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:
The ABC used a photo of reef bleaching on Flowerpot Rock in American Samoa in stories about 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
SIMILARtotalitarian 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.
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
“We’re told “clean” energy is a viable and cost effective. But cut the government subsidies, and 97 percent of investors vanish…!”
UNRELIABLES, the great scam within the scam crumbling under the weight of its own BS.
EXCELLENT.
(Do feel for the 80,000 now unemployed – sucked in by the lies and blatant falsehoods spread by climate change zealots – politicians, ‘green’ lobby groups and sycophant lamestream, fake news media)
STOP THESE THINGS
‘Green’ job promises nothing more than hot air.
Remember all those stories about the wind & solar industries providing millions of groovy, well-paid ‘green’ jobs – as secure as Fort Knox? No?
Sure, you’ll hear those pitching RE promise loads of ‘sustainable’ jobs, as they wail about dreaded ‘uncertainty’ – causing bankers to baulk and investors to flee; and as they demand (with menaces) that governments maintain essential, massive and endless subsidies until the end of time.
But, this is the same crowd who tell us that the ‘transition’ to nature’s wonder fuels is ‘inevitable’ and that they’re not really getting any subsidies at all.
There are a few inescapable truths: cut subsidies to wind and solar power and the jobs those ‘industries’ have ‘created’ evaporate like snow in Summer. Funny about that!
Bloodbath in the German solar “industry” — without subsidies 80,000 solar jobs are gone
Jo Nova Blog
Jo…
JUST saw the BBC report. And yes, no mention of the undersea volcanoes causing regional warming of the western Antarctic Ocean. Nor any mention of the BBC’s own 2018 report:
“BIG increase in snowfall in Antarctica with “The effect of the extra snow locked up in Antarctica is to slightly slow a general trend in global sea-level rise.” – BBC
As far as I am aware, the weight of this extra snow creates enough weight for glaciers to sheer – a completely natural process. No mention of this by the BBC either…
‘Bias by omission’ – the most dangerous and insidious form of propaganda.
The edge of the Thwaites glacier [credit: NASA photograph by Jim Yungel] This BBC report seems unaware that a study in 2014 found that parts of the Thwaites Glacier are subject to melting due to subglacial volcanoes and other geothermal “hotspots”. The existence of this group of volcanoes has long been known.
British and American scientists will assess the stability of one of Antarctica’s biggest ice streams, reports BBC News.
It is going to be one of the biggest projects ever undertaken in Antarctica.
UK and US scientists will lead a five-year effort to examine the stability of the mighty Thwaites Glacier.
IT hasn’t been the best start to the year for the global warming doom industry. Three consecutive “Beast From The East’s“ caused by super-cold Arctic air have resulted in 48,000 non-heat related deaths in the UK alone, as the 2017/18 Northern Hemisphere mega-winter rages on, well into spring.
THE ‘extreme’ cold has seen Iguanas frozen solid in Florida, alligators in a state of cryogenic freeze, sharks washed up in Cape Cod “stranded due to cold shock”, the coldest Super Bowl on record, Niagara Falls frozen over, a thermometer in the world’s coldest village breaking as temperatures plunge to -62C, the lowest temperature ever recorded in Bangladesh, frozen crops creating a food crisis in Europe, even a mass die-off of sea creatures as UK ocean temps plunged 1-3 degrees centigrade, cold temperatures smashed across Saskatchewan’s central and south regions in the spring of April, and the list of non-heat ‘extremes’ goes on.
RECORD cold temperatures have dumped unprecedented amounts of the white fluffy stuff that was, by now, meant to be “a very rare and exciting event”, something that“Children just aren’t going to know what (snow) is”. Dr Viner’s “thing of the past” covered all 50 states in North America, with rare falls experienced in Rome, Monaco, the Sahara desert and the first snow in 50 years dusting Southern Morocco. And, it’s been a rough old winter for Gavin Schmidt’s NASA GISS Temp New York office – home of the “Hottest Year(s) Evah” sausagefactory – with the city that never sleeps experiencing its “fifth consecutive season that at least 30 inches of snow has fallen” with CNN reporting “It’s official: NYC hasn’t seen snow like this in 130 years“!
DON’T LOOK THERE, LOOK HERE!
