Peer-reviewed science, this time about coral reef health, is again being contradicted by real-world evidence.
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In December 2015 Peter Ridd, then a physics professor at Australia’s James Cook University, contacted a journalist, writes Donna Laframboise (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Researchers affiliated with his own institution, he said, were misleading the public about the Great Barrier Reef.

As an example, Ridd cited photos taken approximately 100 years apart near Bowen, a community of 10,000 on the Australian coast in the vicinity of the Reef. These photos tell a stark story: previously vibrant coral expanses are now desolate wastelands.

Ridd complained that this pair of photos was spreading across the Internet. They were appearing in official reports and news stories.

Even though the 1995 paper in which they’d first been published had cautioned against viewing them as evidence the Reef was in “broad-scale decline,” that’s exactly how they were being used.

Ridd supplied the journalist with recent photos from the same area. These showed healthy, abundant coral.

A few weeks later, matters took another turn. Nature published a paper titled ‘Historical photographs revisited: A case study for dating and characterizing the recent loss of coral cover on the inshore Great Barrier Reef’.

The authors said they’d found “very little sign of coral re-establishment” during a visit to Stone Island in 2012, approximately a mile offshore from Bowen. In their words:

At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals. [bold added by me (DL)]

Ridd knew this wasn’t the case. As he’d explained to the journalist:

any decent marine scientist or boat owner around Bowen, could have told you that there is lots of coral…and that it is spectacular. It was always a very unlikely proposition that this area had suddenly lost all its coral. [page 22]

Yet one of the most reputable scientific journals on the planet had just declared otherwise. The real world and the scholarly record were in stark conflict.

So let’s fast forward three-and-a-half years. Late this summer, Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy enlisted underwater cinematographer Clint Hempsall and coral reef expert Walter Starck. Together, they investigated the waters near Stone Island firsthand.

Continued here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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November 18, 2019 at 08:54AM