Bravo, Jennifer, it is iniquitous the way that some people want to ban these lovely chemicals. They are so good that it should be mandatory they be included with milk and other food products, so we can all get our fair share of them.
There is of course no link between the steadily increasing rate of cancer and these delicious dioxins and other pesticides.
Of course there is no link either with the fact that you are or were employed by the cane growers and are speaking out so courageously against any bans on pesticides.
You are known to have the interests of the population at heart and to stick up for them against any ill effects that agrifarming industries would have on them.

Sarnian, continuing in your vein, if we all did without agrifood like milk and sugar there would be no need for pesticides to raise and protect yields thereof, so it is high time we abolished all food production other than by use of chemicals.

Actually, Jen's piece is excellent and very well balanced. Duke's research is like that of so many "scientists" who to prove say the effects of acidification tip chunks of coral into tubs of hydrochloric or sulphuric acid, with very gratifying results.

[Deleted for abuse.]

As a PhD student doing GBR research I was initially very skeptical about this article. I have now had the opportunity to read the paper in Human and Ecological Risk Assessment and cannot find anything wrong with the analysis. It is amazing to me that the original work on mangroves used concentrations of diuron millions of times above those found in our rivers. I wonder how this got through the peer review process?

noosagirl, many of us are amazed at what gets through the peer review process.

All the peer review process is, is a review, it does not prove anything and does not even require reviewers to look at the same data the writers did - unless they really want to.

Some papers get approved within hours, which smacks of being set up before the event.

It just checks for "reasonableness" .. and how anyone can think the peer review process means anything more, is a constant source of amusement to many.

Scientists, like the rest of the community are just people with prejudices and faults and a desire to be liked and popular, part of a team, or herd and are certainly not saints. they also have mortgages to pay and kids to put through school, so of course are wary of upsetting or putting in danger their source or sources of income.

The days of accepting scientists are only capable of public good are gone, when organizations like CSIRO have to regularly beg for government funding, they are subject to its whims and desires, so the react accordingly.

The public are well aware of the foibles of science, since we have been forced to watch certain sciences go all political on us for some time now, to the point of publishing YouTube videos berating part of the community even.

Do we think they have political agenda, of course we do .. is the peer review process potentially political, of course it is?

Jennifer’s article is the only the tip of the iceberg regarding dubious science regarding the GBR. There have been various articles showing supposed decline of the GBR and almost all are remarkably weak. For example a paper in the leading journal Science, by Pandolfi and co-workers, claimed that the GBR was 28% of the way to ecological extinction. In my view this paper contained 4 major flaws each of which completely invalidated the analysis. Another recent paper by De’ath and co workers (2010) claims that reducing agricultural runoff will improve coral diversity by up to 33%. But this paper works on a completely unjustifiable comparison between data from reefs of the North and Southern GBR which were presumed to be identical before European settlement despite having totally different geographic settings. I could go on and list papers regarding sediment, calcification, fisheries and the effect of high temperature all of which have major problems.
We need a review of all this science. We need to employ a bunch of scientist whose sole aim is to challenge this work so that we can find out what is junk and what is solid.

Peter Ridd, JCU