Climate Change - Great Barrier Reef Not Endangered

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Great Barrier Reef escapes 'endangered' listing

by World Heritage Committee

By Kyle Barnett

The Great Barrier Reef is composed of almost 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands that span about 1,400 miles over 215,000 square miles in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, Australia. File Photo by Wagsy/Shutterstock/UPI

July 23 (UPI) -- The Great Barrier Reef escaped being listed as an "endangered" UNESCO World Heritage Site during a meeting Friday to determine the reef's environmental status, despite experts' insistence that it should be on it.

The decision not to add the world's largest coral reef system, located off the Australian coast, followed fervent lobbying by the Australian government against adding it to the endangered list. It also went against the recommendation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which says it should be given protected status.

"Our concern was always that UNESCO had sought an immediate 'in danger listing' without appropriate consultation, without a site visit and without all the latest information, and it is clear that this process has concerned not only Australia but other nations as well," Australian environment minister Sussan Ley said, according to The Guardian.

Not landing on the list gives Australia a buffer against concerns from environmental experts for the reef.

"This is a victory for one of the most cynical lobbying efforts in recent history. This is not an achievement -- it is a day of infamy for the Australian government," Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO David Ritter told The Guardian.

This is a day of astonishing hyperbole for Greenpeace!

Members of the committee who voted against listing the reef came from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mali, Nigeria, Oman, Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saudi Arabia and Spain.

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia voted to put the next vote off until 2023, but an objection by Norway set the next evaluation for 2022.

Earlier this year, Scientists said intervention is needed to save the Great Barrier Reef, which has receded in part due to mass bleaching events in recent years.

Australia reacted with anger last month after UNESCO recommended in a 206-page report that the reef be listed on the endangered list.

Australia has spent billions to protect the reef and launched a plan to rehab environmental effects on the system by 2050.

UNESCO will now carry out a mission to the Great Barrier Reef by February to compile a progress report for next year's evaluation.

VICTORY: Climate Skeptic Scientist Peter Ridd Wins Big!

Astonishing win against Climate Change hysteria

Professor Ridd disputed the hysteria surrounding the demise

of the Great Barrier Reef and the fraudulent 'science'

upon which it was based. He got fired for it! 

Climate Change - Brilliant Article on the Cost of Net Zero, and the Corruption of Science

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Reducing reason to net zero

Climate change policy is dead in the water, along with scientific integrity

Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips

Jul 28

The British government continues to display an intelligent, informed and above all powerfully effective approach to arresting “climate change”.

Its climate change spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, has said people should do their bit to stop anthropogenic global warming (AGW) by freezing leftover bread, ordering shampoo in cardboard packaging and not rinsing plates before putting them in the dishwasher.

Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it.

But what’s this? As the Mail on Sunday reported, the government’s flagship green policy of reducing carbon emissions to “net zero” by 2050 has been thrown into disarray. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is objecting to the cost which is currently estimated at more than £1.4 trillion. The Mail writes:

As part of the net zero plan –which would decarbonise the economy by 2050 – No 10 had been expected to publish in the spring details of the strategy for moving away from gas boilers ahead of Glasgow's COP26 climate change conference in November. But this has been delayed until the autumn amid mounting alarm about the bill.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) calculated the cost of making buildings net zero at £400 billion, while the bill for vehicles would be £330 billion, plus £500 billion to clean up power generation and a further £46 billion for industry. After energy savings across the economy, this would leave a £400 billion bill for the Treasury. The OBR also warned that the Government would need to impose carbon taxes to make up for the loss of fuel duty and other taxes.

Moreover, the government is now panicking over its proposal to ban gas boilers by 2035, so much so that it’s pushed this date back to 2040. This is also hardly surprising. As Fraser Myers wrote in the Telegraph: 

But the truth is, the sacrifices being demanded of us in the name of net zero are incompatible with democracy, and the PM knows it. The boiler ban was a key plank of the government’s net zero strategy. Gas boilers were to be replaced with heat pumps. These heat pumps are not what anyone could call a reasonable alternative to boilers. While a boiler can heat your house fairly quickly at the flick of a switch, a heat pump can take around 24 hours to heat your home to between 17 to 19 degrees celsius - i.e., not-quite room temperature.

