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Dr. Goreau's response to an article titled:
On Issues Like Global Warming and Evolution, Scientists Need to
Speak Up
I presented the first data showing that coral bleaching could be predicted from satellite sea surface temperature alone, 20 years ago in 1990, at Al Gore's Senate committee hearing, not at the White House. I was the last in a series of speakers, all the rest had just said that coral bleaching was a new phenomenon, that from their field work they were worried as hell about it, but they had no real idea why it was happening or what could be done. After I showed the unambiguous data, Al Gore then asked me "Dr. Goreau, in your opinion is high temperature the cause of bleaching?". I replied "Yes, that's what the data shows". Gore then asked each of the other panelists the same question, and once they had seen my graphs they all, one by one, said "Yes, that's what the data seems to show". Our study, which had been done with raw data provided to me the people who ran NOAA's satellite sea surface temperature data analysis for the Caribbean, was then submitted as a NOAA technical report, as seemed fitting. They spent several years "reviewing" it, could find no flaw in the data or analysis, and then banned it, according to high NOAA officials, under orders from the PR Office in George Bush's White House (that was father of a bush, not son of a bush). We were not able to get it published for four years, and then only in a book. We never heard from Al Gore again. What was surprising was the vicious reaction by coral reef "scientists" who had never looked at the data themselves. I was accused of all sorts of nasty things, and it has not gone away. Now of course that everybody accepts that high temperature causes coral bleaching, nobody ever cites the original papers that Ray Hayes and I wrote with various colleagues, defining the HotSpot method for coral bleaching, which has proven accurate for 20 years now. Instead they cite papers written by other "politically acceptable" people a decade or more later that quote our conclusions and analysis word for word with no reference or citation, in other words plain plagiarization. That is to say, those who denied and led the opposition, now claim to have fathered the idea. Honesty is not their strong point.......... Tom Goreau |
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