It seems that we were not the only ones to be alarmed by the serious errors on the front page of The Australian last week.  ABC Media Watch explores journalist Jamie Walker’s illogical and fact-free rampage, identifying severe shortcomings in his story and any support for the conclusion that, “Report undercuts PM’s reef wipeout”.
As we blogged last week, there was no such report or conclusion by AIMS scientists.  In a continuation of The Australian’s war on science, it appears that the truth again has been the first casualty.
Media Watch does …

As part of his $100,000 tour around our great brown land, Christopher Monckton has claimed a great knowledge about the Great Barrier Reef. In an interview with Jon Faine of ABC Radio 774, Monckton claimed that he had a chart which showed that the temperature on the Great Barrier Reef have not changed for 30 years. He even claimed that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority itself had made the measurements itself (a fact disputed by senior GBRMPA scientist David Wachenfeld).
Going with Australia’s leading experts at the Bureau of …

I wanted to add a little to Ove’s continued defence against ‘The Australian’ on going war against science. Whilst most people see the Great Barrier Reef as being one large coral reef, it also contains an array of other habitats including seagrass meadows that are critical to the overall ecosystem. Seagrasses, amongst there many roles in the GBR, are critical in supporting biodiversity and fisheries productivity. These seagrass meadows, like coral reefs, are also under threat from increasing seawater temperatures.
The potential 4°C increase in global temperature by the end of …

Leading climate scientist Bill Hare has published the first emissions pathway to date that brings expected global warming beneath 1°C, albeit after peaking beneath 2°C and on the scale of centuries.
This is an immensely significant research topic for coral reefs as a rise in mean global temperature of 1°C appears to be the highest target that should be set if coral reefs are to be protected from serious degradation (see previous Climate Shifts post here).
Figure 2-1 depicts the global emissions pathway that Hare (2009: 25) suggests “is plausible technically” and …

No really, i’m not kidding. Remember that CO2 satellite NASA lost after a launch failure last October? (click here for the video). Well, according to Lord Monckton, the crash was “extremely dissapointing” for other more nefarious reasons:
”Not greatly to my surprise – indeed I predicted it – the satellite crashed on take-off because the last thing they want is real world hard data,” he told a climate sceptics’ lunch in South Yarra yesterday.
NASA understood that getting the satellite into orbit would have demonstrated ”the whole darn thing” – climate-change science …

I stumbled across today over at Sea Fever blog, and thought was worth re-posting here. First, a bit of background from the Australian Institute of Marine Science on exactly how they managed to get a tiger shark to eat their camera:
Baited Remote Underwater Video Stations (BRUVS) have been developed by AIMS scientists in order to monitor the vast areas of deeper inter-reef and shelf habitats inaccessible to research divers so that important bioregions there can be included in marine protected areas.
BRUVS consist of tourist-grade “HandiCam” video cameras in simple underwater …

This article (surprisingly enough from the usually right-leaning Times newspaper) is striking in it’s honesty. I’m not condoning Jones’s actions regarding the FOI, but given the following response, it’s understandable (back of the envelope calculations: 60 FOI requests in a single month, at 18hrs per request is 1080hrs, or 27 weeks of work of work. With a staff of 13, over half of that month would be dedicated to responding to FOI requests alone – that’s alot of time not doing science. Wait, maybe that’s the point?):
Photographs of Professor Phil …

“We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.”  (Joachim Schellnhuber, Director, Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute, advisor to the German government).
The release of more than 320 billion tons of carbon (GtC) from buried early biospheres, adding more than one half of the original carbon inventory of the atmosphere (~590 GtC) to the atmosphere-ocean system, has triggered a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere at a rate of 2 ppm CO2/year, a pace unprecedented in the geological record with the exception of the effects of CO2 …

Whilst Dr Roy Spencer cautions that these data are “hot off the satellite” and hence are still being analyzed (and may be revised), they indicate that January may be the warmest within the 32 year record of the UAH global temperature record (a stunning +.13C warmer than the previous warmest January on record).

