Day: September 10, 2024

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

The story of fake research findings was published at the journal Science entitled Star marine ecologist committed misconduct, university says.  Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

Finding against Danielle Dixson vindicates whistleblowers
who questioned high-profile work on ocean acidification

A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.

Dixson is known as a highly successful scientist and fundraiser. She obtained her Ph.D. at James Cook University (JCU),  Townsville in Australia, in 2012; worked as a postdoc and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 4 years; and in 2015 started her own group at UD’s marine biology lab in Lewes, a small town on the Atlantic Coast. She received a $1.05 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2016 and currently has a $750,000 career grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She presented her research at a 2015 White House meeting and has often been featured in the media, including in a 2019 story in Science.

Together with one of her Ph.D. supervisors, JCU marine biologist Philip Munday, Dixson pioneered research into the effects on fish of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which cause the oceans to acidify. In a series of studies published since 2009 they showed that acidification can disorient fish, lead them to swim toward chemical cues emitted by their predators, and affect their hearing and vision. Dixson’s later work focused on coral reef ecology, the subject of her Science paper.

Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.

The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.

Several former members of Dixson’s lab supported the whistleblowers’ request for an investigation. One of them, former postdoc Zara Cowan, was the first to identify the many duplications in the data file for the now-retracted Science paper. Another, former Ph.D. student Paul Leingang, first brought accusations against Dixson to university officials in January 2020. He left the lab soon after and joined the broader group of whistleblowers.

Leingang, who had been at Dixson’s lab since 2016, says he had become increasingly suspicious of her findings, in part because she usually collected her fluming data alone. In November 2019 he decided to secretly track some of Dixson’s activities. He supplied the investigation with detailed notes, chat conversations, and tweets by Dixson to show that she did not spend enough time on her fluming studies to collect the data she was jotting down in her lab notebooks.

The investigative panel found Leingang’s account convincing and singled him out for praise. “It is very difficult for a young scholar seeking a Ph.D. to challenge their advisor on ethical grounds,” the draft report says. “The Committee believes it took great bravery for him to come forward so explicitly. The same is true of the other members of the laboratory who backed the Complainant’s action.”

UD “did a decent investigation. I think it’s one of the first universities that we’ve seen actually do that,” says ecophysiologist Fredrik Jutfelt of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, one of the whistleblowers. “So that’s really encouraging.” But he and others in the group are disappointed that the committee appears to have looked at only seven of the 20 Dixson papers they had flagged as suspicious. They also had hoped UD would release the committee’s final report and detail any sanctions against Dixson. “That is a shame,” Jutfelt says.

Inventing Facts to Promote an Imaginary Crisis

Legacy and social media are awash with warnings about hydrocarbon emissions making the oceans acidic and threatening all ocean life from plankton up to whales.  For example:

Ocean acidification: A wake-up call in our waters – NOAA

Canada’s oceans are becoming more acidic – Pêches et Océans Canada

The Ocean Is Getting More Acidic—What That Actually Means– National Geographic

What Is Ocean Acidification? – NASA Climate Kids

Ocean acidification: why the Earth’s oceans are turning to acid – OA-ICC

Etc, etc., etc.

With the climatism hype far beyond any observations, marine biologists have stepped up to make an industry out of false evidence.  They are forced to do so because reality does not conform to their beliefs.  A good summary of acidification hoaxes comes from Jim Steele Un-refutable Evidence of Alarmists’ Ocean Acidification Misinformation in 3 Easy Lessons posted at WUWT.  Points covered include:

♦  The Undisputed Science

♦  The Dissolving Snail Shell Hoax

♦  The Reduced Calcification Hoax

More detail on the bogus fish behavior studies is also found at WUWT: James Cook University Researchers Refuted: “Ocean Acidification Does not Impair” Fish behaviour

A brief explanation debunking the notion of CO2 causing ocean “acidification” is here:

Background Post Shows Alarmist Claims Not Supported in IPCC WG1 References

Headlines Claim, But Details Deny

Update Sept. 9 Response to Brian Catt

Below I note that claimed %s of increasing acidity involve changes in parts per trillion for H ion in water.  Further, the relation between atmospheric CO2 and ocean pH needs to be understood.

The source is Cohen and Happer (2015), where these conclusions are written:

This minimalist discussion already shows how hard it is to scare informed people with ocean
acidification, but, alas, many people are not informed. For example:

• The oceans would be highly alkaline with a pH of about 11.4, similar to that of household ammonia, if there were no weak acids to buffer the alkalinity. Almost all of the buffering is provided by dissolved CO2, with very minor additional buffering from boric acid, silicic acid and other even less important species.

• As shown in Fig. 1, doubling atmospheric CO2 from the current level of 400 ppm to 800 ppm only decreases the pH of ocean water from about 8.2 to 7.9. This is well within the day-night fluctuations that already occur because of photosynthesis by plankton and less than the pH decreases with depth that occur because of the biological pump and the dissolution of calcium carbonate precipitates below the lysocline.

• As shown in Fig. 2, doubling atmospheric CO2 from the current level of 400 ppm to 800 ppm only decreases the carbonate-ion concentration, [CO2−3], by about 30%. Ocean surface waters are already supersaturated by several hundred per cent for formation of CaCO3 crystals from Ca2+ and CO2−3. So scare stories about dissolving carbonate shells are nonsense.

• As shown in Fig. 7, the ocean has only absorbed 1/3 or less of the CO2 that it would eventually absorb when the concentrations of CO2 in the deep oceans came to equilibrium with surface concentrations. Effects like that of the biological pump and calcium carbonate dissolution below the lysocline allow the ocean to absorb substantially more than the amount that would be in chemical-equilibrium with the atmosphere.

• Over most of the Phanerozoic, the past 550 million years, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been measured in thousands of parts per million, and life flourished in both the oceans and on land. This is hardly surprising, given the relative insensitivity of ocean pH to large changes in CO2 concentrations that we have discussed above, and given the fact that the pH changes that do occur are small compared to the natural variations of ocean pH in space and time.