I'm taking the work of Ridd, who said that there are other areas of the world (not Australia) where the same corals are doing fine in warmer water. Maybe he's lying, but that's not what he or I said.
Here is Ridd's paper that got him into trouble with his university.
https://ipa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Ridd-P-Chapter-1-from-Climate-Change-The-Facts-2017-IPA.pdf
The paper provides the interesting information that the same species of coral can adapt to different temperature regimes by "choosing" to work with different indwelling symbiont algae. The algae provides nutrients for the coral through the process of photosynthesis.
When the water temperature suddenly changes, the coral expels its symbiont algae in the "bleaching" process. It is a desperate survival strategy on the part of the coral, in hopes that a better adapted symbiont algae can be drawn in from the environment. If no better adapted symbiont is available in the local ecosystem, the coral dies.
The fact that a warm water adapted symbiont algae exists in Thailand, is very little help to a coral in the GBW that is dying because of extraordinarily rapid climate change. Perhaps in this case, there is some hope that humans could intervene by importing an appropriate algae.
No, the Reproducibility Crisis runs across all the soft sciences, which includes the Climate unScience Cult.
Here's the information Ridd provided in his paper, regarding the "reproducibility crisis" in science. Based on the citations he provides, it seems that the literature on this topic is indeed primarily related to the biomedical & pharmaceutical fields (and psychological research, which is also dominated by pharmaceutical interests.) Ridd wrote:
The lack of quality assurance in science has become a hot topic, particularly in medical science. e failure of drug companies to replicate the findings of scientific institutions is just the tip of the iceberg. In the biomedical sciences, many authors have reported the level of irreproducibility at around 50% (Vasilevsky et al. 2013; Hartshorne & Schachner 2012; and Glasziou 2008). More recently, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, suggested that as much as 85% of science resources are wasted due to false or exaggerated findings in the literature (Ioannidis 2014). Professor Ioannidis focused on, among other matters, the lack of funding for replication studies, which are so important in the medical area. Indeed, replication of already ‘known’ results is one of the fundamental processes upon which the reliability of science rests, but this is generally seen as mundane and not the way to advance a scientific career. Funding bodies are rarely keen to spend money on such work.
The problem is so acute that the editor of The Lancet, one of medicine’s most important journals, stated that:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. (Horton 2015)
Similar concerns have also been raised for the psychological sciences (Wagenmakers et al. 2011).
But, here's where Ridd goes wrong (at least in my view):
In contrast to government policy science, research with an industry or medical focus usually includes some proper quality assurance, with good reason. For example, a company hoping to develop a drug from promising university trials will typically need a billion dollars to take it to market. The first step for the company is to check and replicate the original peer-reviewed research. It is of concern that when these checks are done, conclusions from the original work are found to be in error more than half the time (Prinz et al. 2011). is could be disastrous, but at least the checks were made to prevent wasting vast resources.
How many different ways is this wrong? First of all, it may be true that "government policy science" has QA problems, but Ridd doesn't have any sources to quote for that assertion, aside from himself. All his sources are talking about problems with research done with an industry or medical focus. "Promising university trials" are frequently industry funded. And the basic problem is that the pharmaceutical companies want to sell drugs, whether they're effective or not. A "Flagrant Conflict of Interest", as Ridd says.
It's certainly possible that climate researchers also have a "conflict of interest" related to the institutional bias in favor of MMGW, but I've argued that really the institutional bias is to downplay the seriousness of MMGW.
So, does Ridd himself have a "Flagrant Conflict of Interest"? Well, it turns out most of Ridd's research career is related to effects of dredging projects on coral reefs. And, he gets most of his funding from dredging companies. Does anybody see a problem here??
As far as I can find, no scientists have bothered to directly refute Ridd's IPA paper, including its various specific points about the status of coral reefs. But, similar claims are found in a "Viewpoint" published in
Marine Pollution Bulletin with Ridd as senior author, entitled "
The need for a formalised system of Quality Control for environmental policy-science". And, this article did draw a reply from the coral scientists whose work was attacked in Ridd's papers.
Schaffelke et al wrote:
Larcombe and Ridd (2018) state that there is little incentive for critical assessment of published works stating that “such critiques have been largely ignored in the subsequent literature”. Given their sincere call to improve quality control processes in science it is interesting that nowhere in their 2018 Viewpoint do Larcombe and Ridd make it clear to readers that many of their criticisms of the nine GBR papers have been raised previously (i.e., Ridd, 2007; Ridd et al., 2011, Ridd et al., 2013a, Ridd et al., 2013b), and have been thoroughly addressed by the original authors (De'ath and Fabricius, 2011; De'ath et al., 2013; Kroon, 2013). To republish previous claims that have been addressed and refuted appears to be selecting information to support their statements and an example of the very issue Larcombe and Ridd (2018) are criticising.
