Crying Wolf : Great Barrier Reef Alarmism | CLIMATISM
“THE journalists come up and they’re not interested in what the truth is. They’re only interested in finding out where the ‘dead’ reef is. And when people who work right up and down the reef can’t actually take them to a single place that is going to suit their dooms-day story, then we sort of need a bit of balance…”
– Paul Talbott : GBR Tourist operator
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STRAIGHT-TALKING former James Cook University marine geophysicist Professor Peter Ridd has been an outspoken critic of the relentless tide of fear-mongering, misinformation and anti-science hysteria advanced by climate change activists concerning the health of the Great Barrier Reef.
IN June of 2016, Ridd made the headlines after suspecting something was wrong with photographs being used to highlight the apparent rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef:
AFTER attempting to blow the whistle on the bogus pictures, Ridd was censured and subsequently sacked by James Cook University. (Ridd is currently suing JCU)
After a formal investigation, Professor Ridd was found guilty of “failing to act in a collegial way and in the academic spirit of the institution”!
His crime was to encourage questioning of two of the nation’s leading reef institutions, the Centre of Excellence for Coral Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, on whether they knew that photographs they had published and claimed to show long-term collapse of reef health could be misleading and wrong.” Graham Lloyd – The Australian – 11 June 2016
SIMILAR totalitarian treatment was dished out by free-thinking James Cook University to the late and great Bob Carter, a former JCU adjunct Professor. Carter was a world renowned climate change expert and sceptic. His crime – speaking outside the permitted doctrine of global warming climate change.
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PROFESSOR RIDD writes an ever insightful and eye-opening piece on the reef in today’s Australian.
RIDD comments on the recent backtracking by Scientists from James Cook University who just published a paper on the bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef and were surprised that the death rate was less than they expected…
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Scientists from James Cook University have just published a paper on the bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef and were surprised that the death rate was less than they expected, because of the adaptability of corals to changing temperatures.
It appears as though they exaggerated their original claims and are quietly backtracking.
To misquote Oscar Wilde, to exaggerate once is a misfortune, to do it twice looks careless, but to do it repeatedly looks like unforgivable systemic unreliability by some of our major science organisations.
The very rapid adaptation of corals to high temperatures is a well-known phenomenon; besides, if you heat corals in a given year, they tend to be less susceptible in the future to overheating. This is why corals are one of the least likely species to be affected by climate change, irrespective of whether you believe the climate is changing by natural fluctuations or because of human influence.
Corals have a unique way of dealing with changing temperature, by changing the microscopic plants that live inside them. These microscopic plants, called zooxanthellae, give the coral energy from the sun through photosynthesis in exchange for a comfortable home inside the coral. When the water gets hot, these little plants effectively become poisonous to the coral and the coral throws them out, which turns the coral white — that is, it bleaches.
But most of the time, the coral will recover from the bleaching. And here’s the trick: the corals take in new zooxanthellae, that floats around in the water quite naturally, and can selectselecting different species that are better suited to hot weather.
Most other organisms have to change their genetic make-up to deal with temperature changes — something that can take many generations. But corals can do it in a few weeks by just changing the plants that live in them.
They have learned a thing or two in a couple of hundred million years of evolution.
The problem here is that the world has been completely misled about the effects of bleaching by scientists who rarely mention the spectacular regrowth that occurs. For example, the 2016 bleaching event supposedly killed 93 per cent, or half, or 30 per cent of the reef, depending on which headline and scientist you want to believe.
However, the scientists looked only at coral in very shallow water — less than 2m below the surface — which is only a small fraction of all the coral, but by far the most susceptible to getting hot in the tropical sun. 
A recent study found that deep-water coral (down to more than 40m) underwent far less bleaching, as one would expect. I estimate that less than 8 per cent of the Barrier Reef coral died. That might still sound like a lot, but considering that there was a 250 per cent increase in coral between 2011 and 2016 for the entire southern zone, an 8 per cent decrease is nothing to worry about. Coral recovers fast.
But this is just the tip of the exaggeration iceberg. Some very eminent scientists claim that bleaching never happened before the 1980s and is entirely a man-made phenomenon. This was always a ridiculous proposition.
A recent study of 400-year-old corals has found that bleaching has always occurred and is no more common now than in the past. Scientists have also claimed that there has been a 15 per cent reduction in the growth rate of corals. However, some colleagues and I demonstrated that there were serious errors in their work and that, if anything, there has been a slight increase in the coral growth rate over the past 100 years.
This is what one would expect in a gently warming climate. Corals grow up to twice as fast in the hotter water of Papua New Guinea and the northern Barrier Reef than in the southern reef. I could quote many more examples.
