 I'm Charlie Veran, I'm the ex-chief scientist at the Jane Studer Mean Science, and I'm now working on a giant website which I hope will provide the information for future management of corals and coral reefs. One thing I've been curious about is how you came to be called Charlie. Right. That was when I was six and I used to take bits of wildlife dead wasps and spiders and things to school. And my teacher used to call me Mr. Darwin as a nickname. She called lots of kids something by the nickname. And then I took a Funnel Web Spider, a live Funnel Web Spider to school and she was pretty upset about that, confiscated it. And then I took later on a jar of polychaete worms and I'd forgotten to top the jar up with methylated spirits and I took the lid off. She said Charles Darwin, get that out of here. And all the kids said Charlie, Charlie, and so it stuck and it's been with me ever since. It's a nice name, a friendly name, I like it. But it's nice to be called after Darwin but I don't think the connection runs very deep at all. A lot of people make things of it but I don't. So I'd be curious to know the journey you took to get to where you are now. How did you get into your field of research? Wow. My journey is a very, very long and complicated one. It's nothing like anybody else's. I was a near dropout at school. I went to a Sydney private school and I was near the bottom of every class. I was very shy, asthmatic, got a stutter, could hardly speak, could hardly do anything and I hated school. I just loved the bush and I got the lowest possible pass. What was the leaving certificate then called it in those days? And I wanted to go to Hawkesbury Agricultural College and I needed a scholarship and with a minimum pass, it was one of the worst, the worst pass of anyone in my class at school. My scholarship, that's for sure. And after a lot of soul searching I decided I'd repeat the year. And I did and I was given permission at the school to just spend my time in the library revising. I was exempt for all school activities and I was exempt from biology which is the one thing I did quite well in. And I did the final year again. I got a first class honours in biology, the same in everything else, no scholarship. But at that time the government was running an exploratory second application cycle based on aptitude tests. And my father, we got a letter that didn't get a scholarship but I could go to an aptitude test. My father badged me into going and I did. And a fortnight later another letter arrived, another lot of aptitude tests. This time it was a small lot of kids and I was really fed up with this. I had failed the leaving certificate on there enough twice and all that. And then a third letter arrived and he practically had to drag me along but it wasn't aptitude tests this time, it was just individual with a group of people. And I had no clue what it was all about. And I remember very clearly they said, what do you want to do? Have I got a scholarship? They said, of course you've got a scholarship, that's not why you're here. You're here because you're a gifted child. I said, what? What am I supposed to be gifted at? They said cognitive reasoning, in fact you've got the highest score in the state. And I said, what's cognitive reasoning? People like you are usually very good at maths. And I actually got up from my chair, thanked them, said this is a complete mistake. I've never passed a math exam in my life. And they said, yeah, we know, we've been talking to Parker College about shit. I sat down in the chair again. And I got a scholarship through anything I wanted at any university as a gifted child. And I wasn't gifted a child at all, that was a mistake. I went to Armadale to decide to do psychology to find out why I got the scholarship. And then I filled it in with other bits of science. But I couldn't finish my psychology because that was in the arts faculty. But I went along to all the lectures. And I did all sorts of things. And I wound up studying animal behavior because that was linked to psychology. And then I needed a job. I did a master's degree on temperature regulation in Lizards. And then I decided to go off to the Amazon and live there. But I met this lady who became my wife. And so I had to stay at university. And I studied color change in dragonflies. I found dragonflies that change color within half an hour in the morning to preserve their orientation to the sun. That turned out to be a dream PhD. Everything worked, but it didn't at first. Then I saw an advertisement in a newspaper that James Cook University in Townsville were offering a postdoc any expressions of interest. And I wrote back expressing interest because my PhD at that time was just falling apart. But I'd taken up scuba diving as a hobby. And then the PhD worked fine. I won a prize. I was offered four postdocs immediately. And I accepted one to go to Canada to study the migratory locus, the endocrine system of migratory locus. But then James Cook University sent me a letter saying I was offering a postdoc there. And I wrote back to them saying thank you, but no thank you. I'm not interested anymore. But the corals that we found at the solitary islands off Coffs Harbour that niggled away because we wanted to put together some sort of project that would turn that place into a marine park. I thought it was really a fantastic place. It is a marine park now. It was only 30 years late, but anyhow. I went to the library to see if I could find something to identify the corals I collected. Only nothing about marine life. I'd never been to a lecture on anything to do with marine science in my life. Never have. I've given lots, but I haven't never attended any anyhow. So I went to the library and there was Isabel Bennett's book on the Great Bayer Reef. And I was summing through that to find out something about corals, and it wasn't much help. But then I thought, hey, I'm further than all these beautiful places. It's just a pretty picture book about the Great Bayer Reef. Why am I turning down a scholarship to do anything in this place and going to Canada? So that night I scribbled two more letters. One to Canada saying, sorry, but change your mind. No thanks. And the other to James Brook University said, yes, please. And it turned out I was the only person that applied for it. I didn't apply for it. I was the only person that expressed even