For the pleasure of living in your not-quite warm house, you will have to fork out around £10,000 for the unit and installation. Then, according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), you can expect to spend an additional £100 per year on your energy bills.

If you want to own a heat pump and have a house that’s more than lukewarm, you’ll need lots of extra insulation. This means yet more tens of thousands of pounds in renovation costs. The Energy Technologies Institute estimates that a ‘deep retrofit’ could cost as much as building a home from scratch. This is not money that any ordinary person has down the back of the sofa - or that the taxpayer can reasonably cover for millions of households.

Getting used to this reduced lifestyle ‘will take an attitudinal shift’, says Chris Stark, CEO of the CCC. This is quite the understatement. It means abandoning what was once a completely normal expectation in a developed country: having a warm home in winter.

In our net zero future, we can also forget having a stable and affordable supply of electricity. Boris says he wants to make the UK the “Saudi Arabia of wind power”. But we should be wary of green energy experiments. Places like California that have rushed to swap nuclear and fossil fuels with renewable energy are regularly faced with rolling blackouts. Since Germany embarked on its Energiewende (energy transition), its electricity prices are now among the highest in the world, though, ironically, this hasn’t done much to lower CO2 emissions.

As Myers observed, the government’s net zero policy is effectively dead in the water. This is a trifle embarrassing, since Britain is hosting the COP summit in Glasgow which is expected to bring together more than 100 world leaders to commit themselves to reach global net zero and limit global warming to 1.5C.

Ye gods — are they all quite, quite mad?

It’s hard to get one’s head round the fact that virtually the entire world has lost its marbles over this “climate change” agenda.

It’s not just that net zero carbon emissions is patently undoable without returning to a pre-industrial way of life  — and unless fascist measures are used to force the population to do so.

It’s not just that the idea that humanity can change the course of a system as complex, chaotic and non-linear as climate is in the same league as Jonathan Swift’s satirical fantasy of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

Most astounding of all, the foundational premise of catastrophic warming caused by disastrous levels of carbon dioxide produced by human activity is just that: a mere premise, a theory, an idea, a hypothesis — but one for which the evidence is assembled to fit it, the precise reverse of the scientific method of examining the evidence to arrive at a conclusion. 

As I wrote here for my premium subscribers, AGW is a perfectly circular theory which repudiates the key aspect of scientific inquiry — that it is always open to conflicting argument and thus can never be “settled,” as zealots insist is the case with AGW. Predicted by dodgy computer modelling, the premise of catastrophic “climate change” is fed into further modelling of events such as flooding, hurricanes, rising seas, starving polar bears and so on. 

And so — amazing to relate — out comes yet another prediction of yet another dire outcome of catastrophic “climate change”. Yet away from the modelling, scientifically observable reality over time simply doesn’t support the claim that the rate of global warming is beyond the normal fluctuations of the climate over the centuries — nor that these catastrophic outcomes are happening, nor that if some of these developments are taking place at any level that this is mostly or entirely the result of human activity. 

Actual observable evidence that the predicted climate apocalypse just doesn’t stack up is being produced all the time — and yet it’s airbrushed out of political and mainstream media discourse.

For example, for decades we’ve been told that AGW is destroying the Great Barrier Reef. But on Watts Up With That Peter Ridd now writes: 

The annual data on coral cover for the Great Barrier Reef, produced by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, was released on Monday showing the amount of coral on the reef is at record high levels. Record high, despite all the doom stories by our reef science and management institutions.

Like all other data on the reef, this shows it is in robust health. For example, coral growth rates have, if anything, increased over the past 100 years, and measurements of farm pesticides reaching the reef show levels so low that they cannot be detected with the most ultra-sensitive equipment.

This data is good news. It could hardly be better. But somehow, our science organisations have convinced the world that the reef is on its last legs. How has this happened?

How indeed. Next, a new study has found that East and West Antarctica have profoundly cooled by -2.8°C and -1.68°C since 1979.