IN what appears to be another well-timed, and well-orchestrated plan to thaw out the inconvenient noise of the brutal NH winter still raging deep into Spring, the mainstream media, in concert with the climate crisis industry, has wheeled out an old favourite that always guarantees a juicy headline and an eco-emotional response – The “Death” of The Great Barrier Reef…
A new study, published in Nature by serial reef alarmist Prof Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, examines the link between the level of heat exposure from the 2015/16 super El Niño, “resulting in coral bleaching and ultimately coral death.“
Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages | Nature
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A TASTE of this morning’s mainstream media reef hysteria following the Hughes et al release: Read the rest of this entry »
ONE of the great propaganda lines of the climate change industry is the boom in ‘green energy jobs’ meme.
TAKE this example out of The Daily Advertiser:
Renewable energy: powering Australia in more ways than one
James Wright
A jobs boom is sweeping across regional Australia and there’s one industry to thank – the renewable energy sector. From places like Gordon in southern Tasmania to Pindari in north-east NSW, new solar installations, windfarms, battery arrays, solar towers and pumped hydro facilities are springing life into regional towns. How are they doing this? By injecting desperately needed investment and job opportunities into remote locations.
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This is great news! But despite the steady stream of new developments in regional areas, we’re actually being short-changed. Policy uncertainty due to ongoing internal squabbles in the Federal Government is strangling the growth of this sector and costing regional Australia the true jobs boom it deserves.
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If politicians could simply commit to a modest and achievable 50 per cent renewable energy target, this would create 28,000 new jobs. The vast majority would be in regional Australia where they are greatly needed to breathe new life into struggling local economies.
Renewable energy is powering jobs in the regions | The Daily Advertiser
NO one would deny that job creation is a good thing especially in regional centres and remote locations in Australia. Areas with often high rates of unemployment and limited opportunity.
BUT, where the ‘green energy jobs’ argument falls down is not only in the longevity of the full-time jobs available after installation, but in the fact that these jobs are a direct result of green central planning. Green jobs are like ‘Fiat money’ – a currency without intrinsic value established as money, often by government regulation.
WITHOUT massive government subsidies, estimated at $60 BILLION by 2030 under the Australian government’s RET (Renewable Energy Target), their would be no ‘green’ jobs as advertised by The Daily Advertiser. The private sector simply will not invest in weather-dependent ‘energy’ sources when in competition with cheap, efficient, reliable base-load sources like coal and gas on a dollar-for-dollar or subsidy-equalised basis.
Warren Buffet sums it up nicely:
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett
TELLINGLY, the piece by James Wright (chief executive officer of the Future Business Council)in The Daily Advertiser not once mentions the private sector as a direct player in the ‘green jobs boom’. His argument relies solely on government and politicians:
“Policy uncertainty due to ongoing internal squabbles in the Federal Government is strangling the growth of this sector…”
“If politicians could simply commit to a modest and achievable 50 per cent renewable energy target, this would create 28,000 new jobs…”
“we can’t let backwards politics spoil this once in a generation opportunity…”
BEWARE The Big Government Blob!
WE only have to look at Germany’s €TRILLION green energy disaster – Energiewende – that has trashed the German economy, destroyed her industrial heartland and left hundreds of thousands of German’s disconnected from the grid, unable to pay their power bills.
GREEN central planning like economic planning of failed socialist regimes gone by is doomed for failure. Market distorting policies that pick winners only work until the money runs out.
THIS is the intrinsic problem faced when big government and statist green central planning displaces the commercial sector. Market mechanisms are eliminated, the very mechanisms that promote checks and balances and ensure accountability to make sure stuff works.
THE “green” energy revolution with its touted “green jobs” is largely survived by rent-seeking corporations entering the “save the planet” sector in pursuit of the lucrative government funds, grants and subsidies on offer, supported pro bono by the virtue-signalling, “save the planet” mainstream media.
GREEN JOBS?
WHAT is set to be Australia’s largest wind farm will provide only 20 full-time jobs once it goes into operation next year…
Australia’s biggest wind farm to generate just 20 full-time jobs
“Renewables are a welcome part of the energy mix but they don’t sustain long-term jobs or provide baseload power,” said Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington.
What is set to be Australia’s largest wind farm will provide only 20 full-time jobs once it goes into operation next year.
Construction started yesterday on AGL’s $850 million Coopers Gap wind farm at Cooranga North, 250km west of Brisbane, 10 years after it was proposed. The state government, which is committed to a 50-50 split between renewable energy and fossil fuel energy production by 2030, has endorsed the project, with Energy Minister Anthony Lynham turning the first sod.
Two hundred jobs will be created during construction of the 123-turbine, 453 megawatt facility, which will provide enough power for 260,000 homes.
