Philip Munday’s work falls to pieces whenever someone tries to verify it.



Last week, Nature published a damning refutation of a significant body of climate change research. The title of that article is self-explanatory: Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes.

The authors studied more than 900 fish from six different species over a period of three years, attempting to verify earlier findings by a team of researchers at Australia’s James Cook University. Their attempts failed.

Scholarly convention being what it is, the now-discredited work isn’t identified in a clear manner. Readers are compelled to sift through footnotes to locate the “several high-profile papers” that are being refuted. So here they are:

The author in common is research leader Philip Munday. When eight of this man’s papers were double-checked, others scientists were unable to confirm his findings. They performed the same experiments, but got different results. Every. Single. Time.

The James Cook University website tells us Munday is “in the top 1% of cited researchers in the ISI fields of Plant and Animal Science” (bold added). He sits on the editorial board of three scientific journals.

He also – ding, ding, ding – “has contributed to IPCC reports” on ocean acidification. In fact, Munday’s name appears 46 times in this 174-page document about a 2011 IPCC workshop on that topic.

You heard it here first, folks. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s pronouncements about tropical fish rely on a man whose work falls to pieces whenever anyone tries to verify it.

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