Next, we learn that everything climate catastrophists have said about Atlantic hurricanes and AGW is wrong. On phys.org, Bob Yirka writes: 

Researchers affiliated with several institutions in the United States has determined that the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic over the past several years is not related to global warming. They suggest instead, in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, that it is simply reflective of natural variable weather patterns.

Fancy!

And so on and on.

Back in 2005, the eminent MIT meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen, who is scathing about AGW theory and the corruption of science in its service, wrote: 

The primary implication would be that for over 25 years, we have based not only our worst case scenarios but even our best case scenarios on model exaggeration...

The public discourse on global warming has little in common with the standards of scientific discourse. Rather, it is part of political discourse where comments are made to secure the political base and frighten the opposition rather than to illuminate issues. In political discourse, information is to be “spun” to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, and to discourage opposition. The chief example of the latter is the perpetual claim of universal scientific agreement. This claim was part of the media treatment of global cooling (in the 1970’s) and has been part of the treatment of global warming since 1988 (well before most climate change institutes were created). The consensus preceded the research.

That media discourse on climate change is political rather than scientific should, in fact, come as no surprise. However, even scientific literature and institutions have become politicised. Some scientists issue meaningless remarks in what I believe to be the full expectation that the media and the environmental movement will provide the “spin”. Since the societal response to alarm has, so far, been to increase scientific funding, there has been little reason for scientists to complain.

All around us, the cultural institutions of the west are repudiating reason and evidence in the service of numerous ideologies which permit no challenge whatever to their driving idea and its control over peoples’ lives. Our supposed age of reason is based on science. To understand how reason is currently being destroyed, look no further than the terrible corruption of science by the politicised ideology of anthropogenic global warming.

Free Speech, Climate Hysteria Likely to be Aired in the Supreme Court of Australia

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High Court To Decide On Peter Ridd Free Speech Case

Gideon Rozner  11 February 2021  

IPA TODAY

The Institute of Public Affairs has today welcomed the historic judgement of the High Court in the case of James Cook University (JCU) v Peter Ridd, which has given Dr Peter Ridd special leave to bring on his final appeal.

“This will be the most significant test case for academic freedom in a generation to be settled by the highest court in the land,” said Gideon Rozner, Director of Policy at the IPA.

“Today’s decision continues the David vs Goliath battle on the fundamental issue of freedom of speech, against a university administration backed by millions of taxpayer dollars,” said Mr Rozner.

Dr Peter Ridd, a professor of physics at JCU, was sacked by the university for serious  misconduct for questioning the climate change science in the IPA’s publication Climate Change: The Facts 2017 around the Great Barrier Reef, and for public statements made on the Jones & Co program on Sky News Australia.

“James Cook University has engaged some of the most expensive legal representation in the country to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff, despite crying poor about university funding in the wake of coronavirus. It creates a massive chilling effect for any academic engaging in public debate in Australia,” said Mr Rozner

“James Cook University’s shameful actions prove without doubt there is a crisis of free speech at Australian Universities. Many academics are censured, but few are prepared to speak out and risk their career, particularly if faced with the prospect of legal battles and possible bankruptcy.”

VICTORY: Climate Skeptic Scientist Peter Ridd Wins Big!

Peter Ridd: Scientific Misconduct At James Cook University Confirms My Worst Fears

The IPA called on the Senate to pass the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020 which would ensure the dismissal of an academic like Dr Peter Ridd can never happen again.

“The cases of Peter Ridd at James Cook University, Drew Pavlou at the University of Queensland and pressure on academics across the country on policy matters related to China have highlighted without doubt that there is a free speech crisis at Australian universities,” said Mr Rozner.

“The case has identified a culture of censorship when it comes to challenging claims surrounding climate change and the Great Barrier Reef. JCU to this date has never attempted to disprove claims made by Dr Ridd about the Great Barrier Reef,” said Mr Rozner.

Listen to The Heretic: Inside Peter Ridd’s fight for freedom of speech on climate change at www.ipa.org.au/TheHeretic

VICTORY: Climate Skeptic Scientist Peter Ridd Wins Big!

