In this interview, Dr Peter Ridd appeared on 2GB Weekends with Luke Grant to discuss the IPA’s research on the Great Barrier Reef.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Luke Grant:
Today, I reckon a beauty. Dr. Peter Ridd, physicist, author, former professor and head of physics at James Cook University. His consultancy work at the university led to the creation of specialist instruments used to measure water quality. The profits of that work was then used to fund student scholarships and research projects. Sounds like a pretty good bloke, right. Over his career, he’s published more than a hundred papers in international science journals and guided many PhD students to success. His most recent book, Reef Heresy? Science, Research and The Great Barrier Reef takes a hard look at the climate change science and debate. But that’s not the whole story, because you’ll remember when he had a different view about some of the data was being published. James Cook University thought to themselves, “Well, we can’t have that.” And Peter Ridd became a most newsworthy subject when he probably preferred not to. Let’s find out more about Dr. Peter who’s on the line. Peter, thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
Thank you.
Luke Grant:
So where did it begin? Did you always want to work in this space? How did you find yourself… I know it’s a big question and we haven’t got a lot of time to get the complete answer, but you ended up at James Cook University how?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
By accident. I was a physicist. There’s a whole lot of physics in the ocean. So we ended up working on the Great Barrier Reef, looking at how water gets hot, how mud gets out onto the reef or how it doesn’t get out onto the reef. And eventually with some geologists were coming to the conclusion that the Great Barrier Reef was nowhere near as damaged as everybody was making out. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people were making out. And of course that was fairly unpopular at the time, but it’s in the data. I mean, even the latest data, we’ve got more coral in the last five years. Every single one of the last five years we’ve had more coral than all of the previous 35 years, so the reef’s actually in pretty good shape.
Luke Grant:
So we keep hearing that the UN is looking at the reef and assessing things and they’re about to delist it from UNESCO or whatever it is. And it seems, and there’s a lot of this about. The end of the world stuff, but the end of the reef stuff has certainly been there. And you’re saying that over the last five years, more coral than ever, right.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
That’s correct. And we’ve had all these supposedly devastating hot water bleaching events, well, it turns out the coral that’s come back with huge amounts. So we’ve got twice as much coral now as we had 12 or 15 years ago. The type of coral we got the most of now is the type that’s most susceptible to the hot water. So it completely proves that the hot water bleaching hasn’t had any significant effect on the Great Bower Reef. Look, the Great Bower Reef goes through big cycles. You get a cyclone, you can literally lose 90% of the coral on a particular reef, but it always comes back. It’s been doing it since forever.
Luke Grant:
Did you always, as a younger person, have an interest in this area? Was there a time where you wanted to be, I don’t know, a police officer or something else?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
No, I’ve always been interested in science, but I was also once the president of the Wildlife Preservation Society in North Queensland in council. So I was on the green end of the political spectrum. But my work was showing that, well, actually a lot of these things we shouldn’t be worrying about. Now there’s plenty of environmental issues in Australia, like, noxious weeds and feral animals that a lot of people in the city don’t know about. But the Great Barrier Reef and even climate change is really way down the list of things that we should be worrying about. Yes, we should always worry, especially about the reef because it’s so precious, but actually we’re doing pretty well at the moment.
Luke Grant:
There’s an inquiry on now, and I know you’ve made a submission to it, a select committee on information integrity on climate change and energy. And even Peter, in my opinion, even the existence of such an inquiry indicates to me the preparedness by the political class to accept that if you don’t go along with the bureaucracies and others, then there must be something weird about you. Do we need to have this committee? I sense you might think it’s not needed.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
It’s a terrible idea, but it actually demonstrates they’re running scared. So what they want to do is they’re looking into all the big money that supposedly pays people like me, even though now because they’re fired from the university, I work for nothing. But they’re running scared because they can see that in fact, that the average Australian is only prepared to pay about $2 a week on climate change, right. So they don’t really think it’s that of a worry. Yes, they’re a bit worried about climate change. I’m even worried a bit about climate change. One of the submissions to it from the universities, and of course the universities all want to silence people like me, found that 67% of people believe that whole climate change thing is about elitism and hypocrisy by the elites. So the response to this is, “Well, clearly people aren’t me and the other thousands of unpaid sceptics around Australia are having too much effect, so they’ve got to shut us down.” And that’s what this inquiry is about. It’s a scandal.
