James Cook university crookedness in support of global warming continues

We see now why JCU resisted Peter Ridd's call for validation  of their alarming "dying reef" studies.  Ridd knew that they were fudging the facts but, in good scientific form, did not say exactly that.  He just called for their studies to be validated, where replication is a major form of validation.

JCU illegally fired him for saying that and are still challenging him in the courts.  After one verdict against them, you would think that they would cave in.  But they cannot afford to. Admitting that they had no legal grounds to fire him would open up a whole can of worms about why they DID fire him.

Replication studies are the death of crooked or negligent research and the need for them has come to the fore in recent years after lots of high profile studies in both medicine and psychology have failed careful replication. Much of what we thought we knew was wrong.

So a big replication of some JCU research is of great interest. And the replication was an abject failure.  The JCU results could not be repeated.  Peter Ridd implied that their findings about the reef were nebulous and we now hear that their findings about reef fish were nebulous.  It's a disturbing coincidence.

The chief JCU author on this occasion complains that the replication was not exact but the differences he points to should have been trivial in their effects.  If an effect is real it should emerge in a variety of contexts.  It did not

My best guess about how JCU got their alarming results is that they used much higher levels of acidification than is realistic. Less detectably, they may have manipulated every one of their parameters until they got the result they wanted


Over the past decade, marine scientists published a series of studies warning that humanity’s burgeoning carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could cause yet another devastating problem. They reported that seawater acidified by rising CO2—already known to threaten organisms with carbonate shells and skeletons, such as corals—could also cause profound, alarming changes in the behavior of fish on tropical reefs. The studies, some of which made headlines, found that acidification can disorient fish, make them hyperactive or bolder, alter their vision, and lead them to become attracted to, rather than repelled by, the smell of predators. Such changes, researchers noted, could cause populations to plummet.

But in a Nature paper published today, researchers from Australia, Canada, Norway, and Sweden challenge a number of those findings. In a major, 3-year effort that studied six fish species, they could not replicate three widely reported behavioral effects of ocean acidification. The replication team notes that many of the original studies came from the same relatively small group of researchers and involved small sample sizes. That and other “methodological or analytical weaknesses” may have led the original studies astray, they argue.

“It’s an exceptionally thorough replication effort,” says Tim Parker, a biologist and an advocate for replication studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Marine scientist Andrew Esbaugh of the University of Texas, Austin, agrees that it’s “excellent, excellent work.”

But marine biologist Philip Munday of James Cook University, Townsville, in Australia, a co-author of most of the papers the Nature study tried to replicate, says there are “fundamental methodological differences” between the original and replication studies. “Replication of results in science is critically important, but this means doing things in the same way, not in vastly different ways,” he wrote in an email.

Munday helped launch research on the behavioral impacts of ocean acidification together with Danielle Dixson, now at the University of Delaware. In 2009, their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that orange clownfish (Amphiprion percula) reared in seawater with elevated CO2 levels no longer recognized the chemical cues that could help them find a suitable habitat on the reef. (“Losing Nemo” was a popular headline for stories about the paper.) That study was followed by dozens of others showing similarly striking, and often large, behavioral effects in clownfish and other species, mostly from tropical waters.

Timothy Clark, the first author on the Nature paper and a marine scientist at Deakin University, Geelong, in Australia, says he initially set out to probe the physiological mechanisms behind those behavior changes. But after he failed to reproduce the changes—let alone explain them—he invited other scientists to set up a systematic replication attempt. It focused on three reported effects of acidified waters: making reef fish prone to swim toward their predators’ chemical cues rather than fleeing them, increasing their activity, and altering the fish’s tendency to favor either their left or right sides in some behaviors. The researchers didn’t seek to repeat each previous experiment one for one, but Clark estimates the entire effort covers the research reported in at least 20 studies.

Overall, the group reports, exposing fish to seawater with acidification levels predicted for the end of the century had “negligible” effects on all three behaviors. The Nature paper also reports the results of a statistical analysis called a bootstrapping simulation, designed to calculate the probability that Munday and co-authors could have found the striking data on chemical signal preference presented in seven papers. The authors say the odds are exceedingly low: “0 in 10,000,” as they put it.