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During the election campaign in November, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk spruiked her clean energy policy at the under-construction Clare Valley Solar Farm in north Queensland — a project that will employ up to 350 people during construction, but offer only five to 10 jobs once operational.
Australia’s biggest wind farm to generate just 20 full-time jobs | The Australian
PUFF PIECE ADVICE
Renewable energy is powering jobs in the regions https://t.co/6B2kIKx3ly
— The Daily Advertiser (@DailyAdvertiser) February 18, 2018
ADVICE to marketers of the unreliable-energy jobs ‘revolution’. May I suggest lobbying the private sector and extolling the virtues of so-called “cheap, clean and green” energy to them, rather than writing propaganda, puff pieces in the daily rags and insulting the intelligence of your audience…the ones who now have to pay the highest power prices in the world thanks to the unreliable energy ‘revolution’!
DO let me know if any private sector orgs will take up an investment opportunity in the unreliabels sector without access to the $60 Billion taxpayer-funded RET…
H/t Craig Havenaar@Havenaar64
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Unreliable-Energy-Hell Australia related :
IT’S OFFICIAL : South Australia Has The World’s Highest Power Prices! | Climatism
POLITICIANS Mad With Global Warming Theory Are Destroying The Economy And Hurting The Poor | Climatism
DIESEL – Keeping South Australia’s Lights On Til The Next Election! | Climatism
LIFE In A Fossil-Fuel-Free Utopia | Climatism
THE Twisted Irony of Deep-Green Energy Policy (RET) | Climatism
The Cost Of Going Green: Taxpayers Hit With A $60Bn Power Bill | Climatism
Simon Holmes à Court – Wind Weasel | Climatism
GREEN ENERGY FAIL – World Coal Power Development Up 43% | Climatism
ENERGIEWENDE Related :
GREEN Party Co-Founder : Germany’s Energiewende “An Economic, Social and Ecological Disaster” | Climatism
TRULY GREEN? How Germany’s #Energiewende Is Destroying Nature | Climatism
German Pols Now Demanding Energy Welfare For Its Citizens – 800,000 Have Had Their Electricity Cut Off!
Germany’s ‘Transition’ Back to Coal: Renewable Energy Push Smacks Into Reality | Climatism
Germany’s €Trillion Euro Disaster: Wind Power ‘Transition’ Destroys its Industrial Heartland | Climatism
German Wind Energy Market “Threatening to implode” | Climatism
“This new climate report is not an objective or an honest assessment of the state of the climate, particularly in relation to the US.
Instead, it is a highly partisan and politicised report, designed to promote alarmism.
There has been much talk of the need for red and blue teams, to challenge lazy consensus.
It is now time for this to happen, so that this Report can be constructively assessed and, where appropriate, criticised. One of the tasks of a counter group should be to produce their own state of the climate assessment.
The climate mafia have had it their own way for far too long.”
Spot-on Paul. Great re-reporting to make the non-politicised version available!
The mere fact that activist “scientist” Katharine Hayhoe was a lead on the report, speaks volumes.
Corruption of climate ‘science’ by eco-activists, gobbled up by the sycophant mainstream media without any objective analysis.
Eisenhower was right, warning of the corruption of sciences by govt in 1960:
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”
The Federal Climate Science Special Report from the US Global Change Research Program, mandated under the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990, has now been published.
As with the draft, which I reported on in August, it is the usual mix of half truths, exaggerations, omissions and outright lies.
“I don’t believe in conspiracies of silence except when it comes to Harvey Weinstein and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.”
“…the Bureau can give us a hottest winter on record, even when there are record snow dumps in the Alps, and record numbers of frosts on the flats.”
BOMBSHELL report from the ever-persistent pit bull down under, Dr Jennifer Marohasy, exposing yet more fraudulent warming bias from Australia’s corrupt Bureau of Meteorology…
Watts Up With That?
More hot days — or “purpose-designed” temperature sensors at play?
Guest essay by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy, republished from the Australian Spectator with permission from the author.
I don’t believe in conspiracies of silence except when it comes to Harvey Weinstein and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
For some time, weather enthusiasts have been noticing rapid temperature fluctuations at the ‘latest observations’ page at the Bureau’s website. For example, Peter Cornish, a retired hydrologist, wrote to the Bureau on 17 December 2012 asking whether the 1.5 degrees Celsius drop in temperature in the space of one minute at Sydney’s Observatory Hill, just the day before, could be a quirk of the new electronic temperature sensors. Ken Stewart, a retired school principal, requested temperature data for Hervey Bay after noticing a 2.1 degrees Celsius temperature change in the space of one minute on 22 February 2017.