Luke Grant:
Right. You see, there are examples of where, if you want to do the right thing, you can. For example, if you buy an air ticket, there’s a thing called carbon offsets. Do you know if people think, “Yeah, I want to do that.”
Dr. Peter Ridd:
Yep. Only 3% of people tick that box. So that says, yeah, people are a bit worried about climate change, but most people won’t tick that box because look, they know that China has built a thousand power stations literally, this is cold power stations, in the time we’ve closed a lot of ours down. So they know that this isn’t going to have effect. They also have an intrinsic feeling that climate is not a catastrophe. Just look out the window today. Is it a catastrophe? There has been a reduction of 98% in the number of people who have died from extreme weather events in the last a hundred years. So climate is not a catastrophe. It was way more of a catastrophe for people a hundred years ago.
Luke Grant:
Yeah, we’ve got this ability to adapt, haven’t we? It’s a remarkable thing that humans have. And when thrown a challenge, normally, we find a way of dealing with it. Now that doesn’t mean that you can be reckless and one day we’ll find a cure, but it’s kind of what we do, isn’t it?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
Precisely. I mean, the worst cyclone we’ve had killing people in Australia was 1899 when it wiped out the Torres Strait Island Lugging Fleet, right. And of course they didn’t even know there was a cyclone there. They just got clobbered by this thing, the biggest cyclone. It was huge. There was about a 12 foot, three or four metre tidal surge that came with the thing. Nowadays, we’d have warning a week before, “Watch out, there’s a cyclone coming down.” So yes, we are adapting. We can adapt. That doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t problems there, but we can adapt to it.
Luke Grant:
When you’re in a laboratory or your study or whatever it might be. And I’m going back a few years now, and I mean, you’re not persuaded by politics, you’re looking at science, you’re looking at data and you’re making judgments, but you can’t help hear what people are saying. Was there one clear moment when you said, “I’m looking at numbers here and what’s being said is completely different,” and do you remember that time?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
There’s been a few occasions when we were looking at the effect of farming on the Great Barrier Reef when mud coming off farms was killing the reef and all the data was showing absolutely categorically that it wasn’t. And yet when you read all the stuff coming out of the big institution, they were saying that it was. Now, my group took more measurements on this than all the other groups put together. We were the experts. We’ve been totally ignored. And that’s when I started to realise that actually the whole scientific setup is actually a little bit corrupt, unfortunately.
Luke Grant:
So you’re then going to say… Well, we’ve just got to have a pause here because we’ve found legitimately that something that doesn’t quite fit. When you start to put that forward. I mean, you live this, Peter, thank goodness for people like you. You weren’t persuaded by the noise. You said, “No, hang on. These are the numbers, this is the data.” Was it almost immediate that you thought, “Wow, there’s a fair bit of pushback here”? Or did it happen over time? How did it play out?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
Well, it actually took a few years of a few events. Then when it happened again and again, and it culminated when there was a reef up here near Bowen and the guys were saying there was no car on this and they were saying it was all killed by farmers. And I thought that was very strange. So I sent my guys who worked for me, “Check out that reef, we found a fabulous reef, fabulous coral on a reef that was supposed to have no coral.” And I made a point about this, and I got clobbered with a misconduct allegation from the university just for pointing out that the reef had a huge amount of coral when all the institutions were saying that there was no coral. So you start to realise, oh my goodness, we’ve got a real problem with these institutions here, because they’re not actually looking at, we’re not talking about data, we’re talking about a thing the size of a reef, whether or not it’s got coral, it either has or it hasn’t, and it had.
