There was a piece in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper last week in which Associate Professor David Paton from Adelaide University was quoted calling on the Federal Government to start actioning its pledge to put 500 gigalitres of water back into the Murray.
The piece also stated that:
“Bird numbers at the Coorong have fallen from 250,000 in the 1960s and 150,000 in the 1980s to an estimated 50,000.”
This is an incredibly dramatic decline. I wondered which species and why?
So I emailed David Paton on 29th September with the following text:
“I noted your piece today in Melbourne’s Age newspaper and reference to declining numbers of birds in the Coorong.
I was wondering whether or not this information is published and/or how I might access it. Could you possibly send me a copy of any reprints and/or reports with some of the data you quote. I am particularly interested in which species of birds are in decline and what the trend looks like on an annual and seasonal basis back to the 1960s.
I write for NSW rural weekly The Land and also the IPA.”
There was no reply.
The next day I phoned and left a message on his answering machine. No response. Yesterday I phoned again and again left a message on his answering machine.
In the afternoon Associate Professor Paton phoned me.
I explained that I had emailed, that I was interested in the reports and/or research papers on which the piece in The Age was based. I said I was particularly interested in information on the dramatic decline in bird numbers.
He said he was too busy to put together that sort of information for me.
I said I had previously tried to find information on bird numbers at the Coorong – unsuccessfully. The names of the reports and research papers would do – I could track them down.
He said he would send me the report on the plants of the Coorong. I said I would appreciate that, but I was particularly interested in numbers of birds.
I also suggested at some point that if he had time to talk to The Age, he should have time to provide me with some information.
He said that the information was provided to The Age by the Australian Conservation Foundation. The information in the newspaper article was not his responsibility but he would nevertheless send me an email with the relevant information later in the afternoon.
I am still waiting.
I phoned the journalist responsible for the article, Adam Morton. I said I had been speaking with David Paton and asked whether the information in his piece titled ‘Salinity killing Murray River Wetlands’ was from the Australian Conservation Foundation. Morton said it was based on a media release from the Australian Conservation Foundation and Environment Victoria but that he had phoned Paton to run the figures past him – that is the bird numbers as quoted in the media release. He said he had phoned Paton because he is the recognised expert in the field and has been working in the area for 20 years. He said Paton had confirmed the numbers were accurate.
David Paton has time for Kerry O’Brien, Alexandra de Blas and a 30 part series for radio 5UV, but not it seems to send me an email with references supporting information published in The Age or to put any of his publications up at his university homepage.
Some other University of Adelaide faculty members have lots of information at their homepages, for example Nicolas Stevens.
In December 2003 the IPA published my review of some key indicators of Murray River health, the Backgrounder is titled ‘Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment‘.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jennifer
I hope you are not surprised that Paton has trouble citing sources to back up his claims. In the GBR the scientists in league with the greens have a very sophisticated way of peddling scientific propoganda. Do you recall a travelling roadshow done by GBRMPA where a scientist from AIMS lectured farmers on type I and type II errors. Essentially the message was it doesn’t matter if we don’t have the proof we still need to act. Voila there is the reef plan. I think CSIRO,AIMS and CRC Reef have done nicely out of that deal. I have also recently heard from a little bird that the inshore reefs aint as bad as we have been led to believe too. The same is probably so for the birds on the Murray. Makes one wonder whats real sometimes. I guess its whoever is controlling the discourse.
Michael Crichton writes of the *double-blind study involving four separate teams—one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, a third assess the effect on patients, and a fourth analyzes results. The teams do not know each other, and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results.*
Charlie Munger also speaks of bias *The great example of Charles Darwin as he avoided confirmation bias, which has morphed into the extreme anti-confirmation-bias method of the “double blind” studies wisely required in drug research by the FDA*
Further on he says *As Lord Keynes pointed out about his exalted intellectual group at one of the greatest universities in the world, it was not the intrinsic difficulty of new ideas that prevented their acceptance.
Instead, the new ideas were not accepted because they were inconsistent with old ideas in place. What Keynes was reporting is that the human mind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, there’s an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm from getting in. The human mind tends strongly toward the same sort of result.
And so, people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong.
Moreover, this doesn’t just happen in social science departments, like the one that once thought Freud should serve as the only choice as a psychology teacher for Caltech. Holding to old errors even happens, although with less frequency and severity, in hard science departments.