interest in it because no one in those days was a scuba diver. You had to be a scuba diver. That was the condition. And so I went to James Brook University to do something about corals. I didn't know anything about corals. But I spent two years exploring the Great Bayer Reef. And the first director of Ames turned up. And the Vice Chancellor threw a welcome party. And lots of VIPs were there. And I was there. And I didn't like VIPs. And I drank a lot of wine as anesthetic. And apparently I behaved fairly badly. And the first director, Redgule Martin, he'd heard about Wild Australians. And he thought he'd met one. And he offered me a job the next morning when I still had a hell of a hangover on the basis of my bad behavior. And he later found out that I actually was studying corals. And so that's how bizarre the whole story is. And I was there for 32 years, I think. But I was the first scientist of Ames, the first full-time researcher on the Great Bayer Reef, I mean, anything. And I was the chief scientist at Ames for about half its existence. But really, it's all... I've never applied for a job in my life. I've never applied for a promotion in my life. It all happened by other people. It all happened, certainly. So the first scientific mystery you ever investigated was yourself. Did you ever solve that mystery? No. You'd think that someone who got a scholarship that I did would be a very bright person and not a very bright person. I've got a very good memory. So I remember stuff about marine life or any of the other life and identified things. And I've got this passionate love of nature. And I think if you really have a passionate love of anything, you remember lots about it. I think if you love cars, you remember all the details of cars. I've loved nature. And it's my memory that all I've ever done in my life was observe and write about it. And so I've written something like 100 publications that's including 13 books and monographs. It's because I love the marine life. I love coral reefs. And so I remember all the stuff. And it's not just about taxonomy. It's about everything to do with marine life. And that's why I was chief scientist. I loved joining one science with another. And so I was a bit slow on the uptake about climate change. And it started to worry me more and more. And I started reading about climate change more and more and I was thinking this is going to affect coral reefs really seriously and ocean acidification. And that really was reading other people's work that got me interested in the whole thing. And at that time I was having one of the many fights I'd had with Directors of Ames. I was always having fights about with Directors. I always have had, I hate bureaucrats. The plan was to take all my long service leave and I'd have a half-time job that we as a family would go to France where my children could learn foreign language and get my young children. And we would get some experience in a foreign country. And we spent a year and a half in France. And that's when I wrote A Reef in Time. I took hundreds upon hundreds of references, crates of references. And I had no other responsibilities at all. I just had, I was just a writer and reader and I read and I read and I read and I read and I read and I read just absolutely everything to do with it. And when I finished reading, Harvard University said, oh wow, yes, we want to publish this. And they did but they had me dumb it down to extent which I didn't really like because it was a much more technical volume than the one that was actually published in the end. But maybe they were right. If I hadn't dumbed it down, it probably wouldn't have had the very wide, it was published very, very wide. It's had quite a big impact and that was why I wound up in the Royal Society with David Attenborough next to me, hours on end and why a lot of things happened. So although I guess I'd call myself a coral specialist or coral reef specialist, I got into climate change because it worried me so much and so it traces the origins of the Great Bayer Reef from their very, very beginnings. I disagree with all the geologists in their drillings. Cross swords with them always have because I know they got it wrong. And I went on to pass climates and how climate change has affected coral reefs throughout geological history and then on to modern issues with ocean acidification as well as climate change and mass bleaching. But none of this was original research. It was all a synthesis of what other people had found I think the original book had something like 2,000 references to it. Now I should have kept that and I should have put that on a website somewhere or something like that. But the Harvard University Press said you've got to keep it right down, down and down, make it a small volume. And if the author of A Brief History in Time doesn't mention that E equals MC squared, you're not to put in a chemical formula about ocean acidification. Keep equations out. So I did and it's a book that's became very widely read. And especially on the subject of ocean acidification I think because it was the first time that the experts in the field of ocean chemistry were exposed to the broader issues which were mostly to do with coral reefs or ecosystems of high latitudes. But especially about coral reefs. I later on met the best of ocean acidification, chemists and so on. And they had a mindset that ocean acidification was their subject, was about ocean chemistry. Well it is their subject and there's a huge amount of, much bigger subject. And when I first met, I won't say his name, I first met one that was a real expert, the best, the guy that knows most about ocean acidification. I met him at a workshop and he said, he was over at breakfast and he said, Charlie I read your book and I just thought, oh I want to talk to you about it. I thought well I've got something wrong. And then he went away and it was the following day he said look your book, I just read it and I spent all night reading it and I read it again the next morning because I never realized ocean acidification was that subject, that bigger subject. And of course he was the expert on the details and I connected that up with a big big picture and a big big picture it is and it's a gloomy one but I have to say it's not a subject I enjoy of course. I guess the challenge for science communicators is straddling that line