http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans.htmlAnd as an aside, I'd like to quote from another forum (Cruisers' Forum) a gentleman named Jerry Woodward, who offered a nice synopsis about how the scientific method works, and comparison to media driven 'junk science.' I offer this in the hopes that those will at least somewhat gain understanding about the process:
"As a PhD immunologist, with an active research lab, I am constantly amazed and appalled at the amount of "junk" science out there and the inordinate amount of press often heaped upon a single poorly conducted study, often times not published in a peer reviewed journal. At the other end of the spectrum, I'm equally incensed to see non-scientists attempt to discredit large bodies of scientific research because it goes against their moral or political beliefs: global warming, embryonic stem cells and evolution are a few examples.
So, when I read this topic, I initially thought this was another case of typical junk science. However, National Geographic usually doesn't fall into the trap of reporting junk. So, I looked up the article and checked out the journal. Environmental Health Perspectives has an impact factor of 5.64, which is very respectable for a peer reviewed journal and places it as number 1 among 160 environmental peer reviewed journals. This means that the article was subject to intense scrutiny and review by experts in the field. This paper is a serious piece of scientific inquiry, with state of the art methodology, appropriate controls and statistical analysis. It represents a considerable amount of work and to imply that these guys did this just to get a free trip to the tropics reflects a serious lack of appreciation of the time and effort required to complete a study like this, and get it published in a high quality journal.
To the poster who implied that this has been "debunked", I would echo Gord's response: what is your evidence? In fact, I checked, and there has been no refutation of any of the claims of this work so far in the peer reviewed literature.
So, does this mean we should take this work as gospel, that the work is beyond reproach, that the conclusions are iron clad? Of course not. No single piece of scientific work in the literature is without its faults. This is the part of science that most people don't really seem to understand. Science is continual process of experimentation, publishing of results, and then replication by independent groups. The more the results are replicated, the more it becomes generally accepted. If the results can’t be replicated, it will die a silent death. Often times, there is a completely unanticipated finding that sends the field into a whole new direction. For example, this study includes the surprising finding that these agents reactivate viruses in the Zooxanthellae. The question is why? How does this work? Might this give us a clue as to how other environmental aromatic hydrocarbons affect corals? In other words, the ultimate benefit of this research might have little to do with sunscreens.
The posters who are skeptical because of the dilution effect raise a very legitimate question. But this gets more to the interpretation of the results, rather than the data itself. Of course this study doesn’t say that sunscreens are killing our reefs, but it does open up the possibility that these compounds may be involved. Only further studies will shed light on this. Many of these compounds are not water soluble and thus may be concentrated in marine organisms as well.
Sorry for the long-winded post, but I feel strongly that people need to recognize legitimate science for what it is: it’s one piece of a very large and complex jigsaw puzzle. We also need to loudly denounce junk science when we see it. But this is not one of those.
Jerry"
(the above was replied to a discussion regarding the effects of sunscreen on coral reefs.)
