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Expert: Scientists exaggerated coral bleaching story
175 Comments
June 4, 2016 12:44 am
The Australian exclusive was under Graham Lloyd and Sid Maher.
Notably the other front page story was ‘Lawfare’ risks Adani exit.,
This points out that the reef is being protected from coal mining, so the opponents to the mine are tying it up by the appeal process.
They have not won on the evidence.
Whatever the outcome of this in Australia, it delays and denies the most poor of India the opportunity of clean water and an electricity supply.
Its in INQUIRER ‘A dream to light darkened nights’.
‘Gutam Adani wants to bring Indian villagers into the bright 21st century.’
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/gautam-adanis-dream-to-light-indias-darkened-nights/news-story/0637a58af753b6f9636aefb31d058565
It is shameful that Australians should deny the poor of the world in this way.
June 4, 2016 1:19 am
Hughes tweets:
The first bleaching on the #GreatBarrierReef was in 1998. There is no “cycle”
https://twitter.com/ProfTerryHughes/status/722653679841624064
The BoM says:
Bleaching has been observed on the Great Barrier Reef since 1982,
http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/oceantemp/GBR_Coral.shtml
Prof. Terry Hughes tweets: I showed the results of aerial surveys of #bleaching on the #GreatBarrierReef to my students, And then we wept.
https://twitter.com/ProfTerryHughes/status/722512223067721728
Obviously they wept at the standard of ‘science’ they are being taught.
June 4, 2016 1:42 am
I have been following this one. Professor Terry Hughes is from James Cook University in Far North Queensland Australia. Professor Terry Hughes is Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.
A month ago he “surveyed” the Great Barrier Reef over a few days in a small chopper using a GoPro and SLR camera.
Remembering the Great Barrier Reef comprises the following according to Wiki.
The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system[1][2] composed of over 2,900 individual reefs[3] and 900 islands stretching for over 2,300 kilometres (1,400 mi) over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres (133,000 sq mi).[4][5] The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia
This is quite a feat to complete over a few days……
Professor Terry Hughes managed to not only survey the Great Barrier Reef in this short time frame but also wrote a report. Terry described the Great Barrier Reef as “Fried”
The report strangely was delivered hot off the press to the Australian Broadcasting Commission, a government funded left leaning media outlet similar to BBC. The report naturally went to The Guardian and disseminated within hours to the Left Twitterati. As happens the report was picked up by the Main stream Media outside Australia and Professor Terry Hugh’s was accepted unchallenged and quickly became global fact.
Professor Terry Hughes had achieved his corrupted scientific objective.
The Great Barrier Marine Park Authority administers the Reef and is a very belated an light criticism of Professor Terry Hughes tax payer funded behaviour.
I believe the report was rushed to market because El Niño was waning, the damage to the GBR was grossly misreported and Professor Terry Hughes had to give it his best shot in the middle of an election campaign in Australia. The Left is strenuously attempting to chane government so they can progress their climate agenda.
Throughout history the catch cry of the left is
THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS.
A few salient factors. Professor Terry Hughes viewed shallow coastal coral which is invariably most affected by El Niño events.
Perhaps not commonly understood is that coral grows happily from depths of a few centimetres to depths up to 100 metres. Tidal movement along this coast is up to 10 metres, twice a day.
Also well documented is the coral spawning event at the start of summer each year. This truly is a Bucket List event. The reef becomes lick a muddy river from the all encompassing spawning event. The Great Barrier Reef is seeded via this natural reproductive event annually.
That a Professor could produce a false report which is not condemned by James Cook University and is accepted as fact by all media raises serious accountability issues.
Please feel free to circulate the above as far and as wide as you wish.
