Who has the nuttiest national politicians?

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I had thought that nobody made wacky national politicians like we do here in the US (see Michelle Bachman).  But Kevin Rudd’s speech on climate change last Friday included some jaw dropping and hilarious quotes from denier and on-the-fence Australian politicians about climate change.

Would-be Liberal leader Tony Abbott said in July this year that “the science … is contentious to say the least”. (27 July 2009)

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said:
“I remain unconvinced about the need for an ETS given that carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth”.

Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston said:
“Levels of carbon dioxide have risen in the world, but whether or not this is the sole cause or just a contributor to climate change is, I think, unanswered.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)

Excuse me, but does “liberal” mean something different on the bottom of the world, like maybe, “conservative” or “totally uninformed”?   Is Australia like, opposite world?  I may need to consult my travel guide before I move there in January.

Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin said this year:
“CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant… This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)

Alternative Liberal leader Joe Hockey – who knows better – has been drawn into the same sort of doublespeak, remarking on the Today Show in August:
“Look, climate change is real Karl, you know whether it is made by human beings or not that is open to dispute.”
(12 AUGUST 2009)

Even the leader of the Opposition, once Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has flirted with this doublespeak, telling Alan Jones on 2GB:
“I think most people have at least some doubts about the science.”
(19 JUNE 2009)

OK.  That is, I admit, an impressive showing.  But we have some nuts leading our government as well. Or as Kevin Rudd mildly put it “Climate sceptics are also a powerful political lobby in the United States”  First take the leader of the national Rebuplican party;

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steel said on 6 March 2009:
“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.”

Ahhh.  That explains it.  Maybe the whole world is now opposite world. Warming leads to cooling.  In fact, warming is the new cooling.  Makes total sense!  (to be fair, this man says stupid things daily and even conservatives loathe and are embarrassed by him).

House Minority Leader John Boehner said on April 19 2009:
“The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide.”

I am beginning to sense a meme here…

Republican Congressman John Shimkus said on 25 March 2009:
“If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere”

John later elaborated:

“…the earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood…. I appreciate having panelists here who are men of faith, and we can get into the theological discourse of that position, but I do believe God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect. Today we have about 388 parts per million in the atmosphere. I think in the age of dinosaurs, when we had the most flora and fauna, we were probably at 4,000 parts per million. There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet — not too much carbon. And the cost of a cap-and-trade on the poor is now being discovered.”

That is a pretty good one.  It may even top the God-and-climate-related rant by rep. Joe Barton, whom I blogged about last month:

“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.” – Joe Barton, from a March 10 House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing

I don’t know.  It may seem like a draw.  But I haven’t even trotted out our big gun; conservative republican senator James Inhofe.

“much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science.” I called the threat of catastrophic global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFjMeFaBS7w&w=425&h=344]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VgdYJWdhRw&w=425&h=344]

And read here for more false statements made by US Politicians regarding climate change and the environment.

Australian PM Kevin Rudd; climate change hero

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Australian PM Kevin Rudd gave a speech on climate change at the Lowy Institute for International Policy on ‘Australia, the region and the world: the challenges ahead’ last Friday.  I ran across the text of the speech today and was beyond impressed. This man, a mere politician, truly seems motivated by this issue. He really seems to get what is at stake, what needs to be done and what the political forces opposing action on climate change are.  And he quotes from Kenny Rogers!  That would win millions of red state voters here in the wild west.  (You gave us Men at Work, we give you Kenny Rogers in return).

The full speech can be read here and you can download a PDF of the transcript or listen to the speech here. And ill excerpt some highlights below.

…we are just 31 days away from the Copenhagen Conference of Parties – an historic moment to forge a global deal to put a global price on carbon.

Today we are approaching the crossroads. Both these policies are reaching crunch time.

When you strip away all the political rhetoric, all the political excuses, there are two stark choices – action or inaction. The resolve of the Australian Government is clear – we choose action, and we do so because Australia’s fundamental economic and environmental interests lie in action.

