CQUniversity adjunct research fellow Jennifer Marohasy is set to confront what she calls 'virtual science' when she delivers a plenary paper during the 16th Australian Agronomy Conference* in Armidale in mid-October.

Delivering a paper co-authored with colleague Dr John Abbot, Dr Marohasy will address assumptions concerning ‘chemical-free' agriculture, challenging the way decisions are made and stressing the importance of being consisent, logical and sceptical.

Dr Jennifer Marohasy

"We live in an age that assumes wherever there is industry there is environmental harm and to question this, for example to question whether agricultural run-off is causing harm to the Great Barrier Reef .. I'm often regarded as a heretic just for asking the question," she says in a preview blog for the conference.

"Key published papers underpinning the current reef research effort have been shown to be illogical. There have been correlations made between the presence of chemicals and harm.

"For example, in the case of diuron and mangrove die-back, the chemical was present in a form that could not cause harm. It was much more likely that a natural flood event was the cause of the mangrove dieback that was blamed on the pesticide.

"Because people could find the presence of the chemical there was this desire to link it to the dieback. Subsequent research proved the original assumptions and actual published papers to be wrong but those rebuttals have mostly been ignored.

"In another case there was a campaign linking pesticide run-off from sugar cane with the death of dugongs but subsequent research showed the chemical was not a pesticide at all, it was a naturally occurring dioxin and despite media headlines to the contrary the dugongs were not harmed by it and couldn't have been harmed by it.

"While it may be impossible for a case to be made for an impact from agricultural run-off on the Great Barrier Reef using normal science, normal experiments and observations, the case is increasingly being made through the use of computer models.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be invested in proving an impact from agriculture on the Great Barrier Reef using computer models in what I call virtual science."

* This conference will be hosted by the University of New England.