We hope nothing bad happens to these scientists who are making a point of not contributing to mere hysteria around climate change:
Over the last decade, several high-profile scientific studies have reported that tropical fish living in coral reefs are adversely affected by ocean acidification caused by climate change — that is, they behave oddly and are attracted to predators as levels of carbon dioxide dissolved from air pollution increase.
But now new research suggests that isn’t the case.
In fact, in the most exhaustive study yet of the impacts of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fish, headed up in Australia and co-authored by two Université de Montréal researchers, it turns out fish behaviour is not affected at all.
“The past decade has seen many high-profile studies that have found alarming effects of ocean acidification on coral reef fish behaviour,” with some reporting that “fish become attracted to the smell of predators in acidified waters,” said lead author Timothy Clark, an associate professor at Deakin University’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences in Geelong, a seaside city near Melbourne, Australia.
But when they tried to re-do those earlier studies with many of the same species, and by crunching the data in a new analysis, Clark and his team of Canadian and Scandinavian scientists — including UdeM biologists Sandra Binning and Dominique Roche — arrived at very different results.
It turns out the original results couldn’t be replicated.
University of Montreal, “Debunking previous studies that say tropical fish are behaving oddly” at ScienceDaily
Fancy that. This scene from climate change hysteria couldn’t be replicated.
But then how likely is it that haywire fish would actually be attracted to predators instead of just behaving in weird ways, getting themselves eaten?
But hey, here’s what the competition is doing: 800 Russian journal papers retracted: The most interesting question is undiscussed. To the extent that science is global, tolerated fraud in one milieu taints an entire discipline. Recall the smug people who think that science is an infinitely superior way of knowing, Won’t that be an increasingly harder sell as more people become aware of these tip-of-the-iceberg “bombshell” revelations?