In support of embattled academic Dr Peter Ridd, Dr Jennifer Marohasy reveals that sections of the Great Barrier Reef said to be dead are in fact alive and well. You'll be stunned at her revelations of just how TheScience™ of surveying and assessing coral reef bleaching is conducted and the complete lack of quality assurance when it come to the data that so much relies on.
Over a long and varied career, Dr Marohasy has worked at universities, with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology, run a research station in Madagascar, implemented an environmental audit for the Queensland sugar industry, and is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne-based think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs.
She is surprised at how quickly the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW) has come to dominate climate science, despite its evident lack of practical utility, and her latest project is researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting.
TRANSCRIPT:
(This is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here, um, with Malcolm and with Jared and with Peter. Um, Peter, and I agree with Jared talking about the importance of, I guess I think it's getting beyond just because you really need the opportunity to speak. Jared said it's okay, freedom of speech, but, but, but, you know, but what about the truth? I think he, he may been saying, and I agree with that completely because the issue has been that Peter has had his voice taken away, so he hasn't actually been able to put the truth. And the first issue that caused him to be censured related to pictures of corals fringing a place called Stone Island, which is in Bowen Harbor, Bowen being a coastal city, uh, in North Queensland. And there are, or there aren't still corals, fringing Stone Island.
Peter showed pictures of the Stone Island corals that, that Terry Hughes and others said no longer existed, and that caused the first censure. And through this court process, in fact, the first hand finding that was handed down by, um, judge Vasa, he specifically said it didn't actually matter whether there were corals, fringing, Stone Island or not. It was an issue of freedom of speech.
I tend to agree with Jared, it does matter whether there are Corals, fringing, stone Island or not, and the news limited journalists and the journalists from the age and the ABC should be rushing to Stone Island to see some of these corals, but they refuse.
Nobody wants to actually know about the coral's fringing Stone Island. Now, let's see if this works. This isn't Stone Island, but this is Clint Hessel. Um, uh, filming for the second, um, film. That little film that I made, the first was all about the Stone Island corals and was called Beige Reef. Um, this is Clint's, um, filming, uh, at Ribbon Reef number 10 in January, 2020.
And I went there because we'd been told that the corals at this and the ribbons more generally, um, had been very badly bleached. We went looking for bleaching and we found, uh, almost everything except this, this cuttlefish, um, photographs by Julia Ling. Um, on a dive on the 19th of January, it, the creatures at the Great Barrier Reef, at the ribbons in Bowen Harbor and some of the other places, I'm gonna tell you tonight, it's just extraordinary.
The Great Barrier Reef is still there. There are still beautiful corals and there are still such extraordinary creatures like this little cuttlefish. And people say that it's being destroyed by bleaching and it's being destroyed by cyclones. In fact, the 13th of October last year, the Bureau of Meteorology put out a media release about this cyclone season in which it was actually acknowledged by Greg Browning in that media release.
And I quote, recent decades have seen a decline, a decline in the number of tropical cyclones in the region, in this region. He then went on, of course, to say that there's going to be more though this season, on average, Australia sees nine to 11 tropical cyclones each year with four crossing the coast. Now cyclones can be devastating, absolutely devastating to coral reefs. The waves pound the top, and what I was showing you there before is a reef crest the top of a reef, and this reef drops down 2000 meters to the sea floor. That's off the ribbons, off Cooktown, okay? But it's the top, the reef crest, that habitat that is often worse affected by cyclones.
There are different habitats, um, at, at, uh, coral reefs. There are lots of different creatures. I showed you a cuttlefish before, from a, from a, a coral reef at, uh, at the ribbons.
This is actually a coral. There are little creatures. There's big creatures. Uh, most corals are beige. This is a beige colored coral, a tis, um, filmed, uh, at Murdon on the 1st of December. And I was, um, swimming with my buddy Sean, and you can get an idea from, um, from Sean beside that coral, how big this Ty's coral is.
Now, another thing that's got Peter into trouble is that aims used to call these corals that they have growth rings like tree rings. And Peter published a paper in 2013 explaining the need to continue coring and the need for quality assurance of that coring.