Brooke Mañana
Sent from my iPhone
I see that the Aussies have succumbed to the British “Centre of Excellence” disease. Here in the UK you can find such “centres” where the concrete of the foundations is still wet. They just know what the future holds. But in the place where I come from we have a saying which will resonate down under: good wine needs no accolades.
i already sent a letter of complaint to the bbc on the reporting of this bleaching event. they had professor john pandolfi from the university of queensland on as the “expert”. not once did prof. pandolfi mention el nino in his scaremongering testimony.i also e mailed prof. pandolfi in regard to this. to date i have yet to hear from either the bbc or prof. pandolfi.
yet only last year he had this to say.
“Coral reefs are the poster child for the damage people are doing to the world’s oceans. Overfishing, pollution and declining water quality have all taken their toll on reefs around the world. Perhaps the most famous example is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where half of the coral cover has disappeared over the past 25 years.
But increasingly, coral reefs face additional threats: global warming and ocean acidification, which cause coral bleaching and damage the coral’s ability to build reefs, respectively.
These new climate-induced effects, if not reversed by controlling greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with the global pressures already in place, have prompted many coral reef scientists to predict the overall demise of reefs in as little as a couple of decades.
However, research published today in Nature on reefs from the Seychelles provides some hope that all will not be lost for future coral reefs.”
http://theconversation.com/obituaries-for-coral-reefs-may-be-premature-study-finds-36220
June 4, 2016 3:58 am
““it is in serious danger of being irreparably damaged. If we do not act, our children will rightly ask us why didn’t we.’’
Well, research has shown that one way to guarantee the recovery of a tropical coral reef system is to drop a thermonuclear weapon on it.
http://www.livescience.com/2438-bikini-atoll-corals-recovering-atomic-blast.html
June 4, 2016 4:20 am
Terry Hughes does not research
Quote
@St_Kalimna The first bleaching on the #GreatBarrierReef was in 1998. There is no “cycle”
Unquote
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259578623_Impact_of_Global_Warming_on_Coral_Reefs
That documents bleaching back to 1979.
Also look at the list of causes and the history of the Great Barrier Reef.
Some “professor”
June 4, 2016 4:38 am
This is a follow up on the posting of Climatism
June 3, 2016 at 10:45 pm
For several decades, my family and I rented several holiday homes in Hervey Bay. This business was extremely successful mainly because the homes were fitted out to be completely ‘Pet Friendly’. On several occasions we won the prize of being the best pet friendly holiday homes in Queensland. (I still have the old newspaper clippings.)
After the climategate email scandal broke, we noticed a marked increased in all the horror stories about how climate change was causing more severe weather. There was no let up, almost every day there were stories about increased cyclone activity and, of course, sea level change.
Fortunately, in Hervey Bay there is a few very short periods when the tourists and holiday makers dwindle. Summer we have the school holidays, then there is all the public holidays at the beginning of the year. The week before and after Easter are an excellent 2 weeks. In winter, all the southerners show up to get away from the winter in Victoria. Then, as you could expect, there would be a quiet time, but no, the whale watch season starts in July and continues to November. Then summer is back and we start all over.
In the summer of 2009 / 10, there were predictions of 8 cyclones for that summer season, a profitable time for us, school holidays. That summer, we noticed the bookings had dropped off and we had a couple of cancellations. The remaining part of 2010 was OK, but the scare stories in the press and on TV during the year had ramped up considerably. For the summer season of 2010 / 2011 they were predicting 12 cyclones and an early start to the cyclone season.
Bookings dropped like a rock. Even some of our guests that usually booked 12 months in advance, cancelled.
Easter of 2011 was a total disaster, we never had one booking in those 2 weeks. And around Hervey Bay, there were vacancy signs up everywhere. Even the 5 star resort at the pier (the big one Eric) were letting 3 bedroom units go for $80 a night.
This continued for another couple of years with a slow downhill slide to the point I was subsidising others holidays, just to get bums in beds.
There was a simple choice at the end, hang in there and hope things improve or sell up and get out and cut the losses.
So, we sold up, 4 houses. Profit on 2, a very small profit on 1 and 1, just broke even.
We did make the right decision, Hervey Bay has still not got back to where it was, say in 2000. It was a very busy town and especially during the whale watch season. Today the shops at the marina are still vacant. I have my boat there and I could go there and let off a case of dynamite and no one would hear it.