This is serious, folks. Ridd's criticism of coral science has been published before; his criticisms have been rebutted and rebuked; and rather than carrying forward with the debate, Ridd simply pretends that no replies have ever been offered.
Highlights of specific rebuttals contained in Schaffelke et al 2018: regarding the overall decline of the GBR:
De'ath et al. (2012): The 27-year decline (1985–2011) of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef and its causes
De'ath et al. (2012) showed a 50% decline in coral cover on the GBR, and quantified the causes for this decline, attributing it to the combined effect of tropical cyclones, outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish and thermal coral bleaching. Larcombe and Ridd (2018) state that the impact of the extreme Tropical Cyclone (TC) Hamish in 2009 “was not mentioned by De'ath et al. (2012)” (p. 458), and that the circumstances leading to the reported decline in coral cover were due to “special environmental conditions” from TC Hamish and TC Yasi in 2011.
In fact, De'ath et al. (2012) identified tropical cyclones as the major cause of coral loss in the GBR in their analysis, which included the detailed path, duration and strength of all 36 cyclones (including TC Hamish and TC Yasi) that affected the GBR during the observation period 1985–2011.
Larcombe and Ridd (2018) also summarised the De'ath et al. (2012)conclusion as “Coral cover will fall to 5%–10% by 2022” (p. 453). This statement is both incomplete and an over-simplification of the De'ath et al. (2012) study: the full sentence from the discussion in De'ath et al. (2012) reads “Without significant changes to the rates of disturbance and coral growth, coral cover in the central and southern regions of the GBR is likely to decline to 5–10% by 2022”. Other sections in the De'ath et al. (2012) publication provide regionally explicit data on the effect sizes of the three forms of disturbance.
Coral cover trends, based on standardised survey methods by the long-term coral monitoring program of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, are now reported annually [1]. The significant decline in coral cover reported in De'ath et al. (2012) was followed by a period of recovery (2012 to 2016), due to an absence of disturbances that had driven the 50% decline, and fast growth rates of one type of corals – tabulate Acropora spp. that dominate early successional reefs in the central and southern GBR. Further significant loss in coral cover was observed in the northern and central GBR in 2016 and 2017 due to extreme temperature stress (Hughes et al., 2017) and a new population outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish. Greater warming (Brown and Caldeira, 2017) and more extreme weather (Fischer and Knutti, 2015; Wang et al., 2017) are predicted globally. Coral abundance and recovery are expected to be adversely affected under the predicted future regime of chronic pressure and more frequent and severe disturbances (e.g. Cheal et al., 2017; Osborne et al., 2017).
And, regarding calcification rates:
De'ath et al. (2009) report a significant 14.2% decline in the rate of calcification in massive Porites corals from 68 reefs spanning the entire GBR between 1990 and 2005. This decline was unprecedented for at least the previous 400 years for which calcification records existed.
Ridd et al. (2013a) pointed out an error in the original data set, as some outer-most bands in some corals were incompletely formed. De'ath et al. (2013) have subsequently corrected the rate of decline, from 14.2% in the 2009 study, to 11.4% [95% CI = (10.4, 12.4)]. This rate of decline is marginally reduced, yet it is still unprecedented. Larcombe and Ridd (2018) repeat the critique of Ridd et al. (2013a), but do not cite the responses and corrections (De'ath et al., 2013; also published in Science9), and continue to ignore the fact that there are is no evidence for ontogenetic changes in Porites growth rates.
We maintain that the initial finding of slowing of coral growth rates, possibly attributable to climate change, are valid and supported by other studies reporting similar responses for several other reef regions around the world, including the Caribbean, SE Asia and the eastern equatorial Pacific (reviewed in Lough and Cantin, 2014). A separate analysis of Porites growth records from seven reefs in the central GBR (D'Olivo et al., 2013) over a longer time period than in De'ath et al. (2009) shows a significant decline in calcification on three inshore reefs, and attributes this decline to river discharges. Calcification on four mid- and outer-shelf reefs increased over six decades, but decreased from 1990 to 2008 on midshelf reefs, which D'Olivo et al. (2013) interpret as an indication of recovery from a coral bleaching event in 1998. A subsequent study demonstrated how coral bleaching associated with major thermal stress events on the GBR suppressed coral calcification for four years, followed by recovery (Cantin and Lough, 2014) thus providing a mechanism of action to support the observed decreases.
All of this is very complex. But I don't see that Ridd is successfully challenging the basic narrative that the coral reefs are in an advanced state of decline.