between capturing all the technical details and making it simple enough for a broad audience. Well that's it, that's one of the things and really if you're going to talk to a big audience, a general audience, you've got to put on a different hat because a scientist, at least most scientists have in their mind, they don't think it through but they're actually talking to other scientists and they're being happy that they've explained it in a way that can't be really criticized. Other scientists can't really come back on them but the real communicators push the detail away and use snappy catch phrases although they may not be scientifically spot on they engage the public and if you're going to talk in a public environment a whole assemblage of facts are not going to work for a big audience. What works is emotional content, is the big one and that's something that I've learnt. So a lot of scientists are really not good at talking about their subject even though they think they are. They're not getting out to the general public and that's one of the reasons that a lot of scientists they've got their science right, they've got their wording right. It was a great talk but most people wouldn't because it's dry, it's factual and the fate of our planet is not explained in dry factual ways that reach this general audience. The best talks I've ever given of when I say I've given interviews where it hasn't been recorded I thought the camera wasn't running and I got upset about the whole subject or another time I've seen someone smirking at the audience and I actually turned on the person and once in towns I just slammed the computer down and ramped and raved, pacing up and down the floor so that went down well. A lot of people remember that talk very well whereas if I'd given a cold, dry, factual even chucked in jokes but it's hard to do that on that subject but it's a message that comes from the heart is what works and the last workshop I went to was some time ago now on climate change. I thought oh well, you know, here's another talk about the effects of climate change on coral reefs it wasn't mentioned, I wasn't even asked to mention coral reefs. It was all about communications and networking and getting communications over to experts and I thought I was an expert and I wasn't, I found out. The experts are the people that don't try to win the argument just by factual information. That doesn't work and I think we need to think about why religions work when facts don't or things like that but there are some things which don't work for a general audience and some things which do but Australia's pretty much behind the ball now Australia's way, Australia and America the two worst countries I've ever spoken in about climate change, the least accepting anywhere in Europe now climate change is just it's very rare for anything to come up which is a denial or not acceptance. In America you have this, it's all religion driven in Australia, I think it's just plain bloody ignorance and it's, you'd have to be just ignorant to to push some of the things that have been pushed although I think this is history now, I hope so. So when you wrote your book was part of it in response to some of the misunderstandings and misinformation about coral reefs? Oh yeah, absolutely and yes it definitely was it was partly me wanting to follow up a lot of different sorts of sciences and put them together but it was largely driven by getting annoyed with things I saw on television especially a couple of geologists who really annoyed me but there were so many false statements made and I want to do my part to at least get factual information out I am a scientist, I love factual information although I sometimes speak in an emotive way in my head I love facts, I don't care about opinions I like facts and fact information climate change is so solidly based in fact and it was and has been for a very long time long before it came to my realisation so I came in pretty late in the piece actually it was this century really so in the 1990s, yeah I'd read about this and that and I sort of think, is this all that right? because the facts were never clear to me and I had to go back and read absolutely everything and I did and then it really consolidated into something and as it consolidated it made me more and more aware in fact angry at people who deny science that makes me angry because I think they should just shut up by all means disagree with science, that's fine debate it, that's fine, engage in a debate but stop this farcical mismanagement of science cherry picking, saying things out of ego out of attention seeking, because they've got no other means of getting recognised, that sort of thing so I think these people are the enemies of the future of my children, they're degrading life for all humanity you've mentioned a few times, I guess the evolution of your understanding of climate change like you said once that you thought the oceans were limitless and that the natural environment was indestructible so how did you get from that point, was there a particular thing or was it a gradual accumulation of information that shifted that view? I think that the oceans, the notion of the oceans were indestructible almost anybody my age if they're honest about it has gone through that phase and I certainly did I thought alright we do all these things on land but we can't harm the oceans that way and it was only when I started, when I read about what we've done to wild stocks of fish, of food species for humans and then when I saw, I started to see the destruction of reefs and that really turned me on I've worked on every major coral reef region in the world now with very few exceptions and that's a lot, that's 66 expeditions that's 6,000 hours of scuba diving and working on cars, not playing and I've come back to the same place sometimes 20 years later and I've seen this drastic deterioration in coral reefs and I found out that it wasn't just limited to coral reefs and so it's, it gradually built up on me I think the thing that really turned me on was working in Asia in the 1980s, the Great Bayer Reef I didn't think it changed very much but I'd gone back to the same spots in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, wherever and found that there'd been a huge change and I also found later on there are no big fish left anywhere in Asia they're just