To sum up, I put the decline of Hervey Bay at the feet of the activists, the press and TV and their obsession with climate change and bad weather. Of course, all those cyclones never came to fruition. You and I know there has been a decrease in tropical storms and severity.
It was a shame to see a very successful business, with many awards, collapse. But don’t cry for me, I’m retired now, and loving it !
Chris, All Sea Dogs Ahoy, Hervey Bay.
(just in case some of my old guests get to read this !)
June 4, 2016 5:40 am
No no no. Exaggerating and lying are ok as long as they are effective in communicating to people how dire our situation is: “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Said by their much-revered climate warrior, Stephen Schneider.
It goes without saying that if honest isn’t effective then the problem is defective. There is no C in CAGW, despite efforts to pretend there is as here concerning the GBR. The A is lowercase a because of overlooked natural variability. The GW is uncertain prior to the satellite era thanks to lack of coverage and UHI, and has been manupulated /Karlized to manufacture warming. Historians will look on 1988-2020 as equivalent to the Dutch tulip bulb mania.
And yes, I expect warmunists will be in full retreat by 2020. Renewables are failing; Abengoa in backruptcy, Ivanpah not working technically. Governmental agencies now rebutting alarmist half truths, as here. Public waking up to the costs, as in Denmark this year. More and more obvious nonsense, as the recent UNEP/UNESCO/USC tripe justly ridiculed many places (climate change rabbits will topple Stonehenge). Legal attempts to silence skeptics because they ARE having an impact.
June 4, 2016 5:50 am
Just to tidy up some loose ends …
The full article is not paywalled, you have to take out a subscription. $A4 a week, then goes up to $A8. There is a way round it. I have placed a pdf of the full article as follows:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/90071372/GBRbleachingexaggerated.pdf
There are items missing from the edited version above, including the nauseating stuff from Flannery above.
This was also omitted:
“Activist groups last week seized on reports that a UN assessment of the impacts of climate change on iconic Australian World Heritage sites, including the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the Tasmanian Wilderness was censored by Australia. It later emerged that the report the government was accused of censoring was complimentary of the Turnbull government’s actions to protect the Great Barrier Reef.”
And:
“The Australian Marine Conservation Society said the leaked information demonstrated the legacy of years of poor farming practices and government inaction, and highlighted the scale of ambition needed for political leaders to protect the reef. The society’s reef campaign director, Imogen Zethoven, said Australia’s
plans to protect the reef’s water quality were “shockingly underfunded”.
[This completely ignores the massive amount of work done by primary industry and Landcare organisations all along the eastern seaboard, much of it locally funded and volunteer action.]
And:
“Meanwhile, tourism operators have stepped up a campaign to fight back against the onslaught of negative publicity. “It seems some marine scientists have decided to use the bleaching event to highlight their personal political beliefs and lobby for increased funding in an election year,” said Association of Marine Park Tour Operators executive director Col McKenzie.”
It is only a short time since the last bout of squawking over coral bleaching; 2012 wasn’t it?
WUWT readers might recall a post that reported the ludicrous suggestion of sticking great wads of shade cloth over the GBR.
June 4, 2016 6:08 am
A right wing blog site like this, quoting “The Australian” (where the extreme right, talk to the only very right wing) is like Stalin quoting Karl Marx for validation.
The Oz, as it is known locally, has been dragged before the press council for various climate related lies before.
[then go read the Guardian and look for this story .mod]
June 4, 2016 6:44 am
The most important anthropogenic contributor to loss of coral in the Great Barrier Reef is agricultural chemical runoff.
The dangers associated with climate change (pH and temperature increases) are real, but an order of magnitude too small to have a significant effect on the reef. Fertilizer runoff is a difficult enough problem to solve. You can imagine how impossible it will be to solve when everyone is pointing at “climate change” as the primary contributor. However, this misdirection is misguided.
