Dr. Jennifer Marohasy |

Doctor Jennifer Marohasy, for whom I once had the honor of writing an article, is a scientist I admire very much.

She is among other things an independent thinker down to her very core, which makes her by definition a true scientist — by which I mean: one who follows the evidence wherever it leads no matter the political opposition, the hysteria, the prevailing dogmas, the vitriol, the blowback.

She’s an Australian who, along with Doctor John Abbot (formerly of Central Queensland University), did much study of and work upon issues concerning the Great Barrier Reef.

In 2002, she began documenting her “concerns,” as she puts it, “with the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) ‘Save the Reef Campaign’ including their perverse influence of this campaign on public policy in a long review entitled ‘WWF Says Jump, Governments Ask How High” and a short piece for the IPA Review in March 2003 entitled, ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation.’”

From her website:

“My initial interest in global warming was driven by a desire to better understand water issues, and in particular the likely affect of increasing levels of carbon dioxide on Australian rainfall.”

The following is a recent and important article she wrote for her website. I encourage you to read it in full — because it is an eye-popping, jaw-dropping illustration of what science (climate science especially, but not exclusively) has come to today:

Why Deny the Beautiful Coral Reefs Fringing Stone Island?

by Jennifer Marohasy

We live in an era when it is politically incorrect to say the Great Barrier Reef is doing fine, except if it’s in a tourist brochure. The issue has nothing to do with the actual state of corals, but something else altogether.

Given that the Great Barrier Reef is one ecosystem comprising nearly 3000 individual reefs stretching for 2000 kilometres, damaged areas can always be found somewhere. And a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow – although neither the intensity nor frequency of cyclones is increasing at the Great Barrier Reef, despite climate change. Another reason that coral dies is because of sea-level fall that can leave some corals at some inshore reefs above water on the lowest tides. These can be exceptionally low tides during El Niño events that occur regularly along the east coast of Australia.

A study published by Reef Check Australia, undertaken between 2001 to 2014 – where citizen scientists followed an agreed methodology at 77 sites on 22 reefs encompassing some of the Great Barrier Reef’s most popular dive sites – concluded that 43 sites showed no net change in hard coral cover, 23 sites showed an increase by more than 10 per cent (10–41 per cent, net change), and 17 sites showed a decrease by more than 10 per cent (10–63 per cent, net change).

Studies like this, which suggest there is no crisis but that there can be change, are mostly ignored by the mainstream media. However, if you mention such information and criticise university academics at the same time, you risk being attacked in the mainstream media. Or in academic Dr Peter Ridd’s case, you could be sacked by your university.

After a career of 30 years working as an academic at James Cook University, Dr Ridd was sacked essentially for repeatedly stating that there is no ecological crisis at the Great Barrier Reef, but rather there is a crisis in the quality of scientific research undertaken and reported by our universities. It all began when he sent photographs to News Ltd journalist Peter Michael showing healthy corals at Bramston Reef, near Stone Island, off Bowen in north Queensland.

More recently, I personally have been ‘savaged’ – and in the process incorrectly labelled right wing and incorrectly accused of being in the pay of Gina Rinehart – by Graham Readfearn in an article published in The Guardian. This was because I supported Dr Ridd by showing in some detail a healthy coral reef fringing the north-facing bay at Stone Island in my first film, Beige Reef.

According to the nonsense article by Mr Readfearn, quoting academic Dr Tara Clark, I should not draw conclusions about the state of corals at Stone Island from just the 25 or so hectares (250,000 square metres) of near 100 per cent healthy hard coral cover filmed at Beige Reef on 27 August 2019. Beige Reef fringes the north-facing bay at Stone Island.

This is hypocritical – to say the least – given Dr Clark has a paper published by Nature claiming the coral reefs at Stone Island are mostly all dead. She based this conclusion on just two 20-metre long transects that avoided the live section of healthy corals seaward of the reef crest.

I will refer to this reef as Pink Plate Reef – given the pink plate corals that I saw there when I went snorkelling on 25 August 2019.

Dr Clark – the senior author on the research report, which also includes eight other mostly high-profile scientists – is quoted in The Guardian claiming I have misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study. In particular, she states,

“We never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012.”

Yet this is really the only conclusion that can be drawn from the information presented in her report, which states in different sections the following:

“Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.

“At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.

“For Stone Island, the limited evidence of coral growth since the early 19th Century suggests that recovery is severely lagging.

“… by 1994 the reef was covered in a mixture of coral rubble and algae with no living Acropora and very few massive coral colonies present …”

Clark and colleagues recorded the corals along two transects, which they explain included a section of the reef now stranded above the mean low spring sea level. The sections they studied are some metres away from healthy corals – Porites and Acropora species, including pink plate corals that I snorkelled over on 25 August 2019.

Please read the full article here.

The difference between the cynic and the skeptic is the difference between epistemology and ethics. It is the difference between brain and body.

Skepticism is an epistemological word. Cynicism is ethical.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality.

The Greek word skopein – from which the English word scope derives – means “to observe, aim at, examine.” It is related to the Greek skeptesthai, which means “to look out.” Skepsis and skeptikos are also both Greek and mean “to look; to enquire; to aim.” Those are the etymological roots of the word sceptic.

Sceptic – or, if you’re in the United States, skeptic, the difference being purely one of form and not substance – has its origins in the Ancient Greek thinkers who developed arguments which purport to show that knowledge is either impossible (Academic Scepticism) or that there is never sufficient data to tell if knowledge is possible (Pyrrhonian Scepticism).

