Trust the science

The lack of firm scientific evidence that seismic testing is dangerous is evidently not enough to allay the concerns of the green movement. By Nick Cater.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, a fresh reason not to drill for undersea oil and gas has been dredged up by the Greens.

Seismic testing has been carried out in the Great Australian Bight since February 1960 apparently without mishap. It maps subsurface geology to predict where oil and gas wells should be drilled.

For the green movement, however, seismic is just another scare word to add to the lexicon of fear. At a Senate committee hearing this month, Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson pored over a submission on the supposed dangers of seismic testing authored by Dr Natasha Deen.

Dr Deen, founder of Save our Coast, cites claims that seismic blasting damages the hearing of penguins up to 100km away. Seismic blasts are said to cause soft-tissue damage in fish while turtles and squid had been shown to exhibit “strong startle responses”. People living near the coast risked being affected by solastalgia, a form of melancholia said to be induced by environmental change.

Dr Deen’s improbable claims might have slipped by unnoticed were it not for the presence of former country vet Senator Sam McMahon.

“Can you tell me what published scientific papers Dr Deen has actually produced on the issue?” McMahon asked Save Our Coast director Peter Morris.

Morris: “No I don’t know that there were any that she has actually produced. Her quest was to learn as much as she could and she’s located many, many sources.”

McMahon: “So she’s been doing her own personal education? She’s not actually a researcher?”

Morris: “No, the term ‘researcher’ as she’s using it there is that she’s attempting to learn information about seismic testing and she’s drawn on research done by credible scientific bodies.”

McMahon: “Can you tell me what Dr Deen actually has her PhD in and what scientific institution she works for?”

Morris: “She’s not a scientist, she’s in the medical field.”

McMahon: “My understanding is that she’s actually a dentist.”

Morris: “Yeah, I know she’s a dentist.”

McMahon: “So she’s just effectively a normal person who doesn’t have any scientific credentials in this area.”

To be fair to Dr Deen, who couldn’t attend the hearing, dentists are not entirely ignorant of drilling, nor are they insensitive to the risks of soft-tissue damage. Yet if Whish-Wilson had genuinely been looking for scientific evidence, the committee’s time might have been better spent examining the submission of the CSIRO, which found that the evidence of seismic damage to fish and invertebrates was qualitative and inconclusive.

The same lack of scientific rigour was apparent in the New Zealand government’s decision to ban seismic testing last year. The decision was widely criticised by marine scientists as unnecessary and unjustified.

“They’ve kind of put 10 per cent of their efforts into gathering good data and 90 per cent into modelling really bad data,” said marine biologist Professor Liz Slooten, of the University of Otago. “Statisticians call that polishing turds.”

Sadly, turd-polishing is becoming the new scientific method in this post-empirical world. Environmental scientists seldom test findings by attempting to falsify them, putting their energy instead into buttressing prior assumptions that uphold supposedly self-evident truths. In doing so they commit what Francis Bacon described in 1620 as “the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives”.

Environmental science has been mangling data in search of predetermined outcomes since the early 1960s. It gained momentum with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s influential book, Silent Spring, with its controversial assumption that humans were an invasive species and a danger to nature. As American biochemist Robert White-Stevens said at the time, “if we were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the Earth”.

From such dismal beginnings, environmental science was compromised by the activists who plundered it for propaganda. Unlike other disciplines, which sought to fill gaps in knowledge, environmentalists set out to exploit them by scaring people about the risks of the unknown. The burden of proof was reversed. Genetically modified crops, for example, were banned in Europe not because they were proved to be dangerous, but because no one had proved they were safe. It was not enough to mitigate the known risks when unknown risks might be lurking somewhere. This deeply pessimistic outlook has dogged human progress ever since, strangling innovation and robbing humankind of the technology that could have made energy cleaner and more efficient.

Whish-Wilson has put a motion to the Senate to ban seismic testing, citing what he mischaracterises as the precautionary principle. The paucity of firm scientific evidence that seismic testing is dangerous is not enough to allay concern. The onus is placed on resources companies that wish to use seismic testing to prove it is safe not just from the known risks, but the unknown as well. “Just how much harm it is doing is unknown, including to other marine life such as dolphins and whales?” he asks in a press release.

More than 60 years of seismic testing around the world, including in Bass Strait, might suggest it has little if any effect on sea life or the holistic wellbeing of coastal dwellers. Few Australians outside the technical environment of the resources industry would have had any idea it was going on.

Yet it made possible the supply of abundant gas from Bass Strait, which has powered industry in Victoria for decades. Without seismic testing, oil and gas companies would have to sink many more test wells to identify the locations where production should commence. Drilling more wells multiplies the risks. It also adds substantially to the cost and delays the process, making many fields uneconomical. That ultimately is the aim of this pseudo-science that Whish-Wilson and his colleagues embrace, not in pursuit of the truth, but to enforce their misanthropic doctrine.