People have said, well, they're not coring anymore because there's no Pilates. They're all dead. Th you can find por varieties at so many reefs, and particularly at, um, murdon that I visited last December.
And this is a garden of tis corals, uh, at Murdon Reef, which is about 200 nautical miles east of Townsville. It's these hard corals, um, particularly tis that are responsible for the construction of modern coral reefs, um, including the Great Barrier Reef.
This is High Island and it's prograding like so many fringing islands is actually prograding, um, into the sea as these por corals grow up to sea level. And given that the Great Barrier Reef is one ecosystem extending for about, uh, of about a 3000 individual reef stretching for about 2000 kilometers. And because we do regularly have cyclones, you can go to areas and you can find destruction from cyclones.
And following that, you can, you can find algal blooms, and at other times you can, you can find areas that, because for example, of, um, uh, periods of particularly low sea level as we had in 2016 associated with the El Nina event, um, you, you, you can find, um, devastation at the Great Barrier Reef. But you can also find, and, and, and mostly when I go and look, be it, uh, the corals fringing Stone Island or at Murdon or, uh, the ribbon reefs just extraordinarily beautiful corals, um, with the most extraordinary creatures. Science is not a truth. And um, and Malcolm uh, alluded to this, it's a way of getting to the truth. It's a method and science usually involves some measurement or other, but just because a study includes numbers doesn't actually mean that it is scientific or that something has actually been measured.
Now in Peter's book, Reef Heresy, he talks, He talks on page nine about how coral cover is calculated by the Australian Institute of Marine Science at the Great Barrier Reef.
And he explains that there is no actual direct counting of numbers of corals. Rather, observers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science are towed behind a boat from which they estimate coral cover every few hundred meters.
Peter makes the analogy of someone estimating people's weight and writing it down the average weight by standing at a street corner and observing the people that walk past over a couple of minutes. And then at the end of that two minute period, writing down what they estimate to have been the weight of those people that walked past the average weight of those people.
So there are people at the Australian Institute of Marine Science who are towed behind a boat and after being towed, um, through this sample method over about 200 reefs, they tally out what they estimate to have been coral cover.
So they, they tow them and they stop after two minutes and they write down what they think the coral cover was on a slate and they tow them again. And this happens and happens and happens. And after about 200 reefs, they tally up to give an overall percentage coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef. It's, it's documented in this book and you can go to the AIMS website and see how that happens.
So to be clear, just because a study includes numbers does not necessarily mean anything is actually measured in so much as they may not have actually put any one single person on a scale and written down and then tallied up, rather they observed and they guesstimated.
And this is also the case with the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. They estimate coral bleaching not by actually looking at any one single coral and deciding how bleached it is or even counting the number of corals, uh, at 200 reefs or guesstimating. The chief scientist, he flies in an airplane at 150 meters and he looks out the window and he scores coral reefs from zero to four. So you get a score of zero if he thinks looking down.
And this is what a coral reef looks like. This is Pixie Reef. I was there a couple of weeks ago. We put a drone up. This is 120 a drone up from a hundred and at at 120 meters looking down on, uh, on the reef crest at pixie reef.
That's what you can see. Okay, so we only put the drone up to 120 meters 'cause that's the legal limit for drones in Queensland. Terry Hughes, the chief scientist, he was the chief scientist at the ARC. He puts, he flies in an airplane at 150 meters, looks out the window, and if he thinks that more than 60% of a reef is bleached more than 60% of the corals at that reefer bleached, it gets a score of four.
To be clear, why the ARC purports to report on the percentage of hard coral covers bleached across more than a thousand reefs. Only the reef crest is ever sampled, and this is from a plane window at 150 meters altitude.
So I've had this image up here for a little while. Can you see me in here? Because I'm actually here. I'll show you. So that's me at five meters. And this is, I'm actually there. Can you see me over here at 40 meters? And can you see me at 120 meters? Can't you see me there floating above the reef crest, holding that one meter long orange safety sausage. You can't see me because the photograph's been taken at such a high altitude at such a distance from the reef crest.