Clark declined to elaborate on the implications of the bootstrap finding, but says he “would encourage any other avenues of investigation to find out what has caused the stark differences between our findings and theirs.” Esbaugh calls the bootstrap analysis “a little concerning,” but he objects to the “somewhat nefarious undercurrent” in the Nature paper. “I know both of these research groups,” he says, “and they’re both very, very good.”

Munday stands by his papers and plans to detail many “critically important” differences in the designs of the two sets of experiments in a response to the Nature paper. For instance, he notes the replication group didn’t study clownfish, used different water volumes and experiment durations, and used a different setup to study chemical cue avoidance. Dixson—who presented her findings at a 2015 White House meeting—also says methodological differences make a direct comparison between the studies “inappropriate.” But the Nature authors say some methods had to be adapted because they didn’t work as described in the original papers. They add that they could not catch enough clownfish, so used six other species also used in the previous studies.

Replication studies often cause quibbles about methods, Parker says. But, he argues, “If the original finding is reasonably robust,” then researchers using even somewhat different methods should be able to replicate it. And he notes that the replication team went to great lengths to be transparent. Unlike the original authors, the team released video of each experiment, for example, as well as the bootstrap analysis code. “That level of transparency certainly increases my confidence in this replication,” Parker says.

Researchers say the Nature paper allays one fear about the impact of ocean acidification. But Josefin Sundin of Uppsala University in Sweden, the Nature paper’s last author, stresses that climate change still poses a serious threat to sea life. “If the oceans were as acidic as we have been testing, it would also be much warmer, and that’s a huge issue,” she says.

Although replication efforts have blossomed in psychology, biomedicine, and other fields, they’re still rare in ecology, says biologist Shinichi Nakagawa of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The new paper “sets a great example,” says Nakagawa, who hopes it “will instigate and inspire more replication studies—not to prove previous results wrong but to make our science more robust and trustworthy.”

SOURCE  

The journal abstract

Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes

Timothy D. Clark et al.

Abstract

The partial pressure of CO2 in the oceans has increased rapidly over the past century, driving ocean acidification and raising concern for the stability of marine ecosystems1,2,3. Coral reef fishes are predicted to be especially susceptible to end-of-century ocean acidification on the basis of several high-profile papers4,5 that have reported profound behavioural and sensory impairments—for example, complete attraction to the chemical cues of predators under conditions of ocean acidification.

Here, we comprehensively and transparently show that—in contrast to previous studies—end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes, such as the avoidance of chemical cues from predators, fish activity levels and behavioural lateralization (left–right turning preference).

Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. Together, our findings indicate that the reported effects of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fishes are not reproducible, suggesting that behavioural perturbations will not be a major consequence for coral reef fishes in high CO2 oceans.

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Note: At roughly the same time as I first put up the above (on Facebook) Peter Ridd himself put up a critique very similar to mine above. Peter also mentions the dodgy work on Lionfish done by Oona Lonnstedt, a PhD student at JCU. Making stuff up would appear to be a major feature of the culture at JCU






AFP eyes case of author Bruce Pascoe’s indigenous identity

He's no more Aboriginal than I am.  He is just a fantasist

The Australian Federal Police is assessing an allegation that celeb­rated author and historian Bruce Pascoe has benefited ­financially from wrongly claiming to be indigenous.

One of Professor Pascoe’s most vocal critics, Aboriginal entrepreneur Josephine Cashman, asked Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for an investigation of Professor Pascoe for ­alleged “dishonesty offences” on December 11. Mr Dutton has since referred the matter to the AFP for an assessment, which was underway on Friday.

Professor Pascoe was joint winner of the $30,000 inaugural Indigenous Writers’ Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2016 for Dark Emu, which argues for a rethink of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The award, which Professor Pascoe shared with Ellen van Neerven for her book Heat and Light, was established to acknowledge the contribution to Australian literary culture by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers.

