Tara Clark says the central claim of the Institute of Public Affairs’ YouTube film attacking her coral report is wrong

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

A coral scientist whose work is attacked in a mini-documentary from the Institute of Public Affairs says the rightwing thinktank has misrepresented her study.

The IPA says its YouTube film, Beige Reef, is a “must watch” because it shows healthy Acropora corals living at Stone Island, near Bowen. This, the film claims, is in a place where a study published in 2016 claimed all those corals had died.

But Dr Tara Clark, of the University of Wollongong, says the film’s central claim is wrong because her 2016 study did not make any such statement and the IPA’s film had focused on a different location.

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Clark told Guardian Australia: “Our work has clearly been misrepresented.”

The IPA, which has been heavily funded by the mining magnate Gina Rinehart, is known for promoting fringe views on human-caused climate change.

Study never claimed no coral present in 2012

In the film, the IPA’s Dr Jennifer Marohasy claims the study, appearing in the journal Scientific Reports, reported that “there are no longer any Acropora at Stone Island” before showing footage taken from her filming expedition.

“This claim is of course irreconcilable with what we saw,” she says in the film, which has been promoted by the Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt and the Liberal MP Craig Kelly.

Clark’s paper does reference a visit to the site in 1994 by Dr David Wachenfeld, now the chief scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and a co-author on the study, and states that “no living Acropora colonies” were present at Stone Island at that time. This is the section of text highlighted by the IPA in the film.

But Clark said the surveys of Stone Island for her 2016 study were conducted in 2012 and the information presented in the video had been misinterpreted.

“For example, we never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012,” she said.

The paper states that in 2012, in a deeper area from the reef flat, “living tabular Acropora [species] and Porites [species] colonies were occasionally found”.

Clark said: “Marohasy’s interpretation of [my 2016 paper] is incorrect.”

Clark said the two main aims of the study were to revisit the precise locations of historic photographs taken around 1890 – sites revisited by Wachenfeld in 1994 – and to test a method to date the death of corals.

IPA video was filmed in a different location

Clark also said her study was conducted “in a different location and environment” to Marohasy’s film, “making it a little like comparing apples and oranges”.

Marohasy’s filming had taken place over subtidal reefs rather than over the reef flats that were the focus of her study, Clark said.

The 13-minute IPA video features drone and underwater footage from a chartered boat trip to Stone Island, with extensive commentary from Marohasy.

In a separate video promoting Beige Reef, the IPA’s policy director, Gideon Rozner, says what Marohasy found “refutes a key claim” in Clark’s paper “that there are no living colonies of Acropora coral at all”.’

Rozner says: “The suggestion that the Great Barrier reef is dying is based on claims like this from the Nature paper. If this is wrong then what else are they wrong about?”

(Rozner and Marohasy say the study appeared in the “prestigious journal Nature” but in fact the study appeared in Scientific Reports.)

Associate Professor Andrew Hoey, of James Cook University’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said: “Concluding the reef is fine from a single visit to one section of one reef is ludicrous, and is akin to visiting a house that is left standing after a natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, bushfire) and concluding there has been no damage.

“Importantly the video [the IPA] show is of areas of subtidal reef, yet the study by Clark and others describes changes on the intertidal reef flat,” he said.

Misleading claims about coral bleaching

Hoey added that a separate claim in the video that no bleached corals had been found was misleading, because “you wouldn’t expect to see any unless that area was experiencing an extended period of elevated temperatures at that time”.

He said: “The majority of corals that bleached on the GBR in 2016 and 2017 died shortly after and were subsequently covered by algae within a few weeks.”

The Liberal MP Craig Kelly shared the IPA video on his Facebook page, with the heading “YET ANOTHER CLIMATE ALARMIST LIE DEBUNKED.”

Liberal MP Craig Kelly sharing the IPA’s Beige reef video on his Facebook page

Kelly wrote: “Everytime their lips are moving, those from the climate alarmist industry are peddling lies trying to recruit the naive and gullible to act as their useful idiots.”

At the end of the video, a credit says the film was “produced with financial support from the B.Macfie Family Foundation”.

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In a response to questions from Guardian Australia, Marohasy pointed to sections of Clark’s study that she said backed her claim.

She said that Clark and colleagues “took just two transects each of 20 metres at Stone Island” and stated in the study that “only nine dead corals were found along transects 1 and 2, and that these corals were covered in mud and algae.”

She claimed Clark and colleagues had drawn “erroneous conclusions” from those transects.

Responding, Clark said the reason they described the numbers of dead corals they found was because they were specifically seeking dead samples to test a dating method.

Marohasy admitted the location of her filming was “just around the headland from the location of the two transects” but said she was planning further films that would show more live corals.

Arguments over what conclusions could be drawn from the 1890 and 1994 Stone Island photographs were the catalyst for the censuring and then sacking of the James Cook University academic Dr Peter Ridd, who had complained about their use. With the IPA’s backing, Ridd successfully sued his old university, which is appealing the case.