gone, there's no sharks you can die for them, you know I can be with the fish people on a trip for a month and they haven't seen a one single shark now, so, but that was, I guess it wasn't until the early 1980s that I really got alarmed about what was happening to coral reefs and then I realized it was happening to oceans everywhere obviously the cod story of the Atlantic and so on and I knew about what happened to the prawn industry and the Gulf and so on, one industry after another and so, but I never studied I guess if I'd ever been to a lecture on marine science I'd have done better, but marine science was never part of my education and so it was a pathway of discovering it all for myself rather than being taught it seeing environments change before your eyes over the decades well, absolutely, and I've been doing that for decades now and a lot of people say, what a fabulous job you've had you've died all over the world you've incredibly well travelled, you've seen all this, you've done all that yeah, it was once a fabulous job, now it's horrible because I go back to the same spot and it's just nothing like it used to be and so what was I'd say the best job in the world is not now even a nice job, it's a very unhappy job and it's made me, I have to say it I've had a mildly depressed for a long time now it's a depression because it's not only about coral reefs it's about the future of my children and so I live science, I believe in science I see facts, I like to understand facts and when those facts continually tell me that things are seriously changing and they're changing so rapidly now that bit of rapidly is one of the cruxes at all because of all people one thing I do have a good handle on is time because I've got a good geological knowledge and I'm all the way to a good genetic knowledge because I've been in both fields and everything in between and so two of my books have got the word time in their title time is of an essence in my way of thinking and what we are doing to the oceans, to the planet now we're doing an absolutely explosive rate that has never been seen on this planet before I guess the only thing parallel is when the asteroid hit the earth the KT mass extinction but I can't see a grain of evidence to tell me that we are not launching into the sixth mass extinction there's never been an increase in carbon dioxide like we've seen I guess that asteroid would have done the same thing it's not the amount of carbon dioxide it's the rate at which it's building up and for so much of the animal life and the oceans they're not genetically equipped to accommodate such rapid change there's a lot of talk about adaptation well adaptation means evolutionary change it's a genetic change and corals and so many other organisms are no more likely to adapt than humans are humans in a hundred years time they'll still be humans of today, just born a hundred years later and corals have even got a longer lifestyle like a lot of them have they're not going to be given the time to adapt yeah sure if the carbon dioxide that we're predicting now took a thousand years or a hundred thousand years perhaps yeah sure this has happened before and it can happen again but it's not happening in the century and that's unprecedented by an order of magnitude at least and so we're not going to have adaptation we're going to have sheer destruction and that's what I believe and I as a lover of the natural world that I find that just unendingly depressing if they're going to be involved in a debate on the subject at least that debate needs to be controlled and I think that the media have done a really bad job in Australia by saying oh we've got to have the other side now even though the ratio of disbelievers to believers is well 95-99 to 1 and I think we're coming through that now but it's held the Australian public in the doubt for so long and I think that's a terrible thing to do it's so important there can't be any greater it can't be a subject of greater importance than this and to have compromised the future of our children, not alone coral reefs is a terrible thing You mentioned the 6th mass extinction that you think is happening now can you tell me more about the previous 5 mass extinctions and what drove them? Yes well I've always had a big interest in this subject and so I have seen what happened in as much detail as possible during mass extinction events now first out they're called mass extinctions events but they're actually not events there's been 5 of them and all except when the asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago they have taken over a million years to happen so they're not events they're collapses perhaps the end of the paleo these are events that are happening that are so deeply embedded in the fossil record they've been known since the 19th century and so they're really blind in the obvious the end of the paleozoic was the biggest one where almost all life on this planet was snuffed out but then you have to look for a cause and so I've published this you can delete one thing after another but the one you can't delete is ocean acidification that's something that's big enough to do the job you can discount everything else but if you're going to have something that can drive masses of extinctions in the ocean the oceans come first and coral reefs always come first then ocean acidification is almost the only guy left standing and then when I published that that got a bit of adverse response until specialists in that area have changed their thinking and I think that's become quite a I don't know why the accepted view because not many people go into it but it's not a radical view anymore that ocean acidification has been the prime driver of mass extinctions and it really makes sense ocean acidification will affect carbonate platforms the coral reefs of this world it will affect carbonates that are used in animal life backbones or whatever, not just corals and it affects aragonetic organisms before everything else now something like a third of all marine species will come part of their life cycle in coral reefs it's a huge proportion and so when coral reefs go down it's not just extinction of corals that's almost trivial in this thing the entire ecosystem goes down and takes with it it'll take with it a third of all marine species and that's extinction, that is complete extinction and so after each