Astonishing win against Climate Change hysteria

Professor Ridd disputed the hysteria surrounding the demise

of the Great Barrier Reef and the fraudulent 'science'

upon which it was based. He got fired for it! 

Anthony Watts

Full legal document posted, along with some spectacular quotes from the judge.

In a huge victory for climate skeptics everywhere, Judge Salvatore Vasta finds all findings made by James Cook University, including his sacking, were all unlawful.

The order follows: h/t to @GideonCRozner and CTM

Background on the court case

In May 2018, after an academic career of more than 30 years, Peter had his employment terminated as a professor of physics at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. Peter had spoken against the accepted orthodoxy that climate change was ‘killing’ the Great Barrier Reef.

There’s some absolute rubbish being spoken about the reef and

people’s livelihoods are being put in jeopardy. If nobody will

stand up, then this is just going to go on and on and on.

It has to be stopped.

Peter’s court case has enormous implications for the international debate about climate change, and for the ongoing crisis surrounding freedom of speech.

Peter writes via his GoFundMe page:

Dear All,

Excellent news.

My lawyers have told me that the judge handed down his decision and we seem to have won on all counts. 

It all happened very quickly and we had no warning , and because I live almost a thousand miles from the court, I was not able to be there. I have still not seen the written judgement and will update you all when I have that information.

Needless to say, I have to thank all 2500 of you, and all the bloggers, and the IPA and my legal team who donated much of their time free for this success. But mostly I want to thank my dearest Cheryl, who quite by chance has been my bestest friend for exactly 40 years today. It just shows what a team effort can achieve.

The next chapter of this saga must now be written by the JCU Council which is the governing body of JCU. What will they do about the VC and SDVC who were responsible for bringing the university into disrepute, not just in North Queensland, but also around the world. JCU crushed dissent, crushed academic freedom and tried to crush my spirit with their appalling behaviour. They only failed because I had your support. But if the JCU council does not act, they will be complicit in this disgraceful episode.

Attention must now focus on the JCU council.

I will update you shortly when I have more information, but for now I certainly have a spring in my step.

kind regards

Peter

Help spread the word!

For some reason the full legal document can't be accessed by a link provided in this article, but here are some excerpts:

217. Professor Ridd’s statement, that when he asked if he could mention them to his wife, he was not given permission, is the truth. It was not until 19 September 2017, that the University deigned to allow him to talk to his wife about these matters.

218. Whilst none of this makes any difference at all to my ultimate decision, the actions of the University in this respect are, quite frankly, appalling. They have had no regard for the anguish that Professor Ridd felt between 24 August 2017 and 19 September 2017. There has not even been an apology for what can only be seen as extremely callous behaviour. This is inexcusable.

219. Instead, Professor Ridd is accused of being misleading and untruthful because, even though the University eventually allowed him to talk to his wife, he did not mention this when he made statements on his WordPress website.

220. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. On one hand, the University is finding that Professor Ridd has breached the Code of Conduct in that he has made public a number of items to do with the disciplinary process. On the other hand, he is accused of breaching the Code of Conduct in that he has not referred to all of that material when he has made this particular statement.

221. The irony is even more spectacular when one considers that, in his original email to the journalist in 2016, Professor Ridd took the institutions to task for being misleading regarding the use of photographs. It seems the University found no problem with the use of those photographs because there was a footnote that led to the Wachenfeld article.

222. And yet when Professor Ridd pointed out that there was a hyperlink to all of the 2017 disciplinary process material (which would include the 19 September 2017 letter and the subsequent final censure), he is found guilty of a Code of Conduct violation for being misleading. One could be forgiven for thinking that the university was more concerned with the splinter in the eye of Professor Ridd whilst ignoring the plank in their own.

223. The University still sought to justify this finding on the basis of a breach of the Code of Conduct. I disagree.

224. Professor Ridd was expressing his opinion about the operations of JCU and expressing disagreement with decisions of JCU.

225. I find that Professor Ridd was exercising his rights pursuant to cl.14.2 and cl.14.4 of the EA when he made these comments.

