I played a game of Monopoly where I started with a roll of 12. There was a 97% chance I correctly rejected the hypothesis that the dice were fair. Maybe this is true in some sense? But it's still somewhere between misleading and nonsensical to say.
Presumably, the researchers did not select rivers at random to study, they selected this river in particular because of the changes it is undergoing.
Bayes factor appear to solve this issue. I disagree that this is a basic education issue. It is a lack of agreement among scientists as to what statistical analysis is appropriate.
There are at least a couple of statistical fallacies in this conclusion. And there isn't a lack of agreement about that.
One problem with p-value tests is precisely that people misunderstand what the p-value means, which is where basic education comes in. It could save people from believing a lot of things they shouldn't. (Like many health and fitness crazes over the last generation, for instance) Or at the very least, we could train science journalists.