Dark Emu became a bestseller. An adaptation called Young Dark Emu has been published for children and ABC ­announced it would turn it into a two-part series to be screened this year.

Ms Cashman’s email to Mr Dutton disputed Professor Pascoe’s past statements that he was of Bunurong and Yuin descent.

Ms Cashman, whose son is Yuin, alleged a genealogy search did not show Professor Pascoe had Aboriginal forebears. She said Professor Pascoe had benefited financially from his claims ­including from his appointment “as an Aboriginal professor at the University of Technology Sydney”.

In recent years Professor Pascoe worked as a UTS professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research. The Weekend Australian does not suggest the allegation against Professor Pascoe is true, only that the AFP is ­assessing it.

Ms Cashman is a Warrimay woman from NSW. She was a member of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Indigenous Advisory Council who spoke out about “the epidemic of violence in indigenous communities” in a joint presentation to the National Press Club in 2016.

In October last year, Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt appointed Ms Cashman and 19 other indigenous and non-indigenous Australians to the Voice Co-Design Senior Advisory Group.

In her email to Mr Dutton, Ms Cashman also raised the broader issue of indigenous identity. “I also seek your support on the question of government ­reforms concerning Aboriginal identity. ‘Do you identify as an ATSI person?’ is failing Aboriginal communities,” she wrote.

“I invite you to assist me in collaboration with the Attorney-General and the Prime Minister to develop a national strategy for establishing a register for Aboriginal people. I suggest a panel composed of traditional owners, on-the-ground elders, government experts and others to examine the most efficient manner to achieve identifying Aboriginal people.

“Once the procedure has been designed and agreed upon, it should be easy to register an ­Aboriginal birth because it could be linked to existing Australian birth registration and native title genealogical records. It is doable.”

Professor Pascoe’s current publisher, [Leftist] Morry Schwartz of Schwartz Publishing, declined to give his opinion on the validity of claims that Professor Pascoe was not Aboriginal. He told The Weekend Australian Professor Pascoe’s background was “completely irrelevant to his work”.

In Professor Pascoe’s latest book Salt, a collection of his writing dating back years, he ­addressed questions about his Aboriginality in an essay title “An enemy of the people”, saying “many people think I’m a traitor”.

“You’re not like the rest of us, they tell me, you’re not really Aboriginal,” Professor Pascoe wrote.

“What they say has cool logic. Clinical analysis of genes says I’m more Cornish than Koori. I hardly ever suffered racist remarks, and experienced no disadvantage, due to my heritage.”

In The Weekend Australian Magazine last May, writer Richard Guilliatt quoted Professor Pascoe addressing questions about his ancestry.

Guilliatt wrote that Professor Pascoe told him: “When people ask me whether I’m ‘really’ Aboriginal, because I’m so pale, I say ‘Yeah’. And when they ask me whether I can explain it, I say: ‘Have you got three hours?’”

Mr Schwartz alleged that Ms Cashman was “allowing herself to be used by the professional right-wing cultural warriors”.

“I am indeed saddened, for I have been involved with Josephine on several projects over the past couple of years, and I know she genuinely worked very hard towards the wellbeing of indigenous Australians,” Mr Schwartz said. “Bruce Pascoe’s background is completely irrelevant to his work.”

When told of Mr Schwartz’s comments, Ms Cashman responded by saying that facts mattered. She said it was offensive for a non-Aboriginal person to say they were Aboriginal.

A spokesperson for the AFP told The Weekend Australian on Friday that work had begun to ­assess the complaint about Professor Pascoe. “The Australian Federal Police can confirm it ­received correspondence in relation to this matter on December 24,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “The matter is being ­assessed in accordance with standard AFP protocols. As such, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.”

SOURCE  






Degrees to AVOID if you want to get a job straight out of university and it’s bad news for those studying communications, psychology and maths

Thousands of graduates are battling unemployment thanks to studying creative arts and maths at university.

While having a degree under your belt used to all-but guarantee landing a job, more employers are now happy to hire someone without a degree at all.

