Reposted from Jennifer Marohasy’s Blog
My Aunty Bunty used to work in a factory in Dundee, in Scotland, with thousands of other women all adding colour to black and white photographs. She was allowed to be creative; the idea was to make people happy. So, for example, she could add more pink to the cheeks of young girls on holidays at the beach.
Nowadays scientist regularly do the opposite. They strip colour from pretty pictures because they want to make people feel sad, specifically about the corals at the Great Barrier Reef. They are not very nice people. That is the unfortunate truth.
Greeting cards and postcards were once big business and everyone wanted them more colourful. Nowadays, Great Barrier Reef research is big business, all funded by the government. It relies on the general population being fearful – children anxious and the more so the better.
I wish this wasn’t the world that I lived in, because the Great Barrier Reef is still so colourful. Often the colour is from the fish, with the most common colour of coral, the world over, and since forever, being beige.
There is one photograph in particular that has been republished over and over of fields of beige branching Acropora, that are so extensive and fringing Heron Island; except the beige colour has been stripped from the corals making them appear bleached, when they are not.
I have been to Heron Island and swam over these same corals, they are not colourful. Like most corals at reefs around the world they are beige in colour. It doesn’t mean they are unhealthy; in fact, they are quite fine.
What is not right, I would go so far as to describe it as sick, is when the colours are stripped from these already pale corals to make them look bleached, as though they risk imminent mass death.
It is a fraud to strip the colour from this photograph, and/or to not undertake correct colour balance post production. I have written to the Sydney Morning Herald about it, to Catlin Surveys affiliated with the University of Queensland and UNESCO, and also David Vevers from Washington-based The Ocean Agency. I’ve been ignored, click here for more information.
And, alas, this same photograph has now been republished in The Guardian this weekend.
It is the only photograph of coral, accompanying a feature story in The Guardian by Graham Readfearn. Given the famous scientist, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, has spent the last thirty years working on the reef, and according to Readfearn has witnessed so many devasting bleaching events, why didn’t they use one of his photographs? Doesn’t he have any? Is it the case he doesn’t have any of mass bleaching?
Why have they republished this fraud – this fake?
Some time ago I tracked the photograph down and found the original on Flickr.
The photograph was almost certainly taken on 22 October 2014 at Heron Island, though this date and place is rarely if ever included, nor any information about the postproduction colour stripping or lack of colour balance.
There was no mass bleaching of the corals fringing Heron Island in October 2014.
To read more about the history of the fake photograph republished this weekend by The Guardian, click here.
What does it say about Western civilization that journalists, scientist, and politicians routinely claim the corals at the Great Barrier Reef are suffering, when they are actually quite healthy? How sick are we, or at least the journalists, scientists and politicians who tell such untrue stories about the Great Barrier Reef.
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A little film that I made with Stuart Ireland, called Bleached Colourful, includes some footage of me swimming with a turtle over the fields of beige-coloured Acropora fringing Heron Island.
Bleached Colourful – Part 1 from Stuart Ireland on Vimeo.
How one prints color photos can be a choice. If there is no familiar object in the shot, the color balance can be quite off.
I once had the unfortunate experience of trying to do a paint color match off a color photo. The customer liked the actual building color, not the color as printed, so we rather had a failure to communicate.
But manipulating color balance to claim the corals are unhealthy is unethical.
Unethical? It is outright scientific fraud on the public and government funding agencies. Huge fines, loss of penisions and long prison terms are called for.
I am quite sure the perpetrators will claim bad quality assurance.
You’re too nice
It’s criminal.
The problem with reporting Great Barrier Reef bleachings is that it is reported elsewhere there have been 4 in the last 6 years.
This suggests that the the reef has an ongoing capability to recover between bleachings which indicates that the reef retains an innate ability to recover which is an attribute of a healthy system
Quite remarkable given the boiling ocean that these photos shown divers in wet suits.
Maybe not wet suits, maybe hazard suits to prevent them from being burnt?
Do I need S/ ?
Brian, There was significant bleaching in 2016 and also 1998. There was some localised bleaching in early 2020, and full recovery soon after of affected corals. The bleaching in 2022 was a complete beaut-up. They mostly just make stuff up. Unfortunately.
“Bleaching” is part of the reef’s growth cycle. SPS coral, the reef builders, grow over the skeletons of the previous generation to build the reef.
That is even worse that constantly showing pictures of water cooling towers emitting steam when the story headline is about pollution. Sometimes they also alter the color scheme to darken the steam to make it look dirty.
