Coral? Going, Going, Gone…

Yet another major Australian scientist has researched for himself the dangers of our dependance on fossil fuels and found the future frightening.

J.E.N. Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science has confirmed that corals will be gone if we don’t act. His article on Yale Environment 360:- puts the situation very clearly.

Basically, he expects all our coral reefs to be destroyed within the lifetime of the current generation of children (say 80 years).

Why? Due to increasing heat causing coral bleaching and increasing acidity of the oceans caused by CO2 disolving in the water.

We are responsible for both of these things. We have to take the action proposed by the IPCC in 2007 (now more than 3 years ago):- and reduce our emissions every year so that global emissions peak in 2015 and go down rapidly to near 5% of what the world emitted in 1990.

This CAN BE DONE. We can do it with todays technology. It will cost money but we know what we risk if we don’t do it. What dollar value would you place on the entire tropical coral reef system?

Corals are one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems. If they collapse, other bio-systems will follow and we will be faced with a global disaster and a crashing population.

We need our governments to stop building coal fired power stations. To put a price on carbon to drive the needed changes. And to target reductions that are based on the science, not on some “socially acceptable” level of change. What is socially acceptable if the our grandchildren and great grandchildren have no food to eat and a hostile poisonous world to try to survive in?

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