of the mass extinctions there's been a lag time between coral reefs being able to come back again of 3, 5, 6, 10 million years because the whole ecosystem, the whole animal life has to re-evolve and after the then paleozoic mass extinction all corals went absolutely entirely extinct and the corals we have today are not related to any paleozoic corals they're completely different order of animals and so if you change the conditions of the ocean to wipe out ecosystems that depend on carbonates the chemistry of carbonates when you wipe that out you bring down the oceans and you directly bring down this very high proportion of species because they've got a part of their life cycling in coral reefs but when you do that of course the flow on is to all other species anyhow and I think what's happened in all the mass extinctions except one, one's not clear at all the mid-devonian extinction that had a plunge in carbon dioxide but that could bring about the same result but that's a debatable one I think the other five are not debatable at all it's a dead clear thing there's nothing else that could drive a mass extinction except perhaps some incredible virus that affected all life that's the only other thing and that's so unlikely so when corals experienced mass extinction they recovered, there was a process of re-evolution not re-population No, after mass extinction you've got to have re-evolution so after the N-Paleozoic mass extinction a whole new order evolved and they're called corals in the middle of the Mesozoic another mass extinction almost all corals went entirely extinct and whole new families of corals evolved at the end of the KT, the end of the Mesozoic again most Mesozoic families went extinct totally gone and there was nothing corals vanished in the face of the earth and it was just some of them did survive some families did survive that mass extinction but most didn't and those that re-evolved Acropora as the champion of this Acropora came back in force and Acropora is a real habitat builder it provides protection for so many other and that's when small reef fishes really evolved if you went before that mass extinction corals are mostly massive things they didn't form such complex protective habitats and you didn't have this diversity of fish now you do because of reefs because of Acropora and the other branching corals but mostly because of Acropora and so there's such a logical good link up between one thing and another just what will happen by the end of this century of course is we've got a long way to go but at the rate at which we are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the oceans it is firstly it is absolutely ridiculous to talk about adaptation because nothing except microbes or very small or organisms that have like Drosophila have a very very short life cycle sure they might adapt over 100 years not corals no I'm afraid I don't think so they eventually will change the zerxanthellae to a more temperature resistant zerxanthellae they can do that but that's again that's a very slow process it's not going to happen in that very short amount of time unfortunately by the end of this century at the rate we're going we're going to have absolutely lethal conditions for coral reefs and again I think you've got to think outside the box to appreciate that because it is true that corals will tolerate a much lower pH than is predicted corals will survive in conditions which are mimicking the end of this century but they're not growing and there's certainly the larvae when they settle and they put down that first little tiny it's transparent plate which is where a larva starts to form a coral they're not going to do that they're not going to be able to do that we have already passed the level of carbon dioxide that corals have evolved to accept and use we've already passed that the ocean acidification that will follow now as a hell of a lag time but the level of carbon dioxide and the atmosphere now will produce a saturation state which will prevent larvae from forming spat the very initial growth thing yeah it won't affect the big colonies anything like as much they have almost a chemical shield they control their own chemistry between the skeleton and the living tissue that's true it'll be the last thing to go but their reproductive cycle will be blown to hell the oceans absorb about half of the CO2 that we emit through fossil fuel burning is there any limit to how much the ocean can absorb well yes it is over time, given enough time the oceans can absorb anything to be thrown at them in the way of acid there's not enough acid on the planet to seriously change the pH of the oceans if every bit of acid there was we're up on the oceans but that's assuming that the ocean is mixed in to deep water where ocean carbonates can absorb all the acid there is but you're talking about a circulation time a circulation pattern in hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years so it is again a question of time and there isn't enough time for the oceans to chemically cleanse themselves as it were in time to support carbonate platforms on the surface this has happened at least 30 times in fossil record at least 30 times and every time you go into it the finger is pointed at a certification it's creating an environment where coral reefs just snuff it out 30 times in the fossil record over what time period 34 I think is a reasonable estimate over what time period is it? that's the mesozoic and senozoic of ceritinian corals so they run on a boom to bust cycle and the boom cycle is when we have low levels of carbon dioxide and where the sea level is constant or not continually destroying these the bust times when sea level fluctuates and the alkalinity of the oceans fluctuates down pH goes down and so it's those two factors which create the boom to bust cycles which coral reefs have always had so you could say that the present situation it's not a coral problem it's a human problem if we don't drive the corals to complete extinction but it's certainly a human problem young people are alive today they will need to watch coral reefs on a modern video on the video of their time to see a coral reef and I will say that now there's almost we've almost reached a time when you can't find pristine coral reefs anywhere there are some patches left here and there but I've traveled so much and seen so much