Court rejects fired physicist’s intellectual freedom claim

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s High Court has dismissed an intellectual freedom claim by a university physicist who was fired in part over his public statements that scientists exaggerated damage to the Great Barrier Reef caused by climate change. Physicist Peter Ridd had argued he was unlawfully dismissed in 2018 by James Cook University in Queensland state. But the five judges unanimously said a clause in his contract protecting intellectual freedom was not a “general freedom of speech” clause and didn’t protect him from being fired for misconduct. Two-thirds of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef have been damaged by bleaching caused by high ocean temperatures.