Peter Ridd

Well, sometimes they’re told to shut up. And if they don’t, sometimes they get fired. And after that, sometimes they get told to shut up about being fired.

That’s the gist of what’s happened to Dr. Peter Ridd, ex-professor of marine science at James Cook University in Australia. Ridd had the temerity to point out, in a chapter for the book Climate Change: The Facts 2017, that studies on which the claim that rising atmospheric CO2 concentration—blamed also for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming—was to blame for declining rates of calcification in the Great Barrier Reef were fatally flawed.

“Coral reefs are dying because you drive an SUV or switch on your electric lights!” That’s the idea.

What Ridd pointed out was that the studies fallaciously mixed two datasets, one from a very large and very old batch of coral and the other from some very small and very young corals, the two sorts with predictably significant differences in growth patterns, into a single new set that gave the impression that calcification (essentially, growth) rates had been steady for a very long time and then had suddenly fallen off a cliff. (Call it the inverted hockey stick.)

What did his employer, James Cook University, do? Well, what any defender of science would do: It congratulated Ridd and gave him a promotion for doing what every good scientist, believing in the motto of the Royal Society (nullius in verba, “on the word of no one”), should do: test claims.

Except no.  Instead, JCU accused him of not being collegial and, when he refused to shut up, fired him. In short, it decided to get rid of Ridd.

Jennifer Marohasy gives the details of this sordid attempt to silence a good scholar.

Climate alarmism at work, always championing academic freedom and freedom of speech!

Update, April 23, 2019

Peter Ridd sued James Cook University, and the court ruled in his favor on every count. See here for details.