In its annual Graduate Outcomes Survey, Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching revealed the number of students securing a job straight after university has plummeted yet again to just 72 per cent.

Almost half of students who study creative degrees still aren't finding work four months after graduating, with 47 per cent languishing in unemployment.

Those who study maths and science are also struggling to find a job, as are those with a communications degree.

Meanwhile, to get the best value for money, students should instead opt for degrees in pharmacy, medicine, rehabilitation or dentistry.

Worst degrees for finding jobs

Percentage employed four months after graduating

Creative arts (52.9%)

Tourism and hospitality (56.4%)

Communications (60.1%)

Psychology (63.4%)

Science and maths (63.4%)

Source: Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, 2019

Of those who study pharmacy, 95.7 per cent have secured jobs within four months of leaving university - but are given the lowest average salary.

Young workers face 'systematically disadvantaged outcomes in the labour market', according to the Australia Institute's Dr Jim Stanford.

He said today's graduates are suffering with lower wages, as well a being the last to be hired - and the first to be fired.

In 2008, 85 per cent of graduates secured a job after leaving university.

This figure has fallen to just 72 per cent, down another percentage point from 2018.

Best degrees for finding jobs:

Percentage employed four months after graduating

Pharmacy (95.7%)

Rehabilitation (92.4%)

Medicine (91.1%)

Dentistry (86.2%)

Engineering (84.8%)

Source: Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, 2019

'You're better off with a degree than without one,' Dr Stanford told 7News at the time.

'But the outcomes have still deteriorated.'

As for salaries, undergraduate full-time salaries in 2019 ranged from highs of $88,200 to lows of $48,000, depending on the person's degree.

The best graduate salary awaits dentistry students, at $88,200.

For medical students it's $73,100 and for teach education it's $68,000.

The lowest salaries are reserved for those studying pharmacy, at $48,000.

Those with degrees in tourism and hospitality earned an average of $50,000, while creative arts graduates earned $52,000.  

'Higher level qualifications, on average, continue to confer additional benefits in the labour market, particularly for postgraduate coursework graduates,' the report explained.

'In addition, overall employment declined slightly to 92.7 per cent in 2019, a fall of 0.2 percentage points on the previous year.'

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Australia has been hotter, fires have burnt larger areas

By Dr. Jennifer Marohasy

The word unprecedented is applied to almost every bad thing that happens at the moment, as though particular events could not have been predicted, and have never happened before at such a scale or intensity. This is creating so much anxiety, because it follows logically that we are living in uncertain time: that there really is a climate emergency.

The historical evidence, however, indicates fires have burnt very large areas before, and it has been hotter.

Some of the catastrophe has been compounded by our refusal to prepare appropriately, as is the case with the current bushfire emergency here in Australia. Expert Dr Christine Finlay explains the importance of properly managing the ever increasing fire loads in an article in today’s The Australian. While there is an increase in the area of national park with Eucalyptus forests, there has been a reduction in the area of hazard reduction burning.

The situation is perhaps also made worse by fiddling with the historical temperature record. This will affect the capacity of those modelling bushfire behaviour to obtain an accurate forecast.

We have had an horrific start to the bushfire season, and much is being said about the more than 17 lives lost already, and that smoke has blown as far as New Zealand. Unprecedented, has been the claim. But just 10 years ago, on 9 February 2009, 173 lives were lost in the Black Saturday inferno. On 13th January 1939 (Black Friday), 2 million hectares burnt with ash reportedly falling on New Zealand. That was probably the worst bushfire catastrophe in Australia’s modern recorded history in terms of area burnt and it was 80 years ago: January 13, 1939.

According to the Report of the Royal Commission that followed, it was avoidable.

In terms of total area burnt: figures of over 5 million hectares are often quoted for 1851. The areas now burnt in New South Wales and Victoria are approaching this.

Last summer, and this summer, has been hot in Australia. But the summer of 1938-1939 was probably hotter. In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since

The summer of 1938-1939 was probably the hottest ever in recorded history for the states of New South Wales and Victoria. It is difficult to know for sure because the Bureau has since changed how temperatures are measured at many locations and has not provided any indication of how current electronic probes are recording relative to the earlier mercury thermometers.

