The Astonishingly Woke Australian Academy Of ‘Anti-Science’
The Australian Academy of Science (AAS) recently released a report
Reef Futures Roundtable, which is ostensibly about the doomed Great Barrier Reef.
However, the report only demonstrates that the AAS, Australia’s peak science body, has become not just unscientific, but anti-scientific.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has also become astonishingly Woke. [emphasis, links added]
The
AAS report predictably concluded that the
Great Barrier Reef could already be ‘irreversibly’ damaged.
The fact that
UNESCO has just declared it not endangered did not rate a mention, and neither did the latest two years of statistics showing the
reef is at record high coral levels.
Remarkably, the report
does not contain a single fact or figure to support any of its claims about the reef – except the area of the reef is 340,000 square kilometers. There are
no figures, no percentages. Nowhere does it mention that
coral grows 30 percent faster for
every degree increase in water temperatures.
Or that there is
100 percent more coral on the reef today than in 2012. Or that
just one percent of the reef has the
potential to be impacted by farm sediment, fertilizer, or pesticides, even in the slightest way. Or that the
sea level has fallen by one meter in the
last 5,000 years.
The problem with this completely unanalytical approach is seen in the ‘interventions’ it recommends to fix the reef. Their impracticality is breathtaking.
For example,
it suggests ‘solar radiation management’ – shading the reef from the sun with
man-made fog and clouds to prevent the
water from heating up and causing
coral bleaching.
The only number cited in the entire report –
the area of the reef, which is
as big as Germany – should have given them a hint that this is crazy. How are you
going to make a cloud as big as Germany and keep it
anchored over the reef for the whole summer over the
next few hundred years?
And you will also have to stop
hot water flowing into the reef from the
Coral Sea at the same time. That would require a dam 2,000 kilometers long and 100 meters high.
While a simple calculation is all that is required to reveal the absurdity of this idea,
modern science is full of people who are almost completely non-quantitative and, as such,
impractical and virtually useless as scientists.
Next, there is rubble stabilization. The
supposed experts worry that the Great Barrier Reef will
break up from climate change.
Each of the 3,000 reefs is an almost
solid lump of calcium carbonate rock (fragments of coral glued together over eons) a few kilometers wide and 100 meters high.
How this is
going to be broken up by some climate change magic is
unexplained. But even if that were to happen,
are they seriously suggesting we can wire it back together with steel reinforcing and concrete? Just do the calculation on how much concrete and steel this would entail.
The
unscientific nature of the AAS report is largely a
result of its anti-scientific approach. The report is actually a
parody of wokeness and romantic mythology.
This starts with the way the
roundtable committees of ‘experts’, whom they questioned about the reef, were formed.
Each roundtable had two chairs, a non-Indigenous chair, and a specially selected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander chair. The
romantic mythology about the
special knowledge of any person with
Indigenous heritage pervades the entire document and
starts in the foreword by the head of the AAS.
As the Academy approached the task of planning this project it became immediately obvious that there was no separating nature and culture when it comes to the GBR.
Land and sea cannot be separated. No priority can be selected on an ecological basis alone. Having a Traditional Knowledges co-Chair in each roundtable allowed for different sources of knowledge to be shared and to form a basis for a number of the observations featured in this report.
Having a diversity of ideas and scientific thought would have gone some of the way to
curing the AAS of groupthink that renders its report risible.
The
views and experiences of people from the coral islands of the Torres Straits and northern Great Barrier Reef
could have been used to great effect.
These people tend to be
deeply practical about the reef – like almost all seafaring people who live and work on the reef. And
practical people know you cannot bolt the reef, which is the size of Germany,
down to the seafloor.
But
selecting people for their ‘roundtables’
on the basis of their ethnicity rather than their scientific or real-world experience is a
fundamentally anti-scientific approach.
But it gets worse. The
dearth of statistics about the reef is made up for by an
abundance of data on the
gender identification of all
those who participated in the ‘roundtables’.
There is also the
Indigenous percentage. And not just of those who participated, but also of those who were invited to participate but did not.
One could quibble and point out that
those claiming to be male or female added up to
exactly 100 percent in all categories, indicating a terrifying lack of diversity on the LGBQTI+++ spectrum.
But there is no question,
on the important matters for the Woke brigade, that
this report is brimming with instructive statistics.
The
AAS ascribes such importance to facts and figures on gender and race, but
not to scientific facts. This demonstrates
it is anti-science.
Science is about
evidence and logic. It does
not matter whether one is male or female or whatever else, it is
still impossible to make clouds as big as Germany for the
next hundred years.
That is called a fact, and
facts do not vary with race, gender, or any ideology.
I have been saying for some time that
many of our science institutions have become totally untrustworthy. By its
wilful abandonment of quantitative analysis, the AAS has
destroyed its reputation as a source of useful scientific advice.
The
media loves a bad news story – they should focus on what has happened to a once-esteemed organization.
The
Australian Academy of Science is now a joke.
Read more at Spectator AU
The Astonishingly Woke Australian Academy Of 'Anti-Science' - Climate Change Dispatch
