Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Peter Ridd

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

By

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.

****
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

By

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/

***

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’

Peter Ridd Has Won – Because of You

By

PETER Ridd was a professor at James Cook University who dared to question claims that the Great Barrier Reef is facing imminent catastrophe from climate change – eventually being sacked for not backing down.

With your support he has insisted:
1. That the university undertake some quality assurance of its research, and
2. Refused to be censored, for continuing to speak out.

The case has dragged on with a three-day hearing in the Federal Court in Brisbane just last month. When the hearing wrapped up the presiding Judge Salvadore Vasta said he hoped to have a judgement before Easter.

We were expecting some notice before this judgement was read in court. There was no notice, it happened this morning – and Peter Ridd has won on all counts!

The Court ordered that:
1. The 17 findings made by the University, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure and the final censure given by the University and the termination of employment of Professor Ridd by the University were all unlawful.
2. The issue of the making of declarations and penalty are adjourned to a date to be fixed.

It is very significant that he has won on the issue of academic freedom: that he did have a right to ignore the university administrators and continuing to speak out about the lack of quality assurance and also against the disciplinary process he was being unfairly subjected to.

This is important news!

A clown fish at the Great Barrier Reef, photo taken in April 2005 off Cairns.

The university may have already spent over $1 million in legal fees attempting to silence Peter.

They have assumed that sooner or later he would run out of money … and courage. But not Peter, with his legal team and your support he has kept going.

I have known several good professors lose their will to fight once they are isolated, and risk bankruptcy.

Taking this fight to the Federal Court would not have been possible were it not for Peter Ridd deciding to take a stand in defense of the truth, to not back down regardless of the consequences.

Cheryl Ridd has been a rock, in support of Peter and the ugliness that goes with such court cases, including the unfair and untrue affaidavids.

John Roskam from the IPA found Peter the very best legal counsel in Stuart Wood QC.

We then went into fundraising mode – twice. The first time to fight the censure, and the second time for Peter to get his job back.

Bloggers Anthony Watts, Joanne Nova, and also Benny Peiser were terrific. Together we raised $260,000 from 2,405 people.

Today’s judgement is only that Peter Ridd was wrongly sacked from his position as professor at the university. He has not yet got his job back. There has been no ruling yet on remedies and restitutions. Further, the university may yet appeal.

Thank you for your support – so far.

Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy speaking about the need for quality assurance in science in Sydney in February 2018.

Day 3. Peter Ridd versus the University and State-sponsored Media Stuck in Denial

By

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.

***************************

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.

Calum Thwaites and Gideon Rozner at the Federal Circuit Court today.

What Would a Physicist Know About The Great Barrier Reef?

By

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.

Peter Ridd now finds himself in law libraries.

*****

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

Ends.

Fake Photographs at Heart of Peter Ridd’s Sacking

By

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.

Corals exposed at low tide, off Stone Island. Photograph taken in 2015.

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.

Historical photographs supposedly taken at the same location circa 1890 (left) and 1994 (right), off Stone Island. The profile of the far horizon is similar, but not the same.

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.

Clown fish at the Great Barrier Reef – off Cairns, 10th April 2006.

______

* 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.

Ends