The Reef Ain't Dead

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

Yep. You can't fake reality.

Indeed.
And yet Peter Ridd claims the scientific establishment has (faked reality).



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[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Indeed.

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I personally photographed both those images within the last three months at two separate locations reasonably distant from each other. You might be interested to know the image with the child is located within 30 km of the largest coal loading port in the southern hemisphere and a major sugar loading terminal.


Where'd you take yours?

[jackdale]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

And closest in the southern hemisphere in mid summer. No wonder Australia is a sunburnt country of drought and flooding rains!

Fortunately, eccentricity is just about nothing at the moment, but just wait until it literally goes egg shaped!

MIlankovitch cycles would have us cooling right now. Yet we are warming.


https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/w...rrent-warming/

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

Yep. You can't fake reality.

You can certainly cherry-pick it.

Two photos of healthy reef? Ok then. GBR health indisputable. Obviously.

[GordMay]

The death of the reef may not be inevitable (there’s some hope*), but we’ll never get anywhere reversing the current trend, until we recognize that we have a problem.

* ➥ https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3293201

[RaymondR]

The Great Barrier Reef stretches south from about 09 degrees 24 minutes to 22 degrees 25 minutes or about 780 nm. It is said to be constituted by about 3,000 individual reefs. In the north it lies closely along the eastern Australian coastline and in the south about sixty nautical miles from the coast.

There are about one and one half million people scattered in townships and small cities along this stretch of coast and a fairly limited area of grazing land and agriculture which is mainly sugar cane production. The general de-industrialization of the Australian economy has ensured little industrial activity with what remains clustered around a single port city at the southern more distant from the coast end of the reef. There are also three coal loading ports spread over the southern portion hundreds of miles apart. The agriculture and industry affected parts of the reef are a limited number of near shore reefs clustered near these shore based activities.

Great variation in the forms of the reef can be found over it's length, in the north a considerable distance of outer ribbon reef enclosing echelons of individual SE-NW reefs can be found and in the south a considerable extent of outer ribbon reef and the Queensland coast enclosing many individual reef patches.

Within this vast area of coral reef structures many areas of reef supportive of either "THE REEF IS DEAD" or "THE REEF FLOURISHES" headlines can be found. With the great diversity and geographical extent of the reef the cherry picking is easy.

Nature could not build such a vast area of reef, which is primarily a thin skin of live coral over a great mass of dead, without an extensive and continuous die off and regenerate cycle prevailing. Far from being "DEAD" the Great Barrier Reef is probably one of the most extensive areas of healthy coral reefs in the world.

Ridd's argument appears to have been that you cannot pick a small area of recently damaged reef in poor condition and extrapolate it's poor condition over the entire reef and call it good science.

It is not an unknown phenomenon in the scientific community that an upstart scientist will challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and then suffer an adverse pile on. In their day Galileo and Darwin suffered a bit of a rough trot in similar circumstances and a certain horribly hirsuit, follicly profuse little guy threw a fox among the chicken of the science is settled supporters of the Newton settled it all school a while back.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

Within this vast area of coral reef structures many areas of reef supportive of either "THE REEF IS DEAD" or "THE REEF FLOURISHES" headlines can be found. With the great diversity and geographical extent of the reef the cherry picking is easy.

Ridd's argument appears to have been that you cannot pick a small area of recently damaged reef in poor condition and extrapolate it's poor condition over the entire reef and call it good science.

Sure, agreed. The converse is also true. Two photos or a rave review in Trip Advisor doesn't cancel out genuine concerns over the GBR's condition.

It is not an unknown phenomenon in the scientific community that an upstart scientist will challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and then suffer an adverse pile on. In their day Galileo and Darwin suffered a bit of a rough trot in similar circumstances.

Galileo and Darwin discovered/revealed new and important stuff. Ridd's just quarreling with his peers. As important as informed dissenting opinion is to science, I don't see that Ridd has earned that comparison.

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

You can certainly cherry-pick it.

Two photos of healthy reef? Ok then. GBR health indisputable. Obviously.

Maybe. But if this is 20nm (The actual barrier reefs are another 40nm further from the coast here) from not one - but two - coal loading terminals with around 60 or so bulk carriers anchored just over the horizon and smack bang off the coast from a significant sugar and beef growing region, how does that compare to this claim...?

Peter Ridd’s questionable claims:
Statement by the Australian Coral Reef Society on Great Barrier Reef water quality claims
“As the world’s oldest dedicated coral reef science and conservation group, the Australian Coral Reef Society is deeply concerned that members of the Queensland public are being misinformed about the role of water quality in supporting a healthy Great Barrier Reef.Supported by the sugar cane industry, Dr Peter Ridd has been making several claims about coral reef science during lectures and in media interviews and articles.Several of Dr Ridd’s claims are not true, while others could be characterised as strawmen arguments that ignore much greater challenges faced by the Great Barrier Reef...”