June 4, 2016 7:40 am
Please allow a non-scientific observer to make a first time comment:
I have lived my three score and ten and have lived most of these on the tropical Qld coast. My first memories of The Reef were as a boy in a glass bottomed boat. I later swam it as a teenager. It was magnificent. But that was before the first crown of thorns outbreak.
After that outbreak I travelled to Lizard Is on a leisurely trip on a game boat and dived on the Ribbon reefs. I cried in my goggles. There was no hard coral to be seen. It was devastated. There have been three more outbreaks of the COT since. They can’t have been as bad as the first because my last trip it out of Townsville showed it was somewhat improved, but nothing like it was.
Please!!! Take the COT seriously. Revisit Dr Robert Endean for leads if necessary.
June 4, 2016 7:51 am
This is the second time within a week for Australia to be in the news ar WUWT. The first time was in Eric Worrel’s story “Australia accused of manipulating climate data” on May 28th. Climate change came up as it does now so It is worth paraphrasing my response to Eric Worrel about it:
” We were told by Hansen in 1988 that the greenhouse effect has been detected. In his own words, “…global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He cited an alleged 100 year warming to support this. But elsewhere he also considered regional observations of warming and concluded that the best you can say about them is that “…In all of these cases, the data is just beginning to emerge.” Hence, we can paraphrase him as: “…If it is warm it must be greenhouse warming, but data to prove this has yet to emerge.” This is not science but IPCC and others insist that Hansen proved the existence of the greenhouse effect. They have spread it around and the greenhouse effect is now uncritically and falsely taken for granted. The following example proves the falsity of this assumption. It is based upon the observed shape of of NOAA’s global warming curve. This curve shows the existence of a thirty year warming period that extends from 1910 to 1940. The extended Keeling curve shows that there was no corresponding increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide during this period that is required if this was greenhouse warming. In addition, this warming is also followed by a severe cold spell that inaugurated World War II. It so happens that it is impossible to reverse greenhouse warming without removing every absorbing carbon dioxide molecule from the air. That is an impossibility. The fact that this thirty year warming was followed by cooling proves that it could not possibly be greenhouse warming. That takes care of a third of a century’s warming. There is no particular reason to think that the rest of the century is any different, hence the twentieth century warming is simply is not anthropogenic global warming as we are drilled to believe. That being the case, the Great Barrier Reef is now simply on its own, likely to do its thing as it always has done without imaginary input from AGW.”
It is worth noting that coral in its native state is exposed to various hazards from El Winos to hurricanes to high tidal movements and has been dealing with them for ages. For a dilettantish professor like Terry Hughes of James Cook University to pick out one phase of up and down changes ln coral and get it advertised as some new and different malady is simply academic irresponsibility.
June 4, 2016 9:44 am
Honestly! Scientists who distort, exaggerate, indulge in emotive panic tantrums and conspire to coordinate mutually beneficial conclusions are the ones California and everyone else should be thinking about holding accountable through prosecution. If you can’t stand the slow and deliberate pace of the scientific method including data transparency, then get out of the lab! These people are causing the integrity of the scientific community to suffer from a massive human induced trustworthiness bleaching event from which it may never recover.
June 4, 2016 10:41 am
Scientists discover magma buildup under New Zealand town
June 4, 2016 by Nick Perry
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/csz/news/800/2016/5752a169f2305.jpg
A drawing looking south along the Taupo Volcanic Zone showing the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the North Island of New Zealand. Uplift of the surface measured by satellite radar and GPS suggests the presence of a magmatic body beneath the Bay of Plenty coast at a depth of 9.5 km. Credit: Ian Hamling
http://phys.org/news/2016-06-scientists-magma-buildup-zealand-town.html
Vukcevic that posting is mean. Having reoriented myself with the unusual direction of the map, noted that the magma upthrust is to the north of Rotorua about half way to the coast I conclude that the upthrust is just about under ME!
However there has not, repeat not, been any unusual seismic activity for for some months, at least since the geothermal field stabilised after the power station went on line, I hope there is no reason the be concerned.