…

235. This is an extremely peculiar finding by the University. The University has found that Professor Ridd preferred his own interests, and those of the Institute of Public Affairs (“the IPA”), above the interests of the University. The University found that this was in breach of the obligations under the Code of Conduct to “take reasonable steps to avoid, or disclose and manage, any conflict of interest (actual, potential or perceived) in the course of employment”.

236. During the course of the trial, I repeatedly asked Counsel for the University to tell me what the conflict of interest actually was. Try as he might, Counsel was unable to do so. Yet he would not concede that this finding was not justified.

…

296. To use the vernacular, the University has “played the man and not the ball”. Incredibly, the University has not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom. In the search for truth, it is an unfortunate consequence that some people may feel denigrated, offended, hurt or upset. It may not always be possible to act collegiately when diametrically opposed views clash in the search for truth.

297. Many aspects of the Code of Conduct cannot sit with the concept of intellectual freedom and certainly contravene cl.14. For example, the Code speaks of the need to “value academic freedom, and enquire, examine, criticise and challenge in the collegial and academic spirit of the search for knowledge, understanding and truth”. The University has denounced Professor Ridd because his enquiry, examination, criticism and challenge was not, in their view, done in the collegial and academic spirit. But there is no need for such enquiry, examination, criticism or challenge to be done that way under the rights conferred upon Professor Ridd by cl.14.

298. The University have been at pains to say that it is not what Professor Ridd has said, but rather the manner in which he has said it, that is the underlying reason for the censure, the final censure and the termination. But the University has consistently overlooked the whole of what has been written. They have concentrated on small, almost incidental parts of what has been said and then used the Code of Conduct to pass judgement on those small parts, with the intention that the flow on effect of that judgement would impugn the whole of what Professor Ridd has written.

299. The Code of Conduct is subordinate to cl.14 of the EA. And what is said by Professor Ridd must always be looked at in its whole context. The University have continually “cherry-picked” portions of the writings of Professor Ridd and said “that is not the exercise of intellectual freedom”. But it is the whole of what is written that must be looked at rather than excerpts taken out of context.

…

302. That is why intellectual freedom is so important. It allows academics to express their opinions without fear of reprisals. It allows a Charles Darwin to break free of the constraints of creationism. It allows an Albert Einstein to break free of the constraints of Newtonian physics. It allows the human race to question conventional wisdom in the neverending search for knowledge and truth. And that, at its core, is what higher learning is about. To suggest otherwise is to ignore why universities were created and why critically focussed academics remain central to all that university teaching claims to offer.

FINDINGS:

303. In light of the above, I make the following rulings:

a) The first finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

b) The censure given to Professor Ridd was unlawful as it contravened cl.14 of the EA.

c) The First Speech Direction was unlawful in that it sought to interfere with the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

d) The Second Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

e) The First Confidentiality Direction was unlawful because the University had no power to give that direction, and even if it did have the power, such a direction was in contravention of the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

f) The Third Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant cl.14.

g) The Second Confidentiality Direction was unlawful because the University had no power to make such a direction, and even if it did have the power, such a direction was in contravention of the rights conferred on Professor Ridd by virtue of cl.14.

h) The Fourth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights of Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

i) The Fifth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights of Professor Ridd given to him by cl.14.

j) The Sixth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights of Professor Ridd given to him by cl.14.

k) The Seven Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

l) The Eighth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

m) The Third Confidentiality Direction was unlawful because the University had no power to make such a direction, and even if it did, such a direction contravened the rights of Professor Ridd pursuant to cl.14.

n) The Second Speech Direction was unlawful in that it sought to interfere with the rights Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

o) The Fourth Confidentiality Directions was unlawful because the University had no power to make such a direction, and even if it did, such a direction contravened the rights of Professor Ridd pursuant to cl.14.

p) The no satire direction was unlawful in that it sought to interfere with the rights Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

q) The Fifth Confidentiality Direction was unlawful because the University had no power to make such a direction, and even if it did, such a direction contravened the rights of Professor Ridd pursuant to cl.14.

r) The Second Censure was unlawful because it contravened cl.14 of the EA.

