> And telling your children the coral reefs will be okay creates more of such people.
You and the article author are behind the curve. The coral reefs are fine and the idea of climate coral destruction has been debunked in the past few years. The Great Barrier Reef is currently at record highs for example, after a bleaching event in 2019 that coral "experts" said would wreck the GBR for at least a decade. By 2022 they had to walk that back completely as the reef rebounded far faster than they had ever imagined and reached never before seen growth.
Clearly, their understanding of corals is not good enough to make these sorts of predictions. There's also just a really basic problem with the coral/climate story: corals respond to fast local changes in temperature but CO2 is meant to create slow global changes in temperature.
But it's understandable you don't know this because almost nobody does. A survey done this summer showed that only 3% of Australians were aware that the GBR had reached record levels of coral. The majority still think the GBR is dying. This is for the same reason as covered in the article: academics like to tell stories that will cause people to behave in the right way, as they see it. Sometimes this means downplaying what they think, other times it means exaggerating it or not reporting good news.
Three-quarters of sampled Australian green voters believe the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is doing worse than usual, with 44% stating the coral is at a record low. Overall only 3% of all Australian voters knew that the coral was at a “record high” – the correct answer following two years of record growth that has broken all previous records.
The “phenomenal health” of the GBR is said to be virtually unknown, yet the public are paying half a billion dollars in taxes to save it. In addition the country is “being misled into thinking that expensive low carbon policies and Net Zero targets will help protect the reef, when there is no correlation between CO2 levels and coral cover”.
Yes, that's exactly how they played it with the Great Barrier Reef. It bleached, they said it was horrendously damaged in a way that would take a decade to recover, then three years later it was in rude health. Now journalists have lost interest in the GBR, aren't telling people what happened and are repeating the exact same scam with other reefs elsewhere.
Reef bleaching is a natural process that has happened throughout their multi-million year history. The experts don't really understand it as they so dramatically demonstrated in Australia but the one thing that can be safely said is that it's not to do with global warming. It seems to be triggered by sudden temperature changes, not absolute levels of temperature or very slow changes (like the fraction of a degree per decade observed from temperature satellites).
The results come from a survey carried out by the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) and is the work of coral authority Dr. Peter Ridd and science journalist Jo Nova.
Well, there's your problem.
Still, the Daily Skeptic fits your world view so stick with that and Sky News anti-science climate change outrage.
Ad hominem is the last resort, so apparently you are forced to accept the truth but can't quite handle it. Relax, the news is good! The only problem here is that people aren't hearing about it from the sources they trust.
Jo Nova has been peddling How to Lie with Statistics anti-AGW blog posts for decades for cash - that's not an ad-hominem, it's just a simple economic fact.
Her husband does more of the same when not talking up mysterious alternatives to Fourier Theory and other rabbit holes.
IF (big if) you bother to read the field you'll find her work out on the fringe and routinely debunked.
If you don't .. well, then you find yourself making nonsense comments defending the indefensible.
As for Ridd, he and Jennifer Marohasy don't make the compelling case for GBR health and anti-AGW that Sky News after dark claim they do when they misrepresent their work.
Ridd's specific complaints against reproducibility in GBR marine studies were answered thoroughly several times over, here, for example:
All you've done is double down on the ad hominem, then attack her husband, then address something irrelevant. The complaint here isn't related to reproducibility, it's the reef scientist's own data that shows a huge rebound.
Let's be clear, I'm attacking their work - Jo Nova's blog contains nothing of significance that hasn't been debunked, her husband's C02 spreadsheet work has been grossly overstated and nothing seems to have come from his claims to have had a major breakthrough with "it's totally not Fourier theory", and the claim that "reef scientist's own data that shows a huge rebound" isn't sound.
At no point have you attacked her work. You haven't even discussed it, you just keep asserting that everything she or her husband does is shit without backing that up. You literally started by saying Jo Nova is a liar and then immediately claimed that's not an ad hominem! Every reply of yours has been about the names of the people who commissioned the survey. There's been nothing about the actual results of the poll itself, nothing about the reef measurements.
This sub-thread is really the definition of ad hominem. If you wanted to discuss the actual state of the reefs or the science we'd be discussing that. Instead you got triggered by the name Jo Nova which isn't even in the part of the article I quoted. Great job, you continue to debunk your own position and call attention to how apparently impossible it is to refute theirs.
> You literally started by saying Jo Nova is a liar
Nope, I said she bends the truth savagely by using all the tricks in the "How to lie with statistics" book - classic misrepresentation of data stuff.
I also said that she is widely known for this (also true) and pretty much every post she has ever produced has been debunked (also true).
I stand by all of that - I suggest you check that out for yourself.
While we're on that, Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? is another cut from the same cloth.
No matter how much you spit and splutter the facts remain, these are people that don't do science in good faith, they shill for the Koch aligned "think tanks" and haven't yet hit a goal.
You and the article author are behind the curve. The coral reefs are fine and the idea of climate coral destruction has been debunked in the past few years. The Great Barrier Reef is currently at record highs for example, after a bleaching event in 2019 that coral "experts" said would wreck the GBR for at least a decade. By 2022 they had to walk that back completely as the reef rebounded far faster than they had ever imagined and reached never before seen growth.
Clearly, their understanding of corals is not good enough to make these sorts of predictions. There's also just a really basic problem with the coral/climate story: corals respond to fast local changes in temperature but CO2 is meant to create slow global changes in temperature.
But it's understandable you don't know this because almost nobody does. A survey done this summer showed that only 3% of Australians were aware that the GBR had reached record levels of coral. The majority still think the GBR is dying. This is for the same reason as covered in the article: academics like to tell stories that will cause people to behave in the right way, as they see it. Sometimes this means downplaying what they think, other times it means exaggerating it or not reporting good news.
Three-quarters of sampled Australian green voters believe the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is doing worse than usual, with 44% stating the coral is at a record low. Overall only 3% of all Australian voters knew that the coral was at a “record high” – the correct answer following two years of record growth that has broken all previous records.
The “phenomenal health” of the GBR is said to be virtually unknown, yet the public are paying half a billion dollars in taxes to save it. In addition the country is “being misled into thinking that expensive low carbon policies and Net Zero targets will help protect the reef, when there is no correlation between CO2 levels and coral cover”.
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/04/25/just-3-of-australians-ar...