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Great Barrier Reef 'Will Die' Unless Carbon Emissions Slashed
Australia's Great Barrier Reef will be severely bleached and eventually die unless the world's industrialised nations drastically cut carbon emissions by up to 90 per cent by 2050, a leading coral scientist has warned.
Professor Terry Hughes and representatives of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies told a meeting at the Canberra parliament that the future of the reef, and a large chunk of Australia's tourist industry, was under grave threat from rising sea temperatures.
Corals are seen at the Great Barrier Reef in this January 2002 handout photo. Australia's Great Barrier Reef has only a 50 percent chance of survival if global CO2 emissions are not reduced at least 25 percent by 2020, a coalition of Australia's top reef and climate scientists said on Tuesday. (REUTERS/Handout/Files) Just a small increase in average temperatures could cause massive coral bleaching on the reef, he said.
"We've seen the evidence with our own eyes. Climate change is already impacting the Great Barrier Reef," said Prof Hughes, of James Cook University in Queensland.
To avoid permanently damaging the delicate balance of life on the reef, and give the world's largest living organism a 50 per cent chance of survival, global carbon emissions must be cut by at least 25 per cent by 2020, he said.
Prof Hughes's grim prediction came as the Australian parliament debated the details of the government's planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. A final vote on the carbon trading bill is expected next week.
Australia, one of the world's biggest carbon emitters per capita, has so far only pledged to cut its emissions by five per cent from 2000 levels by 2020.
It has said it would go further, with a 25 per cent cut, if a tough international climate agreement is reached at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December, but this is looking increasingly unlikely.
John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, has carried out research which shows the economic impact of a two degree rise in global temperatures.
He said a rise of more than two degrees would be "catastrophic" for the reef and tourism in North Queensland, which is already suffering as a result of the global recession.
The World Heritage-protected Great Barrier Reef sprawls for more than 133,000 sq miles off Australia's east coast and can be seen from space.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the Great Barrier Reef could be "functionally extinct" within decades, with deadly coral bleaching likely to be an annual occurrence by 2030.
Bleaching occurs when the tiny plant-like coral organisms die, often because of higher temperatures, and leave behind only a white limestone reef skeleton.
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23 Comments so far
Show AllAnother symptom/casualty of the shame of mankind.
See, this an example of why climate change is of little concern to most people, as i outlined in the Apocalypse article. It is just to far away from their everyday lives to be of concern.They may say they are concerned because they understand the problem intellectually or agree with studies or have a deep connection to nature and are appalled at the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, but in reality no one lives on or near the reef, so they will gasp and act shocked, but if they don't have a house or property on the reef, fu%^ it. There are just two many problems occurring at once in peoples lives to ask them to attend to all of them. This is why i continue to advocate investigating as an ADDITION, our common essence of, ' awareness awake to itself' to supplement our endless correction mode that we see world wide. Always having to deal with correcting individual problems is truly exhausting. This makes us care less about some tremendously beautiful and important issue as the great barrier reef.
Coral reefs are convieniently out-of-sight/out of mind to people in temperate climates. But until I lived for a while in Venezuela and the Carribean region, I never knew how extensive coral reefs are and how important they are to the whole web of life in the seas - inlcuding a major source of food. They lie along or just off the coastlines nearly everywhere between 25N and 25S.
And it is not just the great barrier reef that is being killed.
Being as they are comprised of CaCO3 and are capable of storing carbon away as geologic strata for hundreds of millions of years, thay are very important for the storage of carbon too. The thousands of feet of ancient limestone that underlies huge swaths of the the continents are all formed from ancient reefs.
Those of CONUS (continental united states) in the Florida Keys "National Marine 'Sanctuary' " are already ecosystemically collapsed at less than 7% coral coverage remaining and still declining. No Worries, Mate?
Yes, I was going to mention that. I dove a few times in Penencamp Park off Key Largo in the early 1980's. If I dove there today I would be right back in the boat crying. I fear much of the reefs of teh Bahamas and Carribean are devastated too.
But the tourists, with their newly printed scuba c-cards oogle at algae-coverd dead coral and think it is great.