This unreliability of the science is now a widely accepted scandal in many other areas of study and it has a name: the replication crisis. When checks are made to replicate or confirm scientific results, it is regularly found that about half have flaws. This is an incredible and scandalous situation, a view shared by the editors of eminent journals and many science institutions. A great deal of effort is going into fixing this problem, especially in the biomedical sciences, where it was first recognised.
But not for Barrier Reef science. The science institutions deny there is a problem and fail to correct erroneous work. When Piers Larcombe and I submitted an article to a scientific journal suggesting we needed a little additional checking of Great Barrier Reef science, the response from many very eminent scientists was that there was no need. Everything was fine. I am not sure if this is blind optimism or wilful negligence, but why would anybody object to a little more checking? It would cost only a few million dollars — just a tiny fraction of what governments will be spending on the reef.
But the truth will out eventually. The scare stories about the Barrier Reef started in the 1960s, when scientists first started work on it. They have been crying wolf ever since. But the data keeps coming in and, yes, sometimes a great deal of coral dies in a spectacular manner, with accompanying media fanfare. It is like a bushfire on land — it looks terrible at first, but it quietly and rapidly grows back, ready for the scientists to peddle their story all over again.
Peter Ridd was, until fired this year, a physicist at James Cook University’s marine geophysical laboratory.
Coral can take the heat, unlike experts crying wolf | The Australian
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SEE also :
DR Joe McGirr, the independent candidate favoured to win the Wagga Wagga by-election, brands himself as a ‘conservative’. But, his views on climate change and the evidence he provides to back up his claims, speak little for his climate science and conservative credentials…
The conservative independent candidate favoured to win the Wagga Wagga by-election from the Liberal Party tomorrow has written articles about the dangers of climate change and supported organisations such as the Climate Council.
In an article earlier this year that Dr McGirr co-wrote for The Australian Journal of Rural Health, he urged doctors to press governments on climate change.
“Addressing climate change has been described as the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century … Climate change impacts health directly and indirectly,” Dr McGirr said.
“The role of health services in providing education about the health impacts of climate change is well recognised.’’
Dr McGirr yesterday defended his posts and comments: “I can’t hide the fact that I have published on it in literature.
“That was one of my research interests and as far as the medical industry’s concerned … it’s about how we’re going to die from it.”
Lancet literature had talked about people dying from heat-related illnesses, Dr McGirr said.
Wagga Wagga by-election candidate sticks to guns over climate change | The Australian
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CLIMATE CHANGE alarmists like Dr McGirr use appeals to authority, with frequent references to “the literature” or “the science” as evidence to prove their theory:
Dr McGirr yesterday defended his posts and comments: “I can’t hide the fact that I have published on it in literature.
Lancet literature had talked about people dying from heat-related illnesses, Dr McGirr said.
THIS is what the medical journal Lancet actually found:
Cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather... The study — published in the British journal The Lancet — analyzed data on more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Of those, 5.4 million deaths were related to cold, while 311,000 were related to heat.
Study: Cold kills 20 times more people than heat | USA Today
SAME story in Australia:
A new study published in The Lancet shows 6.5% of deaths in this country are attributed to cold weather, compared with 0.5% from hot weather. Most deaths will be from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, as it’s the heart and lungs that struggle when we are outside our comfort zone.
The Australian cold is a bigger killer than Sweden’s freeze – here’s why | Australian
US temperature related deaths (CDC):
“The CDC says heat kills 600 Americans a year,” says John Stossel. “Cold kills more than twice that many.”
It warmed one degree in the last hundred years, and life expectancy doubled! says Dr Patrick Michaels.
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“I have said I think renewable energy is important and I have said that in a public forum,” he said. “I accept that is not what conservative people want but that’s my view of the situation. I have got to stick to my guns.
Wagga Wagga by-election candidate sticks to guns over climate change | The Australian
THE global warming climate change policies of the kind McGirr supports will make the dying worse by making electricity too expensive for the poor:
The situation has become so dire that 77 per cent of low-income NSW households are going without heating in a bid to reduce their onerous power bills, new research from the NSW Council of Social Service (NCOSS) shows. And one in three low-income earners have been forced to stop using hot water for bathing to pay for energy bills.
KELLY WAS RIGHT: SALVOS WARN COLD HOMES WILL KILL THIS WINTER | Herald Sun
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DROACONIAN climate change policies of the kind McGirr supports have indeed made the dying worse:
After a brief mild spell, temperatures are set to dip again in April after the chilliest March in 21 years.