It is impossible to know the health of individual corals from the altitude at which professor Terry Hughes flies in his airplane. Now, this is the same professor who was responsible for forwarding the email that Peter Ridd sent to a journalist about there still being corals fringing Stone Island.
Instead of the journalist actually going and having a look to see if there were Corals fringing, Stone Island, the journalist Peter Michael sent that email from who, that he received an email from Peter Ridd saying, look, there's all these, um, photographs circulating about, there's only that, there's only mudflat now, uh, fringing Stone Island. There are actually corals. This is what they look like. Instead of the journalists going and having a look, he forwarded that email to Terry Hughes. The email was saying that there needed to be some quality assurance of the Great Barrier Reef, uh, science.
And I would suggest there needs to be some quality assurance of these flyovers by Terry Hughes. You can understand why these people get a little bit frightened and perhaps would prefer that Peter was sacked rather than, than there was some quality assurance.
So you can see I went out on this little boat a couple of weeks ago. We laid 36 transects. You can see some of the beautiful pictures at my website, jennifermarohasy.com. Um, so here I am and you can just see me at 40 meters. You can see me quite clearly at five meters. But what about what's under the water here? Can you see the corals? There's some green coral here. Do you, do you think you might know what it looks like if you don't actually get in and under the water?
This is a lovely little green coral from that reef crest, this reef, according to the scientific literature, the technical literature, it was reported as, as 65% bleached back in March, 2016.
It may have been badly bleached, but how do we know if all we have is a score of four from a professor looking out a plane window, an airplane window? That's all we have. Now, I went to this reef in November last year. I was there again two weeks ago. I love the closeups of these little corals. So many corals, so many beautiful colors.
This is that reef crest from under the water. You don't actually need to go to. This is Pixie Reef, which is only 22 ki nautical miles to the northeast of Cairns. It's an inshore reef, one of the reefs that's meant to have been so badly affected, um, by coral bleaching that all the corals are dead. There's just beautiful, beautiful corals at Pixie Reef.
This is Peter and myself just to the south of, um, of Bowen. Um, and these mudflats were shown with this particular backdrop, um, from 2014 for years, Bowen's just to the south of Abbott point.
And these activist scientists were, I think, trying to make the point about coal and coral reefs. And now we've got Mudflat. Peter and I were there in August, 2019 in the filming of an i I, um, I ask you all to, if you haven't already seen my little film, Beige Reef, which is about the corals, the other side of this mudflat that you, um, that, that you find it on the IPA website or just Google Jennifer Marohasy or Peter Ridd and Beige Reef. And you'll find that film on YouTube, some of the corals, um, that make up the 25 hectares of, um, I named this reef Beige Reef that according to the experts, um, does not exist. This is, um, just a little to the north of that mud flat.
This is actually within the township of, and this is Horseshoe Bay and there's actually a little caravan park here. And, uh, when I was seven, my father, well my parents, um, I, I missed a year of school. Grade two, we traveled in a caravan from Cooktown to Cairns and then all the way down the Queensland coast to Clontarf. I went to Clon State School for a little while.
That's, uh, near Sandgate. Um, but we also stayed in the B caravan park for a little little while. And I actually got, as a seven year old to snorkel the corals that, um, that, that are still, that are still here.
Like this little acropora with a little fluorescent purple tips. You don't need to go to murmur don or Pixie, um, or even a crossbo and harbor to Stone Island to find corals along the Queensland coast. You just have to be curious and, uh, and get out with some flippers and, uh, and a face mask. And, um, I do so worry about children who learn at school that the reef is half dead from global warming.
As Peter explains in this fantastic book, there are corals in so many diverse environments, including inshore corals, inshore coral reefs. They are exceedingly resilient. They can be found in so many diverse habitats. As I said, I missed a year of school grade two. And um, that was when I first saw these corals. And for example, at, at at Horseshoe Bay, I went back there in 2019 and I was interested that the locals told me, no, it's all rubbish coral now.
