A particularly "clownish" example of shoddy AGW science

Anthony Watts takes a couple seconds to identify the many ways the latest piece of AGW 'science' is shoddy beyond belief.  It really is clownish.  Like shooting fish in a barrel, really.  They really are fishing for the answer.

Well, Danielle Dixon and Philip Munday are at it again.  This PR claim from the Georgia Institute of Technology  Fish from acidic ocean waters less able to smell predators smells fishy to me. Just ask any salt-water aquariaist how hard it is to simulate the ocean in a fish tank and keep the fish from being stressed.

The failure of this claim is clear when you watch the video below, showing natural CO2 bubbles coming off the sea floor in Milne Bay, in Papua New Guinea. They use this as the “control” for the experiment, according to the caption, when they should be using a normal reef and doing the experiments in situ. Instead, they transport these fish back to the the mobile lab (on a boat), perform experiments, and assume there is no difference in the environment that may contribute to behavioral differences. They apparently don’t stop to consider that BOTH groups of fish in the mobile lab might be stressed the same way. Worse, there’s no mention of transporting fish caught at a non-bubbling reef back to the mobile lab so that they can perform the same test on them and compare differences if any. Instead they say:  “The results do show that what Dixson and colleagues found in the lab matches with what is seen in the field.”

They simply ignored the most obvious control group test and did no actual in situexperiment.

Sigh.  Here.