U. Queensland Oceanographer - World's Reefs Will Die Within 30 Years Without Sweeping Energy Changes

[hatrack]

THE world's reefs, including Australia's Great Barrier Reef, will be dead within 30 years unless human activity changes quickly, a leading researcher says. Addressing the 11th international River symposium in Brisbane, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said it was crunch time for the world's reefs. “Let's say we delay another 10 years on having stern actions on emissions at a global level, we will not have coral reefs in about 30 to 50 years,” he said.

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, from the Centre for Marine Studies at the University of Queensland, said rising CO2 levels and melting ice caps meant the ocean was becoming uninhabitable for reefs. This worldwide change in climatic conditions was in addition to land-based pollution spilling from Queensland's coastal river systems, a symposium session into the impacts of river systems on the reef was told.

“We're rapidly rising to (CO2) levels which will be unsustainable for reefs in the very near future,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said. “If you ask the question, `Will we have coral reefs in 30 years' time?', I would say at the current rate of change and what we're doing to them, we won't. But it's all up to us right now.

“We're at the fork in the road. If we take one road - the one we're on right now - we won't have coral reefs. “If we make some very, very, very aggressive actions, if we reform how we do things, both at the global and local level, we'll have a really good chance of bringing coral reefs through in some shape or form, which will still provide the basis for the 100 million people that they support.”

EDIT

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24275259-11949,00.html

[GliderGuider]

1. WTF?

He wants me to stop driving so we can save a bunch of underwater rocks????

As if.

[hatrack]

2. Bwa-hahhahhahhah!!!!

:toast:

BTW, what is your flag?

[GliderGuider]

3. The flag is Anarcho-primitivism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism

Anarcho-primitivists view civilization as the logic, institutions, and physical apparatus of domestication, control, and domination. They focus primarily on the question of origins. Civilization is seen as the underlying problem or root of oppression, and must therefore be dismantled or destroyed.

Anarcho-primitivists describe the rise of civilization as the shift over the past 10,000 years from an existence within and deeply connected to the web of life, to one separated from and in control of the rest of life. They argue that prior to civilization there generally existed ample leisure time, considerable gender equality and social equality, a non-destructive approach to the natural world, the absence of organized violence, no mediating or formal institutions, and strong health and robustness. Anarcho-primitivists state that civilization inaugurated warfare, the subjugation of women, population growth, busy work, concepts of property, entrenched hierarchies, as well as encouraging the spread of diseases. They claim that civilization begins with and relies on an enforced renunciation of instinctual freedom and that it is impossible to reform away such a renunciation

I subscribe to the critique part of the philosophy, but there's no way in hell we're going back to primitive living voluntarily. Involuntarily? Well, that's whole nother cauldron of pisces.