before the real impacts were happening that I find incredibly sad that I am probably the only human who will ever live who have seen coral reefs in good state because I've traveled all over the world and even if there's someone who is in a position to do that and to study corals they're not there to study corals don't look like they do when I was young it's just in my lifetime the change in my lifetime is horrific it really is, that's what drives me firstly to talk to you but then to write about these things and to be producing this giant website which will track this it's one of the most horrific things happening on our planet so your website, this is corals of the world could you tell me about what that website is about and what you're trying to achieve? I've written books about corals of here and there and wherever but what we did was effectively created a global taxonomy of corals and once you've got a global taxonomy of corals then you've got global maps of corals and that started to emerge in the late 1990s and so we decided to produce a book, Corals of the World and that was a pretty big undertaking because I had no problem getting publisher but that book would have sold for $600 a copy and I don't want to write a book for wealthy Americans or Germans I want to write for people who actually use it so we built it and published it ourselves the whole lot Ames paid the printing price the most expensive book ever printed in Australia but they got their money back and made a profit on it actually so that was fine for year 2000 that was 15 years ago over that because from the cutoff point we stopped taking new information it was 1998 or 1997 because Tercery used to build the book and so I might have thought well it needs another corals of the world but I thought hang on we've moved on, the technology's all changed and it's changed in a way that the website now can do everything the book can do and so I've got a very computer literate wife and we got our heads together and we mapped out we could build a website which would be everything the book is bought up to date well now the website is 10 times what the book is it's huge and it's got every record of every coral in the whole world in it and you can ask very sophisticated questions of it I've had a hell of a time trying to get funding for it because we can't just build something out of nothing but hopefully we'll get an initial test version by the end of this year it's taken seven years of for a start me not having any income which is not so good for our family but it's something that will be available free to every human being on this earth and it will answer very sophisticated questions the initial one is primarily about identifying corals, the taxonomy what they look like, thousands of photos and then a mapping program which has gone far beyond anything I ever envisaged because the actual website builds the map according to what the user asks or wants you tell it you want this map the maps of these corals in this place and then it'll give you the statistics about it in fact if you know how to write an algorithm in Excel the website can read it and give you the results so it's a very very sophisticated website indeed and we started off, we found the best web builder in the country to do this and it was only a month ago that they decided they'd scrap the whole thing that they've done and start again on another platform there are technical reasons for this and they're doing it for nothing because they just love this website and that's, I'm talking about maybe a person year of work, of computer programming and the designs and so on so it's a huge huge, much bigger than the building of the book it dwarfs the building of the book I thought websites would be much easier no, they're much harder apart from the fact that you've got to have everything exactly right for a website otherwise something goes wrong but of course the beauty of it is that it's available free to absolutely everybody if you're a poor student in Vietnam or Indonesia where ever you've got exactly the same access as an American billionaire so that for me is absolutely critical and the other parts are that it can be updated and then we want to bolt onto it we call the modules of things like the connectivity of reef regions so something happens there what are the consequences there or where do you put marine parks now I've had a big say in where marine parks go all marine parks virtually in the Indo-Pacific this will actually when we get the final thing going we'll have an expert system where you can ask almost any conceivable question and it will give you an answer based on the best science there is and I want to do that before I die because I think it's so important for me it's the absolute goal it's the best thing I can do to help coral reefs through the times ahead so we'll identify corals that really we need to think about keeping in aquaria just the same as a rare mammal might be kept in a zoo but this will happen and we will need to do this and we'll need to go into coral gardening we'll need to have special areas for particular purposes this is going to happen and I don't know how clever the technology of management is going to be in the future in other words if something goes seriously wrong in one place can we make amends in another place and things like that but this website will provide instant answers so it will give an answer to something that would take a PhD the time of a PhD to work out from scratch hundreds and hundreds of thousands and thousands of references then combine them all on all these different subjects and so it's got a way to go before it's got that sort of power but that's our goal and so our goal will be to combine the biology of corals with the physical environment in absolutely the maximum scientific depth and to provide direct answers to anybody's question for nothing and I have to say this is incredibly well supported by scientists and other people we've got something like over 90 people have given me all their photographs of corals and these are the best photographers in the world who are among these or loads of unpublished data so if someone has mapped something or has data about something be it crown of thorns or bleaching or temperature or certification it's been given freely because this website is free for everyone and that spirit of that has caught on