And I went and I snorkeled and it was as I remembered it 50 years ago. But 50 years ago we didn't talk about war rubbish coral, and we didn't talk about global warming.
And people like myself as a seven year old were encouraged just to get out there with our flippers and our mask and have a look. We didn't have to save anything.
We, we were allowed to be curious. I got an email from Yoakum from Germany just this morning. I get emails every, every other day, some along this line. He was asking permission to republish some of my closeup photographs of the corals from Pixie Reef and also Stone Island and also Murmon that you can find at my website. And most recently at my pixie reef data page, I've got, um, there's transects and you can see the coral after coral after.
So a meter after a meter, after a meter after a meter where there's supposedly no corals. And just, just, just have a look at them. But Yoakam from Germany emailed me, well I got the email this morning when I woke up.
He was asking permission to republish some of my photographs from these reefs. He explained that he was a German marine engineer, despairing of the nonsense in the German media about the Great Barrier Reef being dead.
He explained that he had once worked in the Pacific and snorkeled at ti and it was a shame that so few people understood very much about corals and coral reefs and that they're still alive.
And he was also saying how Germany was such a long way from the Pacific and such a long way from the Great Barrier Reef. I do actually think that Australians, especially Queenslanders and probably most of us here tonight are Queenslanders, have a particular responsibility to be honest about the true state of this magical natural environment that is being incorporated into the school curriculum in Germany to lament lament climate change.
It is a travesty that the mainstream media has reported it as dead and that we cannot get journalists to visit Bowen to snorkel with me in Horseshoe Bay. Not even my favorite journalists from The Australian will come to Stone Island in nature as in life. We can sometimes find whatever we are looking for and we can refuse to go and see what is so accessible and so accessible to us as Queenslanders cyclones and sea level change, especially localized, dramatic falls and sea level, which are associated with Al Nino events that can periodically cause widespread bleaching will destroy individual coral gardens.
But reef communities do recover because they're mostly healthy and are spread over large areas. The Great Barrier Reef stretches along almost the entire Queensland coastline, couple of thousand kilometers long is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park area. We don't actually know, as I said, what happened at Pixie Reef in March, 2016 because our experts don't appear to have actually done a proper survey back then.
They were allowed to fly in a plane at 150 meters altitude, look out the plane window and score Pixie as four more than 60% bleached, no questioning of that score by the mainstream media.
A score of four from an airplane flying at 150 meters provides very little meaningful information about the state of the corals. It is particularly concerning when children, as a consequence of this nonsense from adults, nonsense from adults at our universities, become so anxious about the natural world that they are no longer interested in observing it.
When I was in Bowen and more recently in Cairns talking to a 14 year old and her friend, she said, "we are not interested in the Great Barrier Reef, Jen, it's dead."
Perhaps one of the greatest real threats to the Great Barrier Reef is a generation who have been told by the experts that it is doomed before they have even had a chance to experience it.
This is also the situation with civilizations. History shows that it may be necessary to identify and weeded out that which is matic but corrosive before it infests every level of key institutions.
Sometimes it is only the strongest individuals with allies who are able to resist the madness of crowds. And it seems every generation does throw up a charismatic delusional leader, be it in a university or somewhere else who seeks to take away the individual's ability to reason.
Why do I have to go out and have photographs taken of me like this to bring to people's attention how absurd it is to attempt to measure the health of corals from 150 meters altitude.
Peter Reed is one brave man who was fired by James Cook University for suggesting there should be some quality assurance of Great Barrier Reef science and that there is still corals in Horseshoe Bay and and beyond the mud mudflat just to the south of Bowen.
Peter recently appealed the decision by James, uh, the decision, well first of all, he appealed the university's sacking of him for simply asking for some quality assurance of the science and he's variously won and lost through the court process. Just recently, he was granted the opportunity to have his most recent loss heard by the High Court of Australia.
It's now up to us to ensure this is properly funded. So donate. Tonight I'm gonna buy a couple of mugs and donate again at his fundraising raising page. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Oh, and buy six books.
