the flaws in peer review. Peer review is a process in which suitably qualified scientists are invited to comment on articles prior to publication. Peter is a scientist from James Cook University who is qualified to comment on the report I wrote.

The bottom line is Professor Ridd and I are colleagues. The paper was not sent to a journal. It was a technical report for the Australian Environment Foundation and Professor Ridd was asked to review it. Had he found errors I am sure that he would have told me and I would have corrected them before it was published.

I was also asked on radio today if anyone else had peer-review the technical report. I comment that I have sent the report to other estuary expert and they have told me it is sound. But they have not been prepared to have their named attached to it because of the politics.

Mr Duffy also commented on national radio today that two scientists who wrote papers I quoted have since said they disagree with me. I was asked to comment on this and I replied that Media Watch sent me specific written questions. The first question was: Do you accept that the vast majority of recognised experts on the natural history and hydrology of the Lower Lakes disagree with your conclusion that they were estuarine immediately prior to the erection of the Murray Mouth barrages, or at any time in the past 2000 years?

I replied: No. The relevant scientific literature, as published in peer-reviewed journals by recognised experts, indicates that the Lower Lakes were estuarine prior to the erection of the Murray Mouth barrages. I then provide the names of experts and quoted some of them.

Listen to the complete interview here: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/murray-mouth/3908760

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Time to Investigate ‘Green’ Media Spin: Mark Poynter

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BIASED media coverage of natural resource use issues should be fertile ground for the ABC’s Media Watch, but despite efforts to draw their attention to this have displayed little or no inclination to cover it in the past. Then again, as some of the worst examples of biased coverage of environmental issues have emanated from the ABC, this is perhaps not so surprising.

Most notably, the double-episode of the ABC’s Australian Story – ‘Something in the Water’ in February 2010 – springs to mind. It claimed that eucalypt plantations occupying just 4% of a Tasmanian town’s water catchment were toxic to humans, animals, and marine life. Screened just 3-weeks before the Tasmanian state election, the program sparked a controversy that was not backed by credible science yet resulted in the unseating of the government’s Health Minister and quite likely contributed to the formation of the current Labor-Greens minority government which has a distinctly anti-forestry agenda.

If the ABC is to ever rid itself of the perception that it caters to a primarily Green-Left audience, its supposedly independent investigative journalists need to start examining the excesses of mainstream environmentalism and the damage it is doing both to the wider environment and regional and rural communities. A good start would be for Media Watch to investigate arguably the most prominent form of media spin which is seen on an almost daily basis – that is the coverage of natural resource usage promulgated at the behest of mainstream environmental groups.

Read more here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13417

Time to Rethink Basic Assumptions about the Murray and the Planned Water Reform

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TONIGHT the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Media Watch program put together a garbled defence of the consensus position on water reform and the Lower Murray, a position based on ‘junk science’.

The program omitted to declare that the federal government, the same government that funds Media Watch, has committed $10 billion for the implementation of the water reform plan.

My objections to the A$10 bilion plan are explained in part in my recent report ‘Plugging the Murray’s Mouth: The Interrupted Evolution of a Barrier Estuary’. Extracts from this report follow:

FOR thousands of years before the European settlement of Australia, when there was good snowmelt in the Australian Alps, the Murray River would tumble down from the mountains, then spread west over the vast black soils of the Riverina, wind its way south through the limestone gorges of the Riverland, before flooding into Lake Alexandrina. Lake Alexandrina is still a vast body of water covering an area of 570 square kilometres; so vast that looking back across the lake from Point Sturt, shorelines recede into the distance and it’s impossible to see Pomanda Point near where the river enters the lake.

While the lake is vast, its outlet to the sea is a narrow and shallow channel between the sand dunes of Encounter Bay – an outlet that sometimes closes over.

In April 1802 British explorer Matthew Flinders, while circumnavigating Australia, described the shoreline as low and sandy topped with hummocks of almost bare sand. There was no river mouth on his map. Historians have written that this acclaimed navigator and cartographer “missed” the Murray’s mouth. It is much more likely that the inlet had closed-over.

Twenty-eight years later, in February 1830, another famous British explorer, Charles Sturt, visited the region but from the inland, travelling-down the Murray in a whaleboat. Captain Sturt described the place where the river enters the lake, which is about 60 kilometres from the Southern Ocean, as the end of the river. He wrote in his journal that:

“We had, at length, arrived at the termination of the Murray. Immediately below me was a beautiful lake, which appeared to be a fitting reservoir for the noble stream that had led us to it; and which was now ruffled by the breeze that swept over it.”

On the third day, Captain Sturt attempted to manoeuvre his whaleboat from the lake to the Southern Ocean but was blocked by sandbars.

“Shoals again closed in upon us on every side. We dragged the boat over several, and at last got amongst quicksands.”

It was not until the fourth day that Sturt conceded that it would be impossible for his men to drag the whaleboat any further over the sand bars and sand flats. So, again in February 1830 the Murray’s sea mouth was closed-over.

When Captain Sturt’s diary was later published it included comment that:

“Australian rivers fall rapidly from the mountains in which they originate into a level and extremely depressed country; having weak and inconsiderable sources, and being almost wholly unaided by tributaries of any kind; they naturally fail before they reach the coast, and exhaust themselves in marshes or lakes; or reach it so weakened as to be unable to preserve clear or navigable mouths, or to remove the sand banks that the tide throws up before them.”

In fact, the Murray River often ran strong in spring and summer, but by autumn had slowed and then a south westerly wind would pick up and the sea would pour in.

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Murray-Gate: Some Questions for Media Watch

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ABC News Watch is unsure of the motivation behind Media Watch’s inquiries regarding my research on the Murray River. Based on their understanding, none of the 11 members of the Media Watch team have the scientific qualifications, or necessary scientific experience, to comment or judge the science behind the policy debate about the Murray River.

ABC News Watch today put 15 questions to Media Watch about what it is calling Murray-Gate.

Questions are here: http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com.au/

They are good questions. But what’s the deadline? When will the questions be answered? I was expected to give immediate answers to Media Watch. I think Media Watch should have until 5pm tomorrow, Friday.

Read more here: http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com.au/