Links tagged “acidification”

Here’s a quote from the abstract in Nature:

we comprehensively and transparently show that…ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes…we additionally show that …[results] that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. [bold added]

Extending back to 2010, many of these studies were highly publicized at the time they appeared. Physicist Peter Ridd points out they were all produced by Australia’s James Cook University. Ridd, remember, was fired by James Cook after raising concerns about research quality.

Last week, Nature published a damning refutation of a significant body of climate change research. The title of that article is self-explanatory: Ocean acidification does not impair the behavior of coral reef fishes. The authors studied more than 900 fish from six different species over a period of three years, attempting to verify earlier findings by a team of researchers at Australia’s James Cook University. Their attempts failed.

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The author in common is research leader Philip Munday. When eight of this man’s papers were double-checked, other scientists were unable to confirm his findings. They performed the same experiments but got different results. Every. Single. Time. The James Cook University website tells us Munday is “in the top 1% of cited researchers in the ISI fields of Plant and Animal Science” (bold added). He sits on the editorial board of three scientific journals. He also – ding, ding, ding – “has contributed to IPCC reports” on ocean acidification. In fact, Munday’s name appears 46 times in this 174-page document about a 2011 IPCC workshop on that topic. You heard it here first, folks. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s pronouncements about tropical fish relies on a man whose work falls to pieces whenever anyone tries to verify it.