Further, since 2011, the Bureau is not averaging measurements from these probes so the hottest recorded daily temperature is now a one-second spot reading from an electronic devise with a sheath of unknown thickness. In the United States similar equipment is used and the readings are averaged over five (5) minutes and then the measurement recorded.

The year before last, I worked with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology (BMKG), and understood their difficulty of getting a temperature equivalence between mercury thermometers and readings from electronic probes at their thousands of weather stations. The Indonesian Bureau has a policy of keeping both recording devices in the same shelter, and taking measurements from both. They take this issue very seriously, and acknowledge the problem.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has a policy of a three year period of overlap, yet the metadata shows that for its supposedly highest quality recording stations (for example Rutherglen), the mercury thermometer is removed the very same day an electronic probe is installed. This is a total contravention of the Bureau’s own policy, and nothing is being done about it.

I explained much of this to Australia’s Chief Scientist in a letter some years ago — neither he, nor the Bureau, deny that our current method of recording temperatures here in Australia is not covered by any international ISO standard. It is very different from methods currently employed in the United States and also Indonesia, and as recommended by the World Meteorological Organisation.

Then there is the issue of the remodelling of temperatures, I explained how this affects trends at Rutherglen in a blog post early last year.

The remodelling, that has the technical term of homogenisation, is a two-step process. With respect to the temperature maxima at Rutherglen, the Bureau identified a ‘statistically significant discontinuity’ in 1938–1939. Values were then changed.

It is somewhat peculiar that the Bureau did not recognise, in its process of remodelling the historical data for Rutherglen, that the summer of 1938-1939 was exceptionally hot because of drought, compounded by bushfires. Rather David Jones and Blair Trewin at the Bureau used the exceptional hot January of 1939 as an excuse for remodelling the historical temperature record at Rutherglen, with the changed values subsequently incorporated into international data sets.

These made-up values are then promoted by the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This propaganda is then tweeted by Hollywood superstars like Bette Midler to The Australian Prime Minister.

After a recent Sky News Television interview that I did with Chris Smith several people have contacted me about the hottest day ever recorded in Australia. They have suggested it is 16th January 1889 being 53.1 degrees Celsius at Cloncurry in Queensland. A problem with this claim is that the temperature was not measured from within a Stevenson screen, though it was a recording at an official station. A Stevenson screen (to shelterer the mercury thermometer) was not installed by Queensland meteorologist Clement Ragge at Cloncurry until the next month, until February 1889.

The hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment (a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen) at an official recording station is 51.7 degrees Celsius (125 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Bourke Post Office on January 3, 1909.

We are all entitled to our own opinion, but not our own facts.

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Queensland grossly negligent about back-burning too

ACTING Fire and Emergency Services Minister Leeanne Enoch blames the weather for the State Government's failure to conduct the required controlled burns for four consecutive years to 2019

Obviously, not just good management practice but simple common sense would dictate that if the window of opportunity reduces, a good manager would allocate greater resources to that reduced window to achieve the required outcome.

More concerning, however, is that for each of these years the number of planned controlled burns has reduced in number. How could the requirement for controlled burns reduce each year for four consecutive years, considering the planned number was not achieved the previous year?

Controlled burns are not the only method of fire prevention. Clearing undergrowth and regrowth, as well as maintaining and making fire breaks, are critical elements as well.

Another concern is that it appears very few so-called frontline state public service staff have been allocated to the critically important task of fire prevention. Could it be that the Palaszczuk Government has neglected its responsibility to prepare for the potential disaster of fire?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was slammed by many for taking a short break before Christmas even though the federal government is not responsible for the frontline against the fires. It is the state governments that are responsible for land management, fire prevention and preparedness and firefighting yet there is hardly a murmur when Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk takes a cruise and now Fire and Emergency Services Minister Craig Crawford appears to be missing.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail of 9 January, 2020

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here