Queensland – Delingpole World

Australian Professor Sues His Own University for Right to Tell the Truth about the ‘Dying’ Great Barrier Reef

An Australian Professor of Physics is suing his university, which is trying to gag him from telling the truth about the “dying” Great Barrier Reef.
The truth, of course, is that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) isn’t dying at all. (As we’ve written here and here)

In fact it’s doing just fine and the gagged professor – Peter Ridd of James Cook University – has plenty of solid scientific evidence to prove it.

Ridd has been studying the GBR for 30 years and believes that the oft-heard claims that it is seriously threatened by climate change or pollution are just environmentalist scaremongering. He is also highly critical of those supposedly reputable institutions which have been promoting this alarmist myth, among them the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

But when Ridd pointed this out in a published essay and a radio interview last year his university accused him of serious misconduct. It claimed that his criticisms were “not collegial” (the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies is actually part of James Cook University) and threatened him with dismissal. Furthermore, the university ordered him not to mention to anyone the existence of its allegations, let alone any detail. Ridd ignored this order and went public.

Now he is fighting not just for his job and his academic credibility but also for the integrity of science itself.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Alarmist Scientists Announce the Latest Climate Change Threat: Mutant Transgender Turtles

Alarmist scientists have found a terrifying new ‘ climate change’ threat: mutant transgender turtles.

Their study, titled Environmental Warming and Feminization of One of the Largest Sea Turtle Populations in the World, warns that global warming could turn the world’s sea turtle populations female, possibly leading to their extinction.

The study authors, from NOAA’s Marine Mammal and Turtle division in La Jolla, California, analyzed sea turtle populations on beaches at the northern and southern ends of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Here is WWF‘s account of their findings:

Because incubation temperature of turtle eggs determines the animal’s sex, a warmer nest results in more females. Increasing temperatures in Queensland’s north, linked to climate change, have led to virtually no male northern green sea turtles being born.

For the study, scientists caught green turtles at the Howick Group of islands where both northern and southern green turtle populations forage in the Great Barrier Reef. Using a combination of endocrinology and genetic tests, researchers identified the turtles’ sex and nesting origin.

Of green turtles from warmer northern nesting beaches, 99.1% of juveniles, 99.8% of subadults, and 86.8% of adults were female. Turtles from the cooler southern reef nesting beaches showed a more moderate female sex bias (65%–69% female).

If global warming continues, the study concludes, then so many turtles may turn female that there will be no males with which to mate. Extinction will then be inevitable.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Shock Survey: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Doing Just Fine

Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is not being killed off because of “global warming” or any other allegedly man-made non-problem, the people who know the area best have confirmed.

According to local newspaper The Courier-Mail [paywalled]

Teams of divers in a joint two-week expedition sponsored by Mike Ball Dive and Spirit of Freedom surveyed 28 sites on 24 outer shelf reefs along a 300km section of the hardest-hit part of the reef from Bathurst Head to Raine Island.

Spirit of Freedom owner Chris Eade said reports of 93 per cent bleaching on the 2300km long Great Barrier Reef had made global headlines and damaged the reputation of the $5 billion reef tourism industry.

“Scientists had written off that entire northern section as a complete white-out,’’ Mr Eade said.

“We expected the worst. But it is tremendous condition, most of it is pristine, the rest is in full recovery.

“It shows the resilience of the reef.’’

Mike Ball Dive Expeditions operations manager Craig Stephen, who conducted a similar survey on the remote reefs 20 years ago, said there had been almost no change in two decades despite the latest coral bleaching event.

“It wasn’t until we got underwater that we could get a true picture of what percentage of reef was bleached,’’ Mr Stephen said.

“The discrepancy is phenomenal. It is so wrong. Everywhere we have been we have found healthy reefs.

“There has been a great disservice to the Great Barrier Reef and tourism and it has not been good for our industry.”

All right, so it’s local dive operators saying this stuff and, of course, they have a vested interested in keeping the tourist industry alive.

But if we’re talking vested interests, what about all the marine biologists and environmental activists whose funding is dependent on promoting catastrophism and junk-scientific environmental scares like “ocean acidification”?

According to one scaremongering report earlier this year only 7 percent of the reef remains undamaged by “coral bleaching” – one of the dire consequences, we’re repeatedly informed by experts, of global warming.

Read the rest at Breitbart.