We have no less an authority for this than Max Planck, Nobel laureate, finder of “Planck’s constant.” Planck is famous not only for his science but also for saying that even in physics the radically new ideas are seldom really accepted by the old guard.
Instead, said Planck, the progress is made by a new generation that comes along, less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. Indeed, precisely this sort of brain-blocking happened to a degree in Einstein. At his peak, Einstein was a great destroyer of his own ideas, but an older Einstein never accepted the full implications of quantum mechanics.
One of the most successful users of an antidote to first conclusion bias was Charles Darwin. He trained himself, early, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one.
The opposite of what Darwin did is now called confirmation bias, a term of opprobrium. Darwin’s practice came from his acute recognition of man’s natural cognitive faults arising from Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency.
He provides a great example of psychological insight correctly used to advance some of the finest mental work ever done.*
http://www.frips.com/cm.doc
Jennifier,
try:
Paton, D. 2000, `Bird ecology in the Coorong and Lakes region’, in Jensen, A., Good, M., Harvey, P., Tucker, P. & Long, M., River Murray Barrages Environmental Flows, report to Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT, Wetlands Management Program, Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Adelaide, South Australia, pp. 35-42.
and
Paton, D. 2002, `Migratory waders’, in Murray-Darling Basin Commission and Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation, The Murray mouth: exploring the implications of closure or restricted flow.
For a start and see where they lead you.
PS I don’t see why Paton should spend his time doing your research. You, should, as a trained scientist be able to this research yourself. In the past you’ve also displayed an inability to find information that others seem to be able to find easily – such as your accusation that an ex-Chief Scientist of NSW didn’t have science qualifications, and that run in with JQ over his writings on the MBD. All uni’s run courses on effective information searching – maybe you should sign up.
Simon,
If David Paton is going to claim deteriorating bird numbers and that there is data back to 1960 the information should be available – his uni homepage would seem like a good place for listing publications and whole reports/research papers.
You are suggesting the relevant information is in the above mentioned two reports – I hope so. And I hope I can find them on the MDBC website.
Certainly when anyone emails or phones me looking for a references or asking where to find information based on something I have written or said, I provide that information. It goes with being part of the public discussion.
In my view it is not good enough for academics to make claims on important policy issues and then refuse to provide the supporting information.
SimonC,
(in your view) why is David Paton not required to provide evidence to a scientific enquiry?
Apparently Charles Darwin encouraged scientific enquiry.
Also there are some internal reports that you might be able to access by contacting the agencies that they were written for. e.g.
Paton DC, Ziembicki M, Owen P, Hill B and Bailey C (2000) Distribution and abundance of migratory waders and their food in the estuarine areas of the Murray Mouth and patterns in the composition of sediments. Final report for the National Wetlands Program, Environment Australia.
Paton DC, Bailey C, Hill B, Lewis T, and Ziembicki M (2001) Study of the link between migratory bird number in the Coorong region, the composition of their mudflat habitat and the available food supply. Final report. MDBC project R 10016.
After reading your article about David Paton not responding to you – all I can say is that he does not have time to jump when you say to, he actually spends months each year collecting the data, sifting through mud, wading shoulder deep etc and thirdly and finally, he does not trust the media – all I can say, I don’t blame him!
As a student of David Paton’s, we infact had a lecture on the Coorong and it’s declining bird species numbers, if you simply use GOOGLE SCHOLAR you will find hundreds of papers not only by paton but on the conditon of the Coorong in general. Do you not think it might be absurd for a university lecturer to give you a hand during exam’s and when major papers are due, let alone Honors students papers need marking?
maybe you should do some effective study yourself…..
Ha! You have to be kidding.
My question is WHY WOULD HE MAKE IT UP? Its offensive to me that you are making this accusation. All this continuous slagging of scientists with their own agendas. Guess what, because of what the research they know how bad the problem is so they do have their own political agenda – just like the host of this blog site.
Firstly, while i do not pretend that i have the expertise anywhere close to David i do know that one species of bird that he is referring to is the SHARP-TAILED SAND PIPER. It is a migratory shore bird from Siberia. The dramatic decline of this bird is an international embarrassment for Australia which will become evident after this months Ramsar Convention. You are correct in pointing out that this data has not yet been published – know why? There is no money to publish it – its not a priority.