Luke Grant:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what about, there must be, if there’s you Peter with respect, there must be other scientists who’ve stumbled on things that thought, “Hang on,” and get shut down. Do you fear that’s happened?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
Oh, it’s totally happened. I know quite a few scientists who will not stick their head up above the parapet. I mean, I was getting on, so it didn’t matter, but I was fine, but if you were 35-years-old and you’ve got a mortgage, you can’t afford to do it. So I know plenty of scientists who are in that situation. And actually when you read their papers really, really carefully, although they apparently sign up to all the catastrophism, when you read the actual data, there’s these little hints where they’re saying, “I don’t really believe this is a catastrophe, but I can’t say that. But it’s actually in their data.” So there’s still plenty of great scientists out there doing great work, but they’ve got to sign up to whatever’s the politically correct thing to do.
Luke Grant:
And is it game over? Have the catastrophists won? It kind of feels like-
Dr. Peter Ridd:
No.
Luke Grant:
No.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
No, no.
Luke Grant:
Oh, thank goodness.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
That’s why they’ve got this inquiry because they know they have to shut us down. The fact is that most people don’t believe that climate is a catastrophe, otherwise they wouldn’t be prepared to pay, right. They’d be prepared to pay a lot-
Luke Grant:
Of course.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
… if they thought it was a catastrophe and they don’t. When people are asked, what do you think our electricity generation system should do? Should it make cheap power or should it go to net-zero? I think it’s 80% of people say cheap power. And by the way, that has increased substantially in the last few years. So there’s been this swing in opinion. In America, the whole net-zero thing is dead. In the UK, it’s on life support. We’ve still got a way to go here in Australia. But even here, the fact is that most people, if they knew that they were already paying $1,000 to $1,500 per family in extra electricity charges because the net-zero, they would think, “What the heck are we doing this for when China isn’t doing this?” And suddenly the wheels will fall off, and that’s going to happen in the next couple of years.
Luke Grant:
Let me ask you this, if I can, has there been a point where, and everything you went through at James Cook University, was there not a point where you said, “I might’ve done this differently?” You sound to me like someone, and I’ve heard you interviewed lots of times and I’ve listened very carefully. You’re not the sort of person that’ll be intimidated or not the sort of person that will, “I’ve got to a stage in life where I just need to be comfortable.” But is there something you would’ve done differently? Would you have gone harder or what would you have done, has it ever crossed your mind?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
I wouldn’t have done anything major differently. Some of the little strategies that I might’ve used to try to get the point across, I would’ve done differently. But in the end, I had to say to myself, look, I’ve got to look myself in the mirror, and if there’s something in the data that shows the Great Barrier Reef or whatever is fine, then I’ve just got to say… And by the way, I often get asked by people on things who think they’re on my side, and I’ll say, “Well, actually, I disagree with you.” Even though you’re trying to push a line that I would overall agree with, the data doesn’t actually show that, and I can’t go with you on that, just the other week. So I try to do that whether I’m always successful, I don’t know.
Luke Grant:
I get suspicious when I hear the words, the science is settled. And this might be a pathetic example, but I once took the prescription drug Vioxx for back pain. Then they banned that. But hang on, it was so settled to science that you could get on the PBS. So I just don’t… When I hear that, I think, “Well, hang on, is there a contrary voice?” Because isn’t science in essence understanding how things work and always questioning? Isn’t that part of the deal?
Dr. Peter Ridd:
It’s utterly fundamental that they should always be questioned. And the last thing you ever do is you get rid of dissenters. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were dissenters and contrarians. Nowadays, they could have easily been shut down, but they weren’t in those days. But unfortunately, we don’t have enough dissent. In fact, one of the things I’ve been recommending is that we need to bring that dissent back in. We actually need to fund people to do replication checks on things like Vioxx and a whole lot of other things. That doesn’t happen, but it’s starting to happen in America under the remarkable guy, Jay Bhattacharya, the now new director of the National Institute of Health. So this is what I’m saying. The science is actually starting to be improved the first time in 30 years. Climate change is just one of those things, but the big stuff is actually happening in the US at the moment.
Luke Grant:
You’re outstanding. Peter, thank you so much for your time and thank you. It can’t have been easy, but good on you.
Dr. Peter Ridd:
Thank you very much.
Luke Grant:
Dr. Peter-
This transcript with Dr Peter Ridd talking on 2GB Weekends with Luke Grant from 28 September 2025 has been edited for clarity.