I've seen enough with my own eyes to call BS.


It might also be of interest to know that the first of my photos I posted (which are actually stills taken from video) is of reef in an area that Cyclone Debbie's eye passed directly over nearly 4 years ago. There was plenty of damage caused by this event, but the reef ecosystem is resilient and is bouncing back. From my observations, it's recovering better than the islands that still bear the scars caused by the extensive damage to vegetation and habitat that occurred.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

I've seen enough with my own eyes to call BS.

Faults notwithstanding, the scientific community is still the best venue to resolve scientific questions. The only effective response to poor science is better science. Litigating a wrongful dismissal won't make the scientific case.

I question why Ridd is pissing away so much money on his court case, and why there are so many 'donors' willing to cough up to fund it. It would be very interesting to see that audited. And litigation of his dismissal does nothing to resolve the scientific questions around the health of the GBR.

[Reefmagnet]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Faults notwithstanding, the scientific community is still the best venue to resolve scientific questions. The only effective response to poor science is better science. Litigating a wrongful dismissal won't make the scientific case.

I question why Ridd is pissing away so much money on his court case, and why there are so many 'donors' willing to cough up to fund it. It would be very interesting to see that audited. And litigation of his dismissal does nothing to resolve the scientific questions around the health of the GBR.

He's not pissing away anything. He got zillions from a GoFundMe to play with.


If I were you, I'd be inclined to question the motives of members and establishments of said scientific community that typically append "If we don't act now..." to any discussion of their research findings. You know, like the hordes of researchers power boating and helicoptering their way around the reef that conclude if we don't immediately reduce using fossil fuels the reef is doomed. I believe the Arctic regions also experiences this same hypocritical behaviour in certain areas?

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Sure, agreed. The converse is also true. Two photos or a rave review in Trip Advisor doesn't cancel out genuine concerns over the GBR's condition.

Galileo and Darwin discovered/revealed new and important stuff. Ridd's just quarreling with his peers. As important as informed dissenting opinion is to science, I don't see that Ridd has earned that comparison.

Maybe not yet but if the High Court of Australia finds that Ridd was right in objecting to what he believed was junk science and that the university administration did wrong in firing him and obliges his reinstatement a great service will have been done for scientific integrity in Australia.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Galileo and Darwin discovered/revealed new and important stuff. Ridd's just quarreling with his peers. As important as informed dissenting opinion is to science, I don't see that Ridd has earned that comparison.

I was not comparing Ridd with these historical figures, I was using them as examples of previous scientific figures of controversy. If I'd said Joe Blow from Etomagah you would not have a clue who, as a historical figure, I was referring to.

[Tillikum]

I guess it's a measure of the emotionalism, mob psychology and naked self-interest that seems to characterize the "consensus", that any purported "scientist" would approve the dismissal of a colleague for disagreeing with the "consensus".


No, we haven't "evolved" since Semmelweis, and as for how any purported "scientist" and evolutionist could think we might "evolve" in less than two centuries....

[lestersails]

Originally Posted by Tillikum

No, we haven't "evolved" since Semmelweis, and as for how any purported "scientist" and evolutionist could think we might "evolve" in less than two centuries....

And so you would support a "scientist" who denied the germ theory of disease based on perceived holes in the evidence?
And don't laugh. We've got something not far from it in the US with the infamous Dr. Scott Atlas.
Both Atlas and Ridd are just (well-credentialed) cranks taking pot shots at an overwhelming mass of evidence. Nothing in this thread has come remotely close to challenging the evidence for AGW. Nothing.
They're just whistling past the graveyard.

[Tillikum]

Originally Posted by lestersails

And so you would support a "scientist" who denied the germ theory of disease based on perceived holes in the evidence?
And don't laugh. We've got something not far from it in the US with the infamous Dr. Scott Atlas.
Both Atlas and Ridd are just (well-credentialed) cranks taking pot shots at an overwhelming mass of evidence. Nothing in this thread has come remotely close to challenging the evidence for AGW. Nothing.
They're just whistling past the graveyard.

"Cranks" because they disagree with the "consensus"? Interesting perspective. The history of science shows who the Bourbons of thought really are.

I don't suppose you've ever heard of Antoine Béchampe, but you might want to look him up. Another measure of the comical intellectual vanity of humans that having gone from more or less complete ignorance to Pasteur's theories in less than two generations, they busily established a new set of orthodoxies and then started ridiculing those who didn't immediately swallow them whole.

Of course since then we've learned a lot more about microbiology, but orthodoxy is still hiding from the theory of pleomorphism. After all, we've all invested our professional reputations in monomorphism, so can hardly admit we were wrong!