HI Jerwin, thanks for the link. The memo is included within the post above. It’s embedded in the Huffpost article.
Anyway, I think that his study does reflect what the memo said.
This excerpt is how he closes his discussion. He starts off by mentioning environmental change, and then mentions the PAH levels. He also states that what’s warranted is “much further research consideration” - not a direct conclusion about the effect that the PAH levels have had. When he later discussed the research in interviews, the memo says he made a direct conclusion.
Environmental change driving both shifts in the physical and chemical conditions of aquatic ecosystems, coupled with modern sedimentary PAH concentrations several-fold greater than “natural” background levels, warrants much further research consideration. Nevertheless, considering predictions of future climate warming and accelerating oil sands development, there exists great potential for Athabasca oil sands ecosystems to experience marked changes in their function and ecological organization.
As I said, he didn’t test any lakes a great distance away from the dust blow over, so he has no direct evidence that the PAH levels are affecting the zooplankton in the way he interprets. He’s missing a control because there are two variables that he notes (global warming and PAH), and if he wants to make a stronger claim about PAH levels, he needs to test what’s been going on at the same time where they exist in “normal” levels. Our climate had dramatic shifts at certain decades, so you can’t just throw the two together. He’s making an unproven assumption. This excerpt is from his conclusion:
Daphnia, a sentinel zooplankter, has not yet exhibited decreases in relative abundance associated with increased PAH loadings through time, despite potential toxicity enhancement of PAHs by other stressors. Rather, climate-driven primary production increases may have trumped some effects of oil sands-derived PAHs on at least Daphnia populations. Nonetheless, several striking PAH trajectories recorded in sedimentary profiles reflect the decades-long impacts of oil sands development on lake ecosystems, including remote Namur Lake. This temporal PAH pattern was not recognized previously by industry-funded oil sands monitoring programs.
So Daphnia hasn’t decreased even though PAH levels have increased over time. There’s an absence of evidence, and he wants to argue that as his proof of a problem. He can’t unless he also checked clean lakes.
(emphasis mine)
Unfortunately with our current federal government that is actually a big if. Harper’s government has a tendency to say things that aren’t exactly true, usually to smear others. It’s not many political leaders who have international bodies of jurists calling on them to apologize to their Chief Justices, for example, but Harper managed to be one.
The problem is that given this government’s past behaviour this story is just all to believable. They are the boys who cried, “people who disagree with us are unscrupulous” so its little wonder people jumped on this story. It will be sad if the details work out that they were actually right in this case because they’ll try to extrapolate that to say they were right about everything else too.
Hi Humabella 
A link was provided to the actual study, and I wrote a response to that as well. It’s directly above your comment. I believe that they were fair. They only said that he sounded like he was “lacking neutrality” and that what he said publicly didn’t match what his own study found. In his own discussion, Smol says that what is warranted is “further research consideration” - not a marked statement about what he found. When interviews were given, the story was changed to be a “smoking gun”.
Smol failed to make any comparison between pristine lakes and contaminated lakes, but allowed two variables in interpreting the study (global warming and PAH levels). He should only have been discussing global warming until he did further tests at pristine lakes. His claims were premature. The only recommendation that was made in the internal memo was to perform further studies. They agree with his findings in his study, but not his actions in public.
Well, I think the most important line in the study is actually the opening:
“The absence of well-executed environmental monitoring in the Athabasca oil sands has necessitated the use of indirect approaches to determine background conditions of fresh water ecosystems before development of on of the Earth’s largest energy deposits.”
It’s quite possible that Smol wanted the study to show something that the government doesn’t think it did. I’m 100% certain that the government wanted the study to show something and would mischaracterize the study if it didn’t.
Government memos are written with an intended audience in mind, and their messages are often tailored to be things that audience wants to hear. “A lack of neutrality” is exactly the kind of thing the government would accuse a scientist of if they didn’t like their findings, regardless of whether it was warranted. “Further research” is a coded excuse for doing nothing.
I do agree that, having read the original memo, “secretly smearing” is a strong turn of phrase. I’d be a little more annoyed by it if it wasn’t exactly the kind of phrase my government would use at the drop of a hat if someone disagreed with them. (I apparently lack neutrality)
Unfortunately, Namur wasn’t pristine. Oops.
Jerwin, you know what I mean. He only tested lakes directly within the influence of the mining, not at any distance away from it. He wanted to test contaminated lakes (where PAH levels increased dramatically) and get results from those. Just read his report.
He’s making a claim based on an absence of evidence. He expected to find a drop in zooplankton levels, but didn’t find that. He’s claiming the even levels came from increased temperatures (global warming). So he needs to get results from lakes where PAH levels aren’t increasing at “at least twice normal background levels” and find an increase in zooplankton levels, or he hasn’t found anything at all.
Do you suppose this was a matter of the authors running out of funding, and publishing what they had?
Because you didn’t reply, I’m not sure if that was to me or a general question. I’ll try to answer best I can.
The report he published was a completed study, but it drew conclusions using an extra variable to explain why his findings weren’t what he’d expected them to be. He originally only sought to examine contaminated lakes, and expected to find a reduction in the population of certain “bell weather” zooplankton living in those lakes near mining. He checked exactly what he intended to check - sediment layers from those lakes showing a historical record of the zooplankton populations and PAH levels. He wanted to see the populations drop around the time the mining started.
He didn’t find what he expected to find. The population levels were fairly constant, and didn’t drop in proportion to the levels of contamination. To explain this lack of finding, he then used global warming as a secondary variable saying that warmer temperatures must have held the populations constant.
But you can’t do that.
If you want to make that kind of claim you then have to make another test where only one variable would have had an effect - in this case, global warming. He needed to take counts at clean lakes before making any real claim about ties between the zooplankton populations and PAH levels. (He has no record of zooplankton populations during the same time period at lakes where PAH contamination was not a factor.) If he wants to claim that global warming counteracted PAH levels, he needs to show increased levels at clean lakes.
Anyway - It wasn’t what he published in his report that they complained about in their memo. If you read the memo, they agree with his report’s general findings, and they also recommend further testing. So they’re not trying to block further testing. It really doesn’t look like anyone in government was blocking funding. I don’t have direct info about funding, but the memo doesn’t state that funding for this topic should be closed - it says exactly the opposite.
What they complained about was the unofficial release of the report, and him making the combined claim in interviews. He did both of those things.
If you can get an unencumbered copy of Global Warming triggers the loss of a key Arctic refugium, I’d be much obliged–the lead author is JP Smol, and it appears, from the abstract, to expand on the “global warming changes zooplankton” hypothesis. Different ecosystem, similar techniques.
I can only view the abstract, not the full paper, without registering. From your link I was able to pull up his Data Supplement. Just follow your link and click on “Data Supplement” under “This Article”.
That supplement shows the testing in the arctic was on diatoms which are phytoplankton not zooplankton. (“Planktonic diatoms” and “Benthic fragilarioid taxa” are diatoms.) So the study in the arctic wasn’t measuring the same thing as the study here. They aren’t related.
How much longer do we have to keep hearing about these assholes, and please tell me it’s likely that you’ll all collectively boot these motherfucker out at the first opportunity?
The Tories have never had a majority popular vote under Harper that I know of. But the first-past-the-post system helps keep them in. Of course, in a parliamentary system the power’s not supposed to be this concentrated, but along with censoring scientists the PM’s been censoring everyone else too.
Fingers crossed it will happen next election.
FUCKING DAMMIT ANOTHER YEAR.
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