... key industry figure Col McKenzie, the executive officer of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, has echoed the criticisms of the former directors, saying the authority is lacking strong leadership [Chairman Russell Reichelt — mentioned in the article by The Australian in picture at top].

“I base that on the simple fact that the decision on sea dumping in the marine park, I believe, was in breach of its own act,” Mr McKenzie said.

“The members of my industry, at this point in time, see the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority as environmental vandals, not environmental protectors. It’s a disgrace to see those five directors go.”

Jon Day is worried about the pressure being placed on GBRMPA staff, saying those steering the agency are failing the organisation.

“I don’t believe they’re doing the job they need to do to save the Great Barrier Reef,” Mr Day said.

“There’s several hundred years of experience that has basically left the authority without, I think, effective succession planning.

“I want to stress there are good people still left in the agency. However, what they’ve been asked to do with less resources is, I think, almost an impossible task. We used to have a director just for climate change, another one just for water quality, another one just for fisheries. Today there is one director who’s responsible for all of those issues.”

“I think it’s about morale too,” former climate change director Paul Marshall said.

“It used to be an exciting place to work. There was always a buzz around the floors. And now people are just too busy to even look up and it’s actually getting quite grim internally.”

The ABC contacted other former office holders of GBRMPA about these issues.

“People inside the authority are disillusioned about the Abbot Point decision, because their advice was ignored,” a former director said.

“With the loss of these directors GBRMPA doesn’t have the expertise to fill the void. They’re irreplaceable.”

“Abbot Point highlights the agency’s rubber stamp approval process and how GBRMPA acted like an arm of the [Environment] department,” a former board member said. “There was no fight.”

http://www.greatbarrierreef.org.au/gbrmpa-chaos/

 

Contrary to its claim that "activists 'distorting' data on reef", The Australian is distorting data on the whole thing. "The Australian" lies.

 

The stench of death

It was the smell that really got to diver Richard Vevers. The smell of death on the reef.

“I can’t even tell you how bad I smelt after the dive – the smell of millions of rotting animals.”

Vevers is a former advertising executive and is now the chief executive of the Ocean Agency, a not-for-profit company he founded to raise awareness of environmental problems.

After diving for 30 years in his spare time, he was compelled to combine his work and hobby when he was struck by the calamities faced by oceans around the world. Chief among them was coral bleaching, caused by climate change.

His job these days is rather morbid. He travels the world documenting dead and dying coral reefs, sometimes gathering photographs just ahead of their death, too.

With the world now in the midst of the longest and probably worst global coral bleaching event in history, it’s boom time for Vevers.

Even with all that experience, he’d never seen anything like the devastation he saw last month around Lizard Island in the northern third of Australia’s spectacular Great Barrier Reef.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/07/the-great-barrier-reef-a-catastrophe-laid-bare#img-2

 

...

Global warming, driven mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, was the key culprit that drove ocean temperatures in the region to record levels which, in turn, caused the corals to bleach. The key question was, how many corals would survive?

But on Saturday 4 June, the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Australian newspaper decided its page one story should not concentrate on the figures that confirmed the death of almost a quarter of the corals on the reef during its worst ever coral bleaching event.

Instead, The Australian focused on an accusation that some “activist scientists” and “lobby groups” had exaggerated the bleaching, quoting GBRMPA chairman Dr Russell Reichelt. 

Favourite targets

The opportunity to have a crack at one of the newspaper’s favourite targets – environmentalists and climate change campaigners – was just too good an opportunity to miss, it seems.

But Reichelt later told Guardian Australia that, in fact, his criticism was more targeted at the media. 

“I have no problem with environmental activists portraying the seriousness of the event,” he said.

“These groups play a critically important role in raising public awareness and we communicate with them regularly. My concern is that the public receive clear understanding of the serious effects of this event on the Great Barrier Reef, including that it is caused by global warming. The media is reporting science in ways that are very misleading.”

Very misleading?

So this commentary on science in the media brings us neatly to The Australian’s editorial from earlier this week, which picked up on its earlier story that the reef was in much better shape than some media and environmentalists would apparently have us believe.

The editorial completely ignored Reichelt’s attempt to clarify the record, saying he had “dissociated his agency from activist scientists and green lobbyists who have distorted surveys, maps and data in order to talk up the extent of coral bleaching”.

But then the newspaper went on to commit the same kind of misrepresentations that it had accused others of.

The Australian gave another example of what it thinks is a tendency to exaggerate. The editorial said:

Ocean acidification is another case study in the pseudoscience of exaggeration. Interest in this topic has exploded, and journals have an inherent bias towards calamitous predictions, the Norwegian-based marine scientist Howard Browman told this newspaper in March.

“I never spoke to The Australian”

The first thing to say about this is that Dr Howard Browman has never spoken to The Australian. I know this because I asked him. 

The Australian had actually reprinted a story that had appeared in the UK’s The Times newspaper, also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, that had quoted Browman.

The second thing to know is that The Times story, which also ran on page one, was based on a misinterpretation of the conclusions from a special issue of the ICES Journal of Marine Science, which Browman edits.

As reported on DeSmog, Browman has said the interview he gave to The Times had been “cherry picked”.

Browman told me that attributing his name to the statement “journals have an inherent bias towards calamitous predictions” was “another distortion”.

He explained that across many science disciplines, there was a known publication bias against studies that did not find dramatic results.  In March, Browman explained this did not mean that scientists were exaggerating results.

Browman told me that he would have expected The Australian to have known the issues with the original story. 

He said: “From this, I conclude that The Australian opinion editorial appears to be a case of compounded misrepresentation.”

@readfearn - I never talked w/The Australian & the original story referred to was debunked -https://t.co/9K1JPpNoZk

— Howard I. Browman (@HBrowman) June 7, 2016

The issues with the original Times story, featuring Browman, were also highlighted in a letter to the newspaper’s editor from members of the UK’s House of Lords, accusing the paper of “distorted coverage” of climate change.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/06/07/australian-newspaper-misrepresents-science-great-barrier-reef-bleaching-editorial-says-scientist-it-quoted

 

 

See also: intelligent design is a dumb idea, promoted by uncle rupert to retard the science of global warming...