It is estimated that 20,275 Brits more than average died between December 1 and March
An additional 2,000 deaths more than average were expected due to cold conditions between March 23 and 31, this winter’s average death rates show.
Campaigners have called the deaths a “national tragedy” as cold weather victims fatalities could be prevented – especially in the elderly.
48,000 Brits dead after worst winter in 42 years | Daily Star
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AS a medical Doctor, candidate McGirr should be at least aware of the actual statistics of temperature related deaths within “the literature” that he says he has contributed to.
IF McGirr cannot get this most basic of facts correct, what other climate change falsehoods is he willing to tell you?
••• Read the rest of this entry »
NO reason to doubt the figures presented by John Harris of The Guardian on how much energy is required to run your iPhone and digital gadgets. So, if you really, really care about “Saving The Planet”, then it’s time to give up all those CO2-belching devices!
WHEN times get tuff, let the words of Obama-the-great sooth your digitally-deprived soul – “no challenge poses a greater threat to our future and future generations than a change in climate”…
“Submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflicts, leaving more floods of desperate people seeking sanctuary in nations not their own.” – Obama
IF Barry’s soothing cadence fails, then just try to “think of the children!”
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Our phones and gadgets are now endangering the planet
Opinion John Harris // The Guardian
The energy used in our digital consumption is set to have a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industry.
Illustration: Andrzej Krauze Photograph: Andrzej Krauze
It was just another moment in this long, increasingly strange summer. I was on a train home from Paddington station, and the carriage’s air-conditioning was just about fighting off the heat outside. Most people seemed to be staring at their phones – in many cases, they were trying to stream a World Cup match, as the 4G signal came and went, and Great Western Railway’s onboard wifi proved to be maddeningly erratic. The trebly chatter of headphone leakage was constant. And thousands of miles and a few time zones away in Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the world’s largest concentrations of computing power was playing its part in keeping everything I saw ticking over, as data from around the world passed back and forth from its vast buildings.
Most of us communicate with this small and wealthy corner of the US every day. Thanks to a combination of factors – its proximity to Washington DC, competitive electricity prices, and its low susceptibility to natural disasters – the county is the home of data centres used by about 3,000 tech companies: huge agglomerations of circuitry, cables and cooling systems that sit in corners of the world most of us rarely see, but that are now at the core of how we live. About 70% of the world’s online traffic is reckoned to pass through Loudoun County.
But there is a big problem, centred on a power company called Dominion, which supplies the vast majority of Loudoun County’s electricity. According to a 2017 Greenpeace report, only 1% of Dominion’s total electricity comes from credibly renewable sources: 2% originates in hydroelectric plants, and the rest is split evenly between coal, gas and nuclear power. Dominion is also in the middle of a huge regional controversy about a proposed pipeline that will carry fracked gas to its power plants, which it says is partly driven by data centres’ insatiable appetite for electricity. Clearly, then, the video streams, digital photographs and messaging that pour out of all those servers come with a price.
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SOME relief :
CO2 Related :
CO2 – “The Stuff of Life” – Greening The Planet :
TEMPERATURE Related :
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(Climate sceptics still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)
Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.
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Click link for more info…TQ! Jamie.
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EVEN when data and empirical evidence completely contradicts AGW predictions and forecasts, alarmists continue to double down on their fear-mongering instead of evaluating their theory and admitting they might have got it all wrong. But sadly, man-made global warming has become a $trillion dollar religion to be defended at all costs in order to protect egos, jobs and reputations. This is not ‘science’, it is dogma, denial and zealotry run amok.
https://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
Mother Nature screwing with the Progressive AGW agenda again, when will she stop?
“Men are born ignorant, not stupid.
They are made stupid by education.”
– Bertrand Russell
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Via (U.N) World Economic Forum :
Every summer for the last eight years, people who live in the Swiss Alps have been wrapping a beloved glacier in blankets.
The white canvas blankets are intended to reflect sunlight off the Rhone Glacier, to try to reduce how much of it disappears each year. And Swiss glaciologist David Volken says it’s probably working; he told Agence France-Presse the blankets may reduce seasonal melting by as much as 70%.
Image: Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters
The Rhone Glacier is a popular tourist destination that has been shrinking rapidly over the last decade; of the roughly 1,148 feet (350 meters) in ice thickness lost since 1856, 131 ft has disappeared in the last 10 years alone, according to AFP. Thus the blankets.
It’s a rare approach, but not unprecedented, notes E&E News: People swaddle glaciers with reflective material in places in Italy and Germany, and Jason Box, a glaciologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, began advocating for covering sections of the Greenland ice sheet with reflective material as early as 2009.