and gone everywhere and I find that very heartwarming and I think when this thing is finally when the initial version is released it will be a cut down version because we can't afford to do it full on when that cut down version is released and people see the power of this website then I think maybe I'll finally get a grant that will pay for the rest of it and yeah then also when this happens we want to bring in more expertise so I'm not a physical oceanographer I'm not a chemist and nor of any of our team have skills in these areas but we want to have a chemist we want to have the best chemist we want to have the best oceanographers and we want to have the best of this and to combine to say their job is to produce this block of information which we know how to bolt that onto our website as overlays it's going to have thousands of layers and you're going to be able to drill down from your home you're going to be able to drill down through that to get answers to the just about any question you might want to dream up and I find that there's a and all keeps me going that goal and I think it will happen It sounds like the kind of project that would make a good partnership with someone like Google Well, it was in a partnership with Google Google said, wow yeah but that was when Google Earth was exploded as a company before that they were just funded the whole thing as it was they said we can't the public company we can't fund it anymore but we've got a little bit of spare change that's $50,000 that would keep us alive Ames pulled out of it because it was too expensive too difficult but Google said hang on we can give you $50,000 to keep going and Dave Hannon who runs an NGO said he did the same so there are lifesavers and others now have chipped in but actually the amount of money we need to do the job is absolutely trivial compared with most research projects what we need from now on though is expertise in these different fields and I can confidently say that we know how to build on in Google style and maybe Google will take it back but Google keeps changing their maps so we don't like that but in that style and so yeah you will be able to Google that website Google might take it over, I don't know but somebody, I don't care I just want that information to be available to absolutely everybody free with no strings attached and so people will give to us free to use as we want and that's happening and I and so I'll have it never I'll never have it with for sale, for funding to be attached to it I want it to be usable by a little school kid, by anybody and I believe that's going to happen that's my swan song I'll be exhausted by the time that's through I guess the big question is when will that initial launch be? well I think by the end of this year we will have it out to be tested now because it is a very complicated website it's got search boxes and it's got three search boxes of different things it's been difficult to design but when you actually see it you think oh what's difficult about that it's all very straight forward it'll look straight forward but it isn't and so by the end of this year we hope to have it out to people who will try and break it who will try and stop it find fault with it and also people who will want to look at it from a strictly user's point of view initially all I know is coral people will get stuck into it but we want to have it stuck in we want people from different fields to try to see if something can be done a smarter way and so we'll go through I think early next year we'll go through a rethink of fine-tuning to get to get as clever as we possibly can then we will release it and then I hope that we can build on these final modules and attract other authors of the whole thing to do the final we've done I think the hard yard and it is now fairly straight forward I thought that before and been wrong but I do think it's fairly straight forward to finish this whole thing so it's a real expert system and it will achieve every goal we've ever dreamed of I hope so but you know that's what I believe and it's been a pretty rough road to get to the point we have we're virtually almost no significant funding at all because no one's believed us until well people have believed us and they say we can find money for that but when that goes up to the CEO who has to sign something he said website isn't that the Australian government job isn't that we deal with Pacific you know there's always that sort of question there's always a square peg in a round hole but when the initial release is coming it will sell itself it will be obvious what it is and there will be no doubts about it as you talk about as a scientist and you've come to understand the realities of climate change and it's quite depressing thinking about that I think that hearing you talk about this project I think possibly the best way to respond to it is to find a way to make the best the most impact we can and I think that's a lesson for all scientists well it's certainly my hope and my source of joy in the whole thing otherwise I might as well just go and jump off a cliff you know I think this is my hope that I can make a difference and that other people it will empower other people to make a difference and I think they will make a difference and I think this will take corals and reefs through the nastiest time the nastiest times that lie ahead in the smartest possible way and I think we'll definitely do that and if there's it'll make my life worthwhile well I think you've made a lot of contributions to science that you've already certainly had a worthwhile contribution to our scientific understanding of coral reefs well this will be the big one this will really be the big one it will dwarf everything else I've ever been involved in and it's so great that technology this technology wasn't available even 10 years ago and this technology has now become available to all these clever ways of doing things and we're going to build on to this we're going to be able to build on video and all sorts of things educational modules we're going to be able to do things which we only dreamt of only 10 years ago would have been impossible now we've got the power of the internet and of computers the the rate at which the server of this website can pile through there's masses of data almost instantly and come up with an answer is incredible and of course