Action now. Not action delayed.

As one of the hottest and driest continents on earth, Australia’s environment and economy will be among the hardest and fastest hit by climate change if we do not act now. The scientific evidence from the CSIRO and other expert bodies have outlined the implications for Australia, in the absence of national and global action on climate change:

  • Temperatures in Australia rising by around five degrees by the end of the century.
  • By 2070, up to 40 per cent more drought months are projected in eastern Australia and up to 80 per cent more in south-western Australia.
  • A fall in irrigated agricultural production in the Murray Darling Basin of over 90 per cent by 2100.
  • Our Gross National Product dropping by nearly two and a half per cent through the course of this century from the devastation climate change would wreak on our infrastructure alone.

In Australia, we must pass our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – to deliver certainty for business at home and to play our part abroad in any global agreement to bring greenhouse gases down.

President Obama in the United States is also working hard so that he can take strong commitments to Copenhagen. And let us never forget that in the US, as in Australia, under both our respective previous governments, zero action was taken on bringing in cap and trade schemes meaning that the governments that replaced them began with a zero start. Other countries are striving to build domestic political momentum in their own countries to take strong commitments into the global deal.

The opponents of action on climate change fall into one of three categories.

  • First, the climate science deniers.
  • Second, those that pay lip service to the science and the need to act on climate change but oppose every practicable mechanism being proposed to bring about that action.
  • Third, those in each country that believe their country should wait for others to act first.

It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change skeptics in all their colours – some more sophisticated than others.

It is to destroy the CPRS at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad, and our children’s fate – and our grandchildren’s fate – will lie entirely with them.

It’s time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.

Seven times the Liberals and Nationals have promised to make a decision on their policy on climate change – and seven times they have delayed.

  1. In December 2007 they said wait for Garnaut.
  2. In September 2008 they said wait for Treasury modelling.
  3. In September 2008 they said wait for the White Paper.
  4. In December 2008 they said wait until the Pearce Report.
  5. In April 2009 they said wait for the Senate Inquiry.
  6. In May 2009 they said wait for the Productivity Commission – forgetting that the Productivity Commission already made a submission on emissions trading to the Howard Government’s Shergold Report.
  7. Now the Liberals and National have said wait for Copenhagen and for President Obama’s scheme.

It is an endless cycle of delay – and I am sure that with December almost upon us, the eighth excuse cannot be far away – which will be to wait until the next year or the year after until all the rest of the world has acted at which time Australia will act.

What absolute political cowardice.

What an absolute failure of leadership.

What an absolute failure of logic.

The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so, then no nation will ever act.

The immediate and inevitable consequence of this logic – if echoed in other countries – is that there will be no global deal as each nation says to its domestic constituencies that they cannot act because others have not acted.

The result is a negotiating stalemate. A permanent standoff.

And this of course is the consistent ambition of all three groups of do-nothing climate change deniers.

Coral reef scientist slams Australian government over ‘reckless vandalism’

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AUSTRALIA-ENVIRONMENT-REEF

For anyone is the Brisbane area – Dr Charlie Veron will be speaking at City Hall as part of Run for a Safe Climate (betwen 5.30-7pm). In the leadup to Copenhagen, 35  emergency services workers are running from one end of Australia to the other. Find out more at www.runforasafeclimate.org

The Age newspaper, 9th November 2009

One of the world’s leading coral reef scientists has slammed the Brumby Government’s proposal to export Victoria’s brown coal to India as “reckless vandalism”.

John “Charlie” Veron, who discovered a quarter of the world’s identified coral species, said any move to export the state’s vast reserves of brown coal would only further endanger the Great Barrier Reef.

“It’s reckless vandalism. Brown coal would have to be the dirtiest, nastiest form of energy there is. It is absolutely essential that it remains in the ground. That is obvious,” he told The Age.