I had your post in mind when I was just making the case for algal oil. The coral would either come back to life or get a new life if all that algae were pulled out and oil were extracted from it to substitute conventional crude oil. It gets interesting.
The algae isn't what is killing or preventing the coral growth, it is the bleaching from excessive water temperature, plus pollutants. The algae takes over the dead coral like it would any dead rock under water.
And, coral reefs grow far, far too slow to migrate northward. The offshore platforms of old dead coral on which the living coral grows take millions of years and the right geological conditions to develop.
The impending death of the world's shallow-water corals should be all the evidence that we are facing a once in many-million-year catastrophe.
Thanks pjd. I was no good in biology. I was addicted to computers and math. I'm just glad nobody's thinking of drilling for natural gas there or something like that.
Max, i don't always agree with you but, you are one, maybe the only who consistently gives interesting alternatives for a lot of our problems. especially the legalization of hemp. Fantastic stuff. I insulated my house in germany with it. It was factory made as it is legal there. it is very easy to work with, totally nontoxic and bugs don't like it. very cool.
Until the oil cartels had complete control, paint used to be made with hemp instead of petroleum. I assume it's more common place in Europe. I'm not the only one who's brought up hemp though I admit I got fascinated by it in 2007 when I heard all about it. For now, one can only import its products but can't grow its own. The legality of importing it ironically came from a loophole in NAFTA. Of course, I'd still choose to cancel NAFTA and the drug war. Maybe $200+ per barrel of oil might get the public to see it.
It's easy for anyone to be put in a state of feeling helpless and that all is lost. I've had that feeling lots of times too. Solutions can be tough to prove but some management skills might be helpful in convincing enough skeptics to give it a try. I'm still shakey even on the solutions. In the case of hemp, it's still something that must be grown and contrary to what I denied, the current oil demand is too high for hemp to easily replace oil. Serious lifestyle changes will be needed to cut down the demand to sustainable levels.
By the way, what was life like living in Germany and was it this decade or before?
I lived in germany only three years ago. I don't think hemp is an alternative to oil. I was referring to other uses, clothing, paper production, insulation etc.
We also took our kids snorkeling at Pennekamp in the 1980's. I would not go back either. It would not be a vacation but more like a mournful visit to a memorial.
Joe
those 'magic' dates again: 2020, 2050........
we've known about this bleaching for a long time now......
All this carbon cutting bloat talk isn't going anywhere. How about taking the algae and using it towards producing algal oil? Algal oil is the perfect replacement for light sweet crude oil and is carbon. There is no point in setting dates and procrastinating when the right solutions aren't being carried out. We can reduce our dependence on oil and use the carbon neutral type for a change. 2050 is too long to wait. It's time to get the oil for algae product on the road already.
http://www.oilgae.com/ref/oil/or/or.html
http://www.oilgae.com/algae/types/red_algae/red_algae.html
that's right Max, as i said here and in the apocalypse fatigue article, people are just to exhausted with more immediate problems, foreclosure, credit card defaults, jobs, health ins. etc. to be concerned with a reef thousands of miles away. Crude? Yes, but even if they understand the connection of that to climate change and some soon to be horrible set of events, they just don't care, period.
I was thinking solutions like hemp and algae for oil would give people an economic startover and save the coral reef without their knowing it. There's one problem though and Henry8 of TX was right. It takes more labor as well as enough land to get either one of them going. Then the operation has to be decentralized. Hemp and algae can grow anywhere so that wouldn't be a problem but then there's politics and the fact that the current demand for oil is too high for hemp and algae to catch up. Finally, lots of labor which could mean lots of jobs but I'm afraid I just hit the ceiling there. People want "easy" jobs and will stoop to working for controversial places. I'm already guilty of that too.
You got the connections part right. If I told someone that filling up a tank with oil from algae instead of oil drilled from anywhere on this planet would actually save coral reefs, I'd get a horse laugh or a confused stare.
There's also the fact that certain parts of the country don't give biology much of a showing in high schools especially in red America where the fundies rule. But even in NYC, my wife told me that it's impossible to get most people to take scenic beauty seriously.