Academic Scepticism rejects certainty but accepts degrees of probability. In this sense, Academic Scepticism anticipates elements of present-day quantum theory. The Academic Sceptics rejected certainty on the grounds that our senses (from which all knowledge ultimately derives) are unreliable and reason therefore is unreliable since, say the Academic Sceptics, we can find no guaranteed standard by which to gauge whether our convictions are true. This claim rests upon the notion that humans can never know anything that is absolutely false.

The roots of Academic Scepticism are found in Socrates famous apothegm: “All I know is that I know nothing.” The word “Academic” in “Academic Scepticism” refers to Plato’s Academy, third century B.C.

At around this same time, a fellow by the name of Pyrrho of Elis (c.360-275 B.C.), who was connected with the Methodic School of Medicine in Alexandria, founded a school, which soon came to be known as Pyrrhonian Scepticism. Pyrrho’s followers – most notably a loyal student named Timon (c.315-225 B.C.) – were called Pyrrhonists. None of Pyrrho’s actual writings have survived, and the theoretical formulation of his philosophy comes mainly from a man named Aenesidemus (c.100-40 B.C.).

The essential difference between these two schools of Ancient Greek scepticism is this:

The Pyrrhonists regarded even the claim “I know only that I know nothing” as claiming too much knowledge. There’s even a legend that Pyrrho himself refused to make a definitive judgment of knowledge even if “chariots were about to strike him dead,” and his students purportedly rescued him a number of different times because he refused to make commitments.

To this day the term Pyrrhonist is synonymous with the term sceptic, which is also synonymous with the term agnostic (a meaning “without”; gnosis meaning “knowledge”).

It’s perhaps worth pointing out as well that the word agnostic in this context was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, in the spring of 1869, at a party, in which there was reportedly “much licking and sucking.” According to R. H. Hutton, who was there: “Huxley took it from St. Paul’s mention of the altar to ‘the Unknown God.’”

In truth, however, the word agnostic was most likely first used by a woman named Isabel Arundell, in a letter to Huxley. Huxley stole it from and gave her no credit.

The Oxford English Dictionary (Unabridged, 2004) lists four meanings of the term sceptic, which are as follows:

1. one who, like Pyrrho and his followers in Greek antiquity, doubts the possibility of real knowledge of any kind; one who holds that there are no adequate grounds for certainty. Example: “I am apt to think there never yet has really been such a monster in the world as a sceptic” (Tucker, 1768).

2. one who doubts the validity of what claims to be knowledge … popularly, one who maintains a doubting attitude with reference to some particular question or statement; one who is habitually inclined to doubt rather than to believe any assertion or apparent fact that comes before him. Example: “If every sceptic in Theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion” (Samuel Johnson, 1779).

3. one who doubts without absolutely denying the truth of the Christian religion or important party of it; loosely, an unbeliever in Christianity. Example: “In listening to the arguments of a sceptic, you are breathing a poisonous air” (R.B. Girdlestone, 1863).

4. occasionally, from its etymological sense: a truth seeker; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite conclusions. Example: “A sceptic, then, is one who shades his eyes in order to look steadfastly at a thing.” (M.D. Conway, 1870).

The anthropogenic global warming debate has catapulted this latter definition to the forefront, yet many purists, who know the philosophical roots of the word scepticism, are not always comfortable using it in this way — mainly because it’s so at odds with the philosophical meaning of the term. Scepticism has over 2,000 years of heavy philosophical baggage, and to call yourself a sceptic in the philosophical sense entails much more than one “who shades his eyes in order to look steadfastly at a thing.”

Language, however, as everyone knows, is a living, breathing organism which will and properly should evolve, and it would be very bad to say that sceptic in this latter sense is incorrect. And yet there is another word, more precise and less laden: Evidentialism.

True scepticism — which is to say, agnosticism, which is to say, Pyrrhonism — rejects the possibility of all knowledge, and yet it is precisely this that the scientist seeks, and finds: knowledge. What is knowledge?

Knowledge is the apprehension of reality based upon observation and reason; reason is the uniquely human faculty of awareness, the apparatus of identification, differentiation, and incorporation. Knowledge is truth, and truth is the accurate identification of reality. Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. Truth is the equation of thing and intellect.

For example, when the child grasps that 1 unit combined with 2 other units makes a total of 3 units, that child has discovered a truth. She has gained knowledge. The philosophical sceptic rejects this elementary fact.

The philosophical sceptic is defined by three words: “I don’t know.”

The scientific sceptic, on the other hand, is defined by rational inquiry — someone who investigates with a disposition to be persuaded and yet does not (in the words of perhaps the most famous sceptical inquirer of them all) “insensibly twist facts to fit theories, instead of twisting theories to fit facts.”

A cynic, on the other hand, is someone who doesn’t believe goodness is possible.

Cynicism is a moral concept, not epistemologic.

The word originated with a Greek fellow by the name of Antisthenes (not to be confused with Antihistamines, which are something else), who was once a student of Socrates.

Antisthenes had a notorious contempt for human merit and human pleasure, and that is why to this day the word cynic denotes a sneer.

The cynic rejects goodness; the skeptic rejects knowledge.

Both words, it should also be noted, do, however, have one very important thing in common: from a philosophical standpoint, they’re each stupendously incorrect.

This article first appeared, in slightly different form, at Dr. Jennifer Marohasy’s website.

The comments there are well worth reading.

Tag: Dr. Jennifer Marohasy

“Why Deny the Beautiful Coral Reefs Fringing Stone Island?” by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy

The Difference Between a Cynic and a Skeptic