Yes, see EVERY picture ever taken of an Alberta oilsands plant, inverting the color so the steam is black.
It’s because the cooling towers are backlit.
The BBC claims they have no control over how a photographer lights their photos.
Apparently, the BBC also has no control of how they choose photos to illustrate their tall tales
The question is not whether there is scientific dishonesty in climate alarmism. There is lots, this being but one of many subtle examples on many subtopics.
The question is whether there is any that isn’t? I spent almost three years looking when writing the climate essays for ebook Blowing Smoke. I found nothing peer reviewed that was fully and only honest. Essays Greenhouse Effects, Last Cup of Coffee, and Somerset Levels are examples equivalent to this subtle corals coloration example. Essays Shell Games and One if by Land give three worse examples of not so subtle academic misconduct. And essay A High Stick Foul gives clear proof of intentional major dishonesty by Marcott in his ‘famous’ 2013 Science article derived from his ‘honest’ PhD thesis.
Yeah you said it Rud.
It’s just been a continuous stream of dishonesty and perfidy spewing out of the doomist promoters of their climate “science” for 5 decades now.
And what of their continuous models, projections and predictions have been observable?
As Einstein said –
“just one will do”
Polar bear photos were faked or used to communicate false info over the past decades why not coral reef pics. If people will lie about the basic facts they will lie about anything.
But it must comport with the agenda.
There are obviously a number of influential people whose careers are built on the narrative of the GBR being in danger from ocean warming. When your career, income, status and reputation are based on untruths, you have little choice but to double down in the face of inconvenient facts, and a little colour manipulation becomes justified because you’re saving the planet (and saving your own arse, not to mention your own ass). And the mainstream media thrive on bad news, so they lap it all up.
Same thing up our way with the thriving/disappearing polar bears. In fact the whole climate business is built on selected, manipulated or even falsified data forced into supporting a political agenda that threatens the future, if not the very existence, of liberal-democratic civil society. The Climategate emails prove that they knew exactly what they were doing back in 2009, and it’s only gone downhill since then.
Keep up the good work, Jennifer. Even if the only reward is a clear conscience and the thanks of a handful of fellow believers in science, truth and reason.
Greenpeace’s entire model is built on lies to generate funding … they admitted this in a Canadian court.
My Aunty Bunty used to work in a factory in Dundee, in Scotland, with thousands of other women all adding colour to black and white photographs (…) she could add more pink to the cheeks of young girls on holidays at the beach.
I can understand why. There is no “beach” at Dundee on Tayside.
And the Scottish climate is not very permissive of either sunshine or crocodiles.
🙂
Jen never said what beach.
Just beach
I recall hearing much of Glasgow used to go to places like Blackpool (Northern England) back in the day(pre and post WW2). Large local and regional employers used to have company holiday fortnights organised en-masse for their employees.
Where Dundee went, I don’t know.
Would Aunt Bunty have worked at Valentines in Dundee?
Using photographs to to convey a message rather than the truth is all too common. I’ve complained to the BBC, without success, about the use of stock photographs in their weather and climate stories. I’ll use unethical next time
Spot on.
Jennifer never suggested that there was a beach at Dundee.
But Valenties were based there.
Monifieth 5 miles east from the centre of Dundee has a large sandy beach. Described in the Beach Guide
Monifieth is a long, sandy beach looking out over the Firth of Tay, with views across towards the southern side. The beach has a number of sea defences, with wooden groynes becoming exposed at low tide. A number of rocks are also exposed, providing an opportunity to explore the pools around them them for signs of wildlife.
The western end of the beach is backed by a caravan park and fields, and is an excellent place to go walking, or bird watching, as the area is a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to the large population of water birds and wildfowl to be found here.
Photos that misinform are commonplace, everywhere. Look at any fishing magazine. Photos taken with wide angle and fisheye lenses make fish look huge. No photoshopping required.
Okay so what we need is a lesson on coral. I guess it’s an animal, hard to tell by looking at it. It seems to have a symbiotic relationship with algae. Is algae it’s only source of color. It appears that bleaching occurs when the coral kicks the algae out. Does the coral die if the algae don’t return, can a certain type of coral only live with a certain algae or are there several kinds of algae suitable for a specific coral. How long can a coral live without algae, can the algae live without the coral? What does the algae do for the coral besides giving it color? Where do the algae go when they are kicked out? And on and on.
