The Dog Ate my Data

AUSTRALIA'S peak science agency, the CSIRO, has backed away from attributing a decade of drought in Tasmania to climate change, claiming ''the jury is still out'' on the science.

THE Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is in excellent shape - farming and other human activity are not killing the reef, according to James Cook University's reef scientist Dr Peter Ridd.

The past few months has been a frustrating time for the climate change industry. Earlier in the year they were on a roll and it looked like a global treaty agreement at Copenhagen in December was a done deal. The heady scent of unprecedented power and money was palpable.

In Australia, this mythology of a natural ‘left-green’ alliance was forged in the early 1980s as the traditional communist parties disintegrated and their cadres scrambled for a way to re-assert the ideology of state socialism in Australian politics. A key event at the time was a visit to Australia of leading figures in the extremist Deep Ecology movement, including its intellectual founder, Arne Naess. Its manifesto called explicitly for a reduction of the human population by some 95% to around one hundred million people, living in a society pegged at pre-historic levels of economic activity and social organization.

A SENIOR marine researcher has accused Australian scientists of "crying wolf" over the threat of climate change to the Great Barrier Reef, exposing deep division about its vulnerability.

Peter Ridd's rejection of the consensus position that the reef is doomed unless greenhouse emissions are checked comes as new research on the Keppel group, hugging Queensland's central coast, reveals its resilience after coral bleaching. Professor Ridd, a physicist with Townsville's James Cook University who has spent 25 years investigating the impact of coastal runoff and other problems for the reef, challenged the widely accepted notion that coral bleaching would wipe it out if climate change continued to increase sea surface temperatures. Instead of dying, the reef could expand south towards Brisbane as waters below it became warmer and more tolerable for corals, he said.