The timing deadlines of carbon emission cutting itself is suspicious. Who knows what 2050 will be like. How many of us on this forum will be alive by then? Will this forum or even the Internet exist? 40 years is too far out for any future predictions.
"It takes more labor as well as enough land to get either one of them going."
Well, yeah. No technology that gets its energy from the sun is going to be able to beat the millions and millions of years of stored sunlight in fossil fuels. Humanity is just going to have to cut back. A blessing in disguise, I suspect, considering how unhappy our excesses have made us.
Fusion power is a game-changer, but no-one has cracked it yet.
Global climate disruption is but one facet of the sixth extinction. I guess that's all I really have to say about this!
"It has said it would go further, with a 25 per cent cut, if a tough international climate agreement is reached at UN climate talks in Copenhagen"
This is a totally unacceptable position for the Australian government and all governments. You don't cut emissions as a concession in a business deal. You cut emissions to do your part to save the reefs and the rest of the earth's living legacy.
Let's purge the idea of business priorities trumping the health of the biosphere. We could purge 3/4 of all the business activity as well, because it's highly unnecessary, wasteful and destructive. Starting with Casino Royal, the stock, derivatives, commodities and currency speculation rackets, and general finance, military, energy, and quite a number of other infected sectors. Half of the healthcare sector activity in the USA is waste. 90% of economic activity related to transport in the USA is waste. Just look at these solitary commuters racking up 500 miles per week in 3.5 ton SUVs. On and on.
This is the truth, that we don't need 3/4 of current economic activity, given a certain set of values, and nobody has a monopoly on these values. You can embrace them or not, but you can't escape partial responsibility for the destruction if you choose to reject them. It's like a natural law. Certain laws cannot be broken, contrary to the petro-fried liberal mythology.
Sad to say, but humans get the planet they deserve.
Wow, & "If" the old "If Game" human beings upon the planet had lived like the Tribes of this land as well as others we wouldn't be having this conversation now.
If Columbus was sailing today the mountains still might be completely untouched. Nuclear weapons & nuclear waste might not even exist in this land. Might not even be up to electricity yet or given to any thought of such things.
The Elders of the Tribes would still live with the Tribes, & do their own hunting, fishing, growing & gathering of the food, merely a member of the Tribe selected as an Elder for their wisdom. And as instantly unselected as an Elder if they proved not to be to wise at all.
Completely perfect, no, but perhaps 95 to 98 percent less problems since the change of ownership of the land so the Europeans could build their new Roman Empire/Babylon upon the earth as they usher in their New World Order.
It's all strange. At least I am in the food chain somewhere today. Tomorrow, who knows?
Just headline the story:
"Great Barrier Reef Will Die"
Forget the unless... part of the story.
Sorry, there will be no saving the planet.
It doesn't make plutocrats wealthier.
Pretty photo though, save it for our extinction parties.
We will reduce our fossil fuel use by 2020 regardless of whether politicians make promises or not.
Peak Oil means there will be less to burn in the future.
I realize it's politically incorrect to discuss the laws of physics, but the "alternatives" to oil are all less energy dense than fossil fuels. That is why we have used oil, coal and natural gas -- they are very concentrated. Solar and wind (and maybe algae) are nice but they are not going to replace what we have been using. We are also past "Peak Minerals" or "Peak Ore" for many critical materials. Prius engines and large wind turbines require Rare Earth minerals mostly found in China. The best iron ore in the US is long gone. There's no free lunch. Sorry.
It's unfortunate that Common Dreams and the rest of the "progressives" were more interested in "left" politics and not the physical limits of nature. The survivors of the crash will hopefully get a powerful lesson about the limits to exponential growth on a finite planet.
http://www.postcarbon.org/new-site-files/Reports/Searching_for_a_Miracle_web10nov09.pdf
SEARCHING FOR A MIRACLE
Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society
by Richard Heinberg
Foreword by Jerry Mander
A Joint Project of the International Forum on Globalization and the Post Carbon Institute.
[ False Solution Series #4 ] September 2009
http://www.oilempire.us/triple-crisis.html
Triple Crisis: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Overshoot