Well, a few things if you would just review WUWT. I am doing this to shame you for not doing your own research here and elsewhere. For example, sedentary corals cannot ever be kicked out. You display abject coral ignorance.
Coral leaching means expels their symbiotic xooanthella, when water conditions (not only temperature) change. If they find new zooantellae within about a year, no problem. If they don’t, potential bleaching problem. If bleached dead, the coral reef will repropagate in about less than 10 years by coral natural annual breeding massive spawn.
Your whole coral reef climate change thing is falsely contrived. Coral reefs have been around for hundreds of millions of years, evolved.
Thanks but next time behave yourself and you have barely scratched the surface. I have looked other places and find climate change climate change climate change. You have been a little help but not much.
I think Rud was unnecessarily rough on you regardless of your views.
I forgive Rud and so should you. I have way less respect for him now but he can think what he wants I don’t much care.
We come here to learn, discuss, debate- we can’t be expected to do all our own research. It’s complex stuff. We hope those who are way beyond us can help us understand the subject better so we can better oppose the idiots – which now dominate places like Wokeachusetts. I’ve certainly learned a lot here asking endless questions. I don’t expect to get spanked- though it happens every time I defend woody biomass as a good source of energy.
I see you too got a negative rating. Wear it as a badge of honor.
One more thing I didn’t say anything about corals being kicked out!
Hard corals first appear in the fossil record in rocks from the late Cambrian early Ordovician when, according to the proxy evidence, atmospheric CO2 levels were at or near 7,000 ppm and the air temperature ran about 10C hotter than now.
Must be species that love boiling water. /sarc 🙂
And all the time since they’ve been removing CO2 as calcium carbonate CaCO 3 now found in Limestone, chalk and marble. They’re out to get us!!
Hi Bob
So maybe if you watch the film, and then if you have questions follow on from that,
At John Brewer Reef many of the corals were more colourful after they ‘kicked-out’ their symbiotic algae because the algae that is either brown or green was masking the natural pink pigment in the corals.
Corals have tentacles and will feed on little animals, even shrimps, additional to photosynthesising.
In a previous blog post, I explain how corals could go some months without algae and even spawn, more here, https://jennifermarohasy.com/2020/01/leaning-on-the-lookouts-at-the-great-barrier-reef/
Cheers,
Thank you Jennifer. I did watch the video it was very informative but like so many things the more you learn the more questions you have. I looked at other sources on the internet the problem is that much of what is on the internet is written by people whose methods and results you are questioning or people like them.
My number one issue is bleaching. Bleaching sounds fatal but apparently is a normal process, might not always be beneficial but is normal.
Second there are two basic kinds of coral soft and hard. My understanding is that most or all hard coral have a symbiotic relationship with algae. Does each type of coral rely on just one type of algae or many different types and does each algae depend on one type of coral or many?
If the algae provides food for the coral via its photosynthetic process why would the coral get rid of the algae when it is stressed? It doesn’t make sense.
Sorry about the other commenters – they misunderstood your simple request for more coral info from Jennifer, who would be a source you can trust.
Rud made me mad at first but I can handle people who sometimes get impatient with my questions. I will ask questions until the cows come home, like it or not. Many times it is difficult to get a satisfactory answer to even the most straightforward questions.
This is all propaganda. Nazis were real masters of it.
Wanna be Weltführer Klaus Schwab would take that as a compliment.
Should we really be surprised by this? If you’re willing to write a 2,000 word essay on the demise of the GBR and not mention one time that coral growth was the highest ever in 2022, of course they are willing to use dishonest photos.
Because they don’t have facts they must lie.
Clicked on the Grauniad link and went down to the comments, all but it hook line and sinker.
Never been a subscriber so I assume they don’t allow comments questioning the narrative.
Try viewing comments in “Sort by : Newest” mode. In my experience “pushback” takes time.
I have never been a (paying) “subscriber” either, but have sporadically posted there since “registering” around 2008.
While some of my posts have been “Removed by a moderator” most of them are left visible … they just don’t attract many upvotes !
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts.
On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination.
That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.
This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
Stephen H. Schneider – Stanford climate “scientist” (deceased)
Says it all.
Great Stary form Down Under!
The flip side of this changing colors Story, is the frightening Anomaly Graphs about the North Atlantic, all summer long, where they splash Maroon Paint in abundance everywhere!
The NOAA people probably get a discount on Maroon paint at Home Depot?
Similar to what CNN did to Joe Rogan after he got sick with covid and recovered. They tried to make him look still sick.