The Australian newspaper ran with a typical sensationalist headline this morning, titled “Report undercuts Kevin Rudd’s Great Barrier Reef wipeout“. The journalist in question might sound familiar – he is the same same journalist who penned the deliberately misleading “How the reef became blue again” article (see here for our response at Climate Shifts: “Why the Great Barrier Reef isn’t magically blue again“). So continues The Australian’s ongoing war against science, creating contention and deliberately clouding issues to sell newspapers. “Report undercuts Kevin Rudd’s Great Barrier Reef wipeout” – sorry …

Australia’s National Climate Centre (which is housed by the Bureau of Meteorology) undertakes real-time analysis of sea surface temperature around Australia.  This is an important task in terms of assessing the risk faced from climate change by our fisheries and assets such as the Great Barrier Reef.
The latest analysis of the Coral Sea region is of significant interest.  The warming trend is unmistakable and is statistically significant. And it turns out that 2009 was the eighth warmest year on record for this region.  Experts at the National Climate Centre have …

Dennis Jensen replied to OveHG
Sun 31 Jan 10 (12:50pm)
Ove, your comparison with flight is particularly apropo. Around the turn of the 20th century Samuel Langley, a scientist supported by the Smithsonian was seen to be the most likely to fly first. Unfortunately, the scientist did not apply scientific method and his “aerodrome” crashed unceremoniously into the Potomac. Then you had the Wright Brothers, non-scientists who you IPCC lot would say “not qualified” and attack for lack of credentials, who actually used scientific method, developed the wind tunnel, and actually took …

The consistent attempts by a well organised and well funded denialist movement have recently focused on the sources of information used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Through an transparent set of guidelines to how to deal with literature (the next set of guidelines are about to be published in preparation for AR5), the IPCC has referenced the thousands of scientific papers to gain the latest consensus view on climate and related sciences.  This stands in contrast to the lack of scrutiny, credibility or honesty of the principal champions …

Update:  just got two new comments on this:
John,
Saw your post on coral list.  Toadfishes at San Blas also eat Diadema with little pre-processing of the meal.  The burrows of Sanopus barbatus on the reef can be localized by the long spines littering their ‘porch.’  Amphichthys cryptocentrus at San Blas are also known to eat Diadema but are also more of a generalist feeder (in an old Ross Robertson paper).
BTW, I recently saw an aggregation of ~500 Diadema spawn on Turneffe Atoll in Belize.
Cheers,
John
–
John Barimo, PhD
Field Coordinator and Coral Reef Biologist
Blackbird …

More on the Great Barrier Reef and how it isn’t in “bloody brilliant shape” – despite what Andrew Bolt might claim to the contrary. Ignoring the science and facts, Bolt instead relies on a single anecdotal observation from a spearfisherman to support his case:
Veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen no heat damage to the reef at all. “The only change I’ve seen has been the result of over-fishing, pollution, too many tourists or people dropping anchors on the reef,” he said.
Here’s a challenge for you …

Time after time I read articles in the news that the Great Barrier Reef is ‘doing fine’, or quoting misguided and baseless information, saying that the GBR is in ”bloody brilliant shape”. Myths like this seem to be endlessly perpetuated, in this case, with absolutely no data to support there claims – why let the fact get in the way of a good story? Sadly, the science is hard to argue against:
-
Source: Bellwood et al (2004) Confronting the coral reef crisis. Nature 429 827-833

It is very flattering that Andrew Bolt takes a special interest in my scientific research.  In his latest posting, his whipped his fan club into a frenzy over some graphics from my 1999 paper.  I gave a copy of this paper to him when I met him last year hoping that he would understand it.
But, surprise surprise, my good friend Andrew Bolt has stuffed up again.  I guess he stuffs up when it comes to political predictions, his understanding of complex issues like the stolen generation, as well as his …