Image: Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters
Polar geoengineering ideas aren’t limited to blankets. At the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union last spring, a research group from Utrecht University proposed blowing artificial snow across Switzerland’s Morteratsch Glacier, to help reflect sunlight, according to E&E News.
Others have suggested even larger-scale interventions, like using wind-powered pumps to squirt sea water over Arctic sea ice in winter, prompting thicker (and, they hope, more stable) ice to form, Oceans Deeply reports. Scientists have also floated the idea of building artificial platform-like mounds underwater to prop up particularly vulnerable ice sheets from below.
Swiss residents are wrapping glaciers in blankets to keep them from melting | World Economic Forum
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NOT sure whether to put this down to nostalgia, tourism, hubristic madness or simply an act of climate derangement syndrome?
BUT, one thing is a given – this almost ‘artistic’ yearly ritual, in defiance of Mother Nature is, no doubt, brought on by fear and anxiety over the perceived ill effect that mankind’s excesses and emissions are having on glaciers and the climate.
IT’S a shame that the good residents of the Rhone Glacier weren’t around in 1857 to spare a few blankets for Washington’s most famous glacier, Nisqually, that retreated 3,200 feet and lost 200 feet of thickness between 1857 and 1918…
COINCIDENTALLY, the Swiss Rhone Glacier began its retreat in 1856, a year before Nisqually in Washington began its melt…
“The Rhone Glacier is a popular tourist destination that has been shrinking rapidly over the last decade; of the roughly 1,148 feet (350 meters) in ice thickness lost since 1856…”
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TONNES more blankets would have come in handy in 1902 when the Rhone Glacier was disappearing at alarming rates during NASA’s coldest years on record…
GLACIERS disappearing during NASA’s coldest years on record… Read the rest of this entry »
BACK after a short break, I caught this handy tweet via @SteveSGoddard that’s been touring twittersphere causing, no doubt, all sorts of pain for the Climate Crisis Industry.
STAY tuned for the lamestream media and their sycophant (government-grant funded) ‘scientists’ to hit back with another unhealthy dose of inane, transparent, rhetorical Arctic BS…
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DETAILS Via Tony Heller’s The Deplorable Climate Science Blog | “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts” – Richard Feynman :
Terrifying Times For Climate Alarmists
Arctic sea ice volume is highest in five years, and approaching the “normal” line.
It has been ten years since Mark Serreze and David Barber predicted an ice-free North Pole that summer, and I countered with an article in The Register “Arctic Ice Refuses To Melt As Ordered”
Terrifying Times For Climate Alarmists | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog
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OVER the years, TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough has wowed us all with that mesmerising voice narrating epic visuals of all things nature. Aesthetics aside, and not doubting the man’s intelligence, Attenborough persists in parroting easily demolished propaganda about the threat of ‘climate change’.
IN the BBC1 series on Africa he claimed that the wildlife there was at a “pivotal moment in their history” and “Africa’s climate is certainly changing. Some parts of the continent have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years.”
WHEN challenged, the BBC indicated that the claim of a 3.5C rise over 20 years was sourced from a Christian Aid report. The BBC acknowledged that the 3.5C claim, based on that NGO source, had no basis in fact and the statement would be removed when the program was repeated.
GLOBAL warming’s favourite mascot – polar bears – haven’t escaped his misinformed activism. The Oasis Nature Channel, of which Attenborough lent his name and reputation to, presented a series of programs entitled Extinctions, about animals under threat. The first of the series was about polar bears, which they referred to as the canaries in the global-warming coalmine, ignoring the fact that polar bear numbers are actually the highest since records began.
ATTENBOROUGH’S resume wouldn’t be complete without paying homage to UN “sustainability” (Agenda 21) and the tenets of Thomas Malthus …
IN his latest eye-rolling rant, Attenborough claims that climate change “stops plants growing” and that global warming will create a “plant-less desert” !
Sir David Attenborough marks the reopening of the Temperate House at Kew Gardens, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world this evening. He praises conservation work being done at the botanical gardens to preserve plants which otherwise would die, due to climate change. Kew Gardens is currently finding and researching species of plants that can help restore land affected by global warming, instead of letting our landscape become a “plantless desert”.
ASSUMING that climate change aka global warming equates to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, (I say ‘assuming’, because climate change aka global warming can mean whatever an alarmist wants it to mean depending on their particular eco-grievance of the day) then it would appear our favourite ye-olde botanist has officially exchanged brains for blunts, in claiming that climate change “stops plants growing” !
BACK ON THE ‘BLUE PLANET’, DAVID >> Carbon dioxide = plant food!
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