s) The Ninth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it related to the breach of a direction which was of itself unlawful.

t) The Tenth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it related to the breach of a direction which was of itself unlawful.

u) The Eleventh Finding made by the University was unlawful because it related to the breach of a direction which was of itself unlawful.

v) The Twelfth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

w) The Thirteenth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights the Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

x) The Fourteenth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it related to the breach of a direction which was of itself unlawful.

y) The Fifteenth Finding made by the University was unlawful because of breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

z) The Sixteenth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it breached the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

aa) The Seventeenth Finding made by the University was unlawful because it had no substance whatsoever, and even if there were the slightest scintilla of evidence, it was contrary to the rights that Professor Ridd had pursuant to cl.14.

bb) The termination of Professor Ridd’s employment was unlawful because it punished Professor Ridd for conduct that was protected by cl.14 of the EA.

Criticizing Sensationalism Over Science Gets 40yr Professor Fired

Why do the majority of scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming?

Because those who don't get fired.

Professor Peter Ridd challenges James Cook University sacking

Former James Cook University climate scientist Peter Ridd outside the Federal Court Brisbane.

He claims he was unfairly dismissed from his job for publicly voicing his opinions on climate change.

Picture: Liam Kidston.

CHARLIE PEEL
JOURNALIST

Lawyers acting for sacked James Cook University professor Peter Ridd say the university sought to turn its disciplinary process into a “star chamber” after he publicly criticised the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the impact global warming had on the Great Barrier Reef.

Professor Ridd, who worked at the university for 40 years, has challenged the dismissal in the Federal Court, saying the university breached its own enterprise agreement which allowed all staff to express controversial or unpopular views.

The physics professor’s lawyers say the Townsville-based university, which is renowned for its marine science expertise, dismissed Professor Ridd in 2018 for breaching its code of conduct.

But they argue that the code was secondary to the enterprise agreement.

Barrister Stuart Wood said his client had every right to criticise his colleagues and the university’s perceived lack of quality assurance processes.

The first alleged breach of the code occurred in April 2016, when Professor Ridd emailed a journalist to allege that images given to the media by the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority were misleading.

Sensationalism not science

Professor Ridd said the images of bleached coral reefs near Stone Island, off the coast of Bowen in north Queensland, were misleading because they showed poorly affected corals, which were selected over nearby healthy coral and used to show “broad scale decline” of reef health.

Many years ago I worked with an hydrologist who was furious at a very famous Canadian scientist who took the erosion of a particular and unique watershed and applied it to all of British Columbia. It was sensationalism over science.

Field technicians working for Professor Ridd took photos in the same vicinity as the bleaching pictures supplied by the university and GBRMPA which showed “spectacular coral living there”.

Professor Ridd told the journalist in the email that the use of the pictures was “a dramatic example of how scientific organisations are happy to spin a story for their own purposes”.

He also said his colleague Professor Terry Hughes, the head of JCU’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, would “wriggle and squirm” when asked to explain the discrepancies in the images.

“Mr Ridd said the photos being used were not, in his view, an accurate representation of what was going on at the site,” Mr Wood said.

“The complaint was that there should be much more care taken when representing the photos to ensure the story is not based on sensationalism but on science.”

Professor Ridd was sceptical of the photos and warnings around the health of the reef, which had undergone extensive bleaching, because his own academic work had shown coral health was not affected by sediment runoff or increased water temperatures, as claimed by other scientists

After receiving a warning from the university, Professor Ridd was censured again in November 2017 after appearing on Sky News and making similar claims about the lack of quality assurance processes on coral reef science.

At one stage Professor Ridd was told he could not even discuss the proceedings with his wife, leading Mr Wood to compare the proceedings to a coercive “star chamber”.

After a third alleged violation of the code of conduct, Professor Ridd was sacked in April 2018.

Mr Wood said there was no argument that his client attacked the integrity of his colleagues and the organisation, but that this was not in breach of the enterprise agreement.

He said Professor Ridd offered Professor Hughes a public apology for the phrasing of his complaint, not the subject matter, but Professor Hughes rejected the apology.

The hearing is expected to continue for three days.