A penguin-perfect example of the global warming “climate change” scam in action…
And, don’t forget to believe the climate faithful next time they yell “The Science Is Settled!”
TOO MUCH ICE, TOO LITTLE. MORE PENGUINS, LESS. IT’S ALL GLOBAL WARMING, YOU KNOW
Andrew Bolt | Herald Sun
THERE were too few penguins in the Antarctic, and then lots more. Now they’re starving. Same thing with ice: there was too little and now too much, which is killing the penguin chicks. Yet every change we’re told: it’s global warming. Be scared.
2007:
“Bill’s Adelies, struggling, failing, persisting, succumbing, were a small poignant example of a potentially vast reality. In one sense, they had become surrogate humans. Through them, the impact of a changing climate on established communities was palpably visible, a kind of parable in real time. This is how it is, if you have been residing in attractive island real estate, and climate change comes knocking on your door.” p. 268, The Ferocious Summer, Profile Books Ltd, 2007
2008:
The literary awards of Labor Premier John Brumby are … worth a total of $210,000… And the non-fiction prize … [went to”> The Ferocious Summer: Palmer’s penguins and the warming of Antarctica by Meredith Hooper Again, to explain:Meredith Hooper has captured how one scientific team uncovered the story of the devastating impact of rapid global warming on the Adelie penguins of the Antarctic Peninsula.
2013:
New, very short film from the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation highlights threats to Adelie penguins from climate change, already. Actor and conservation activist Harrison Ford narrated “Ghost Rookeries, Climate Change and the Adelie Penguin.”
January, 2014:
SBS reports: Penguins are in peril because of extreme environmental conditions linked to climate change, research has shown…. Adelie penguins on Ross Island, Antarctica, are finding it harder to feed as melting sea ice fragments to form giant icebergs.
May, 2014:
For the first time, researchers have counted all the world’s Adélie penguins—a sprightly seabird considered a bellwether of climate change—and discovered that millions of them are thriving in and around Antarctica… “What we found surprised everyone,” said ecologist Heather Lynch at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y., who led the penguin census. “We found a 53% increase in abundance globally.” Counting the birds by satellite, Dr. Lynch and imaging specialist Michelle LaRue at the University of Minnesota found that the Adélie penguin population now numbers 3.79 million breeding pairs—about 1.1 million more pairs than 20 years ago. In all, they identified 251 penguin colonies and surveyed 41 of them for the first time, including 17 apparently new colonies.
Now, not too little ice but too much:
Almost the entire cohort of chicks from an Adelie penguin colony in the eastern Antarctic was wiped out by starvation last summer in what scientists say is only the second such incident in over 40 years. Researchers said Sunday the mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived.
Yet the global warming story gets trotted out again:
Sea ice extent in the polar regions varies each year, but climate change has made the fluctuation more extreme.
TOO MUCH ICE, TOO LITTLE. MORE PENGUINS, LESS. IT’S ALL GLOBAL WARMING, YOU KNOW | Herald Sun
(Climatism bolds)
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Related :
Adelie Populations Growing | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
Bigger, smaller, whatever. It’s global warming | Climatism
What planet do the CSIRO climate-obsessed, doomsday scenario “scientists” live on?
Sounds to me that they live on the ever-forgiving and lucrative planet of horror-scenario computer models providing endless government (taxpayer funded) “climate” research grants…
Watts Up With That?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the Australian CSIRO, “The lines will cross” in 20 years, heralding the end of biotechnology’s ability to improve wheat yields.
Climate change to blame for flatlining wheat yield gains: CSIRO
By Anna Vidot
Updated Thu at 11:59am
Australia’s wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change, according to CSIRO research.
While 2016 set a new national wheat harvest record, the national science organisation’s findings indicate that result masks a more troubling long-term trend.
While Australian wheat yields tripled between 1900 and 1990, growth stagnated over the following 25 years.
…
Zvi Hochman, a senior research scientist with CSIRO Agriculture and Food said the team considered whether other factors could have shared the blame, such as investment in research and development (R&D), changing patterns of land use, and soil fertility.
But those could all be ruled out: investment in grains R&D…
‘Green’ job promises nothing more than hot air.
The edge of the Thwaites glacier [credit: NASA photograph by Jim Yungel]
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