Perhaps the little hill to the east is going to grow a bit in size. It hasn’t done that since the last major earthquake so there may be a bit of excitement in the future.
June 4, 2016 11:07 am
The whole coral scare story is complete insanity.
Corals evolved during the Cambrian and Ordovician with temperatures 10-15C higher than today and CO2 20x higher.
Anyone believing that during the present climate that is almost the coldest in the whole Phanerozoic, that a fraction of a degree C and a few tens (or even hundreds) of ppm CO2 increase is going to have anything but a positive effect on corals is simply insane.
They should spend the rest of their lives in an institution.
If they don’t believe it but are peddling it then they’re a bunch of Bernie Madoffs.
If falsehood had, like truth, but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit. The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white, there is only one to hit it.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Liars”
http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/liars/
June 4, 2016 1:03 pm
Nothing new in the science or corruption . I recently watched the excellent Reef Reality – Dr Walter Stark : https://youtu.be/ej46dlLxUe8 which I believe was linked here .
But GoogleEarthing , as is my wont , Cape York , I happened to click on this neat image of one of those sinking islands :
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/25570812.jpg
This is a biggie. What makes it a biggie is that the Head of the Government-run department is speaking out against intentionally bias claims of climate change induced destruction of the Great Barrier Reef
Great Barrier Reef: scientists ‘exaggerated’ coral bleaching
By Graham Lloyd -The Australian
There is growing scientific conflict over bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Picture: Tourism Queensland
Activist scientists and lobby groups have distorted surveys, maps and data to misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, according to the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt.
A full survey of the reef released yesterday by the authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science said 75 per cent of the reef would escape unscathed.
Dr Reichelt said the vast bulk of bleaching damage was confined to the far northern section off Cape York, which had the best prospect of recovery due to the lack of onshore development and high water quality.
The report emerged as Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten traded political fire on the reef’s future this week at the halfway point of the election campaign.
As Labor announced $500 million towards protecting the reef, the Opposition Leader said: “We will invest in direct environmental management. We will invest in science and research. We will invest in proper reef management.’’
He said if Australia did not spend the money on the reef, “it is in serious danger of being irreparably damaged. If we do not act, our children will rightly ask us why didn’t we.’’
…
The political debate and the release of the authority’s survey results highlights a growing conflict between the lead Barrier Reef agency and the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce headed by Terry Hughes.
Dr Reichelt said the authority had withdrawn from a joint announcement on coral bleaching with Professor Hughes this week “because we didn’t think it told the whole story”. The taskforce said mass bleaching had killed 35 per cent of corals on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef.
Dr Reichelt said maps accompanying the research had been misleading, exaggerating the impact. “I don’t know whether it was a deliberate sleight of hand or lack of geographic knowledge but it certainly suits the purpose of the people who sent it out,” he said.
“This is a frightening enough story with the facts, you don’t need to dress them up. We don’t want to be seen as saying there is no problem out there but we do want people to understand there is a lot of the reef that is unscathed.”
Dr Reichelt said there had been widespread misinterpretation of how much of the reef had died.
“We’ve seen headlines stating that 93 per cent of the reef is practically dead,” he said.
“We’ve also seen reports that 35 per cent, or even 50 per cent, of the entire reef is now gone.
“However, based on our combined results so far, the overall mortality rate is 22 per cent — and about 85 per cent of that die-off has occurred in the far north between the tip of Cape York and just north of Lizard Island, 250km north of Cairns. Seventy-five per cent of the reef will come out in a few months time as recovered.”
Former climate change commissioner Tim Flannery described diving on the Great Barrier Reef near Port Douglas recently as “one of the saddest days of my life”
…
Dr Reichelt said Dr Flannery’s language had been “dramatic” and “theatrical” and his prognosis, although of concern, was “speculative”. Dr Reichelt also rejected reports, based on leaked draft documents, that improving water quality would cost $16 billion.
He said the interim report had been rejected by a board of which he was member and “taken totally out of context” in media reports.