it's only going to get better and better and better we've got a way to go though there's some things you can't for example go to sea out of internet range and still use the website we've got to produce something that you can put on your laptop when you go to seas it won't be the full shebang because that has to be mapped by the website itself because that's it builds maps out of data sheets not maps just data sheets but we need to have it so that when you go to sea and you want to find out about coral or your information you want to subset that you can take with you on your laptop and that you can update when you get back update this and the way it goes and update it but you want to be able to use it at sea away from the internet so that's now there's all sorts of challenges so these are technological challenges and the way as you know the IT industry is moving the answers will be there as quickly as can be I think 10 years time this is going to fly everywhere moving forward from a scientific research point of view what do you think are the most exciting questions about coral research at the moment I think there are some really big unknowns I think that ocean certification we're only at a broad brush stage we know general things we know what corals can tolerate what they can't about there we haven't we haven't honed that down to the details that matter often the devil is in the detail and as far as ocean acidification is concerned I think it's a big big field that is still very much neglected and I think we need to have a lot of science on not just a semi applied science to get into an area where we really know about a lot of these really scientific details people are working on on things which will make a difference it's almost applied science which we need that also but I think marine science is still in its infancy and I think the students of today the people that matter the students of today are going to be able to get really good projects together to make a hell of a difference in the future the likes of me and the website and so on we're just regurgitating known information the website doesn't create new information it puts it together in a new way but we need to always think about getting the the base information together now if you think of something like medicine medicine's been around for as long as humans have since which doctors have medicine is still in its infancy isn't it I mean it's still so we've got to look we've got to keep into the into the science that matters and it's basic science the really the discoveries that make are the building blocks of a bigger picture and so my advice to young people today is think about is to keep thinking thinking not just reading not just simulating what other people have thought but thinking shutting yourself away shut the computer sit on a boat laying your toes in the water and think what really what really looks like being important that's all I've done in my lifetime and think gosh wouldn't it be nice if we knew that and there's so many questions I think marine science is one of the most critical of all sciences because oceans are the ones that are so under threat and I say oceans will bring about a mass extinction we've got to take care of it the oceans are the big guys and we've got to look after it and I just think we're just beginning just dabbling and I just love the way so many students that I love hearing about their projects half of it I can't understand I'm not good enough at their field a lot of it I can and I think gee good on you because that's it might seem an obscure narrow little bit of stuff but it's really important and so I just hope that countries like Australia where marine science should be the big one we've got our coastline we're set up for marine science universities have got to drive this and it's not going to be done by governments it's going to be done by young people doing smart things and they've got to be free to do smart things not to do what they're supposed to do not do projects that are given to them not do them to get points for publishing papers and journals and then they've got to be able to be free to think to do to think outside the envelope and I just love to see students that have got that are really keen love their subject and are really enthusiastic about it that's what's going to drive the future that's what's going to come to the rescue of the planet I think it's just absolutely fundamental and it's going to be I hope I can say with it long enough to appreciate some of the discoveries that are coming in now and who knows there might be with there might be smart ways of coming to the rescue of corals of the oceans we've got to hope so one last question could you could you summarize I guess in a short statement about how human activity has influenced climate change and the oceans particularly from the point of view of your research well I think human activity is an absolute one-off there's no precedent in the geological record and it's partly the destruction caused by so many humans and coral reefs occur in the tropical world and so do most countries which have got very high population pressures and so I see this everywhere population pressures are a very big thing so that's one thing and of course humans for the first time ever in the history of the earth are actually changing our very environment in which everything lives so humans are are inflicting incredible damage on our planet and it's going to get very much worse very quickly and I think we're drastically underestimating the speed that this is going to happen there are young people I'm afraid my children are included in it which are going to see this world in a horrifically bad state and I guess terribly sad but I think humans have done it we're not nice to our planet our planet will be a lot better off without us what happens after humans have done their thing they'll be humans around they'll be a completely different the organized critters they won't be doing the same thing as they're doing now they'll be completely different and I think in a hundred years time we'll see a very very different earth whether it's got humans on it or not I haven't got a clue but their numbers will be very different and their behavior will be radically different than humans are today we're talking to Charlie Varan that's not a good start for you when I'm mispronounced