The Sunday Age revealed in September that Energy Minister Peter Batchelor had championed in a Cabinet committee a 40-year proposal to export 12 million tonnes of brown coal to India. Mr Brumby has said that, given environmental approval processes, there is no reason why Victoria should not export its coal. “Australia exports oil, Australia exports gas, Australia exports black coal and Australia exports uranium,” he said. “So why you would single out brown coal and say you can’t export that?”

But Dr Veron, the Townsville-based author of the three-volume Corals of the World, said that avoiding every tonne of carbon dioxide was now crucial to save the world’s reefs. Moreover, he said science had now shown that corals will struggle to survive with the carbon dioxide levels already in the atmosphere.

High levels of carbon dioxide – the world is currently at 378 parts per million of carbon dioxide – have two impacts on corals. As the globe warms, so too does the sea, which sparks coral bleaching. But scientists now understand that the bigger problem is ocean acidification, when the chemistry of the ocean changes because of the large amounts of carbon dioxide they absorb from the atmosphere. These changes reduce the ability of reefs to form and regrow after bleaching events.

Mr Veron, who recently gave a talk on climate change and corals at the Royal Society introduced by Sir David Attenborough, said the current targets the world’s politicians are talking about – 450 and 500 parts per million – would leave only “a very small band of ocean left in which corals can live”.

“They will struggle just to exist, let alone build reefs,” said Dr Veron, who has clocked 7000 hours of diving research on coral reefs.

Brown coal, which drives 90 per cent of the state’s power supply, has been unsuitable for export because it is unstable and flammable. But proponents say recent developments in technology will allow them to dry the coal, making it less polluting – equal to black coal – and safe to transport.

The company behind the plan to export brown coal to India, Exergen, is hopeful the Government will give it access to a new release of brown coal. The company expects to earn $700 million a year in export income for Victoria.

Scientists call for urgent ‘global cooling’ to save coral reefs

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UQ News, 8th November 2009

Australian marine scientists have issued an urgent call for massive and rapid worldwide cuts in carbon emissions, deep enough to prevent atmospheric CO2 levels rising to 450 parts per million (ppm).

In the lead up to United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change Conference Professors Charlie Veron (former Chief Scientist, Australian Institute of Marine Science) and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and The University of Queensland, have urged the world’s leaders to adopt a maximum global emission target of 325 parts per million (ppm).

This will be essential, they say, to save coral reefs worldwide from a catastrophic decline which threatens the livelihoods of an estimated 500 million people globally.

This is substantially lower than today’s atmospheric levels of 387 ppm, and far below the 450ppm limit envisaged by most governments attending Copenhagen as necessary to restrain global warming to a 2 degree rise, on average.

“This may take a long time. However, climate change is an intergenerational issue which will require intergenerational thinking,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“If CO2 levels are allowed to continue to approach 450 ppm (due by 2030–2040 at the current rates at which emissions are climbing), reefs will be in rapid and terminal decline world-wide from mass coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and other environmental impacts associated with climate change,” Professor Charlie Veron, Professor Hoegh-Guldberg, Dr Janice Lough of COECRS and the Australian Institute of Marine Science and colleagues warn in a new scientific paper published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.

“Damage to shallow reef communities will become extensive with consequent reduction of biodiversity followed by extinctions,” they said.

“Reefs will cease to be large-scale nursery grounds for fish and will cease to have most of their current value to humanity. There will be knock-on effects to ecosystems associated with reefs, and to other (marine) ecosystems.”

The researchers say that coral deaths due to bleaching were first observed when global atmospheric CO2 levels passed 320ppm in the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, at 340 ppm, sporadic, highly-destructive events were being recorded.

In the paper they argue for a long-term limit “below 350ppm” to be set.

Prof Veron told the British Royal Society recently that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef would be on ‘death row’ unless urgent action was taken to stem global carbon emissions.

“We are tracking the IPCC’s worst case scenario. The global CO2 situation, tracked by temperature and sea level rise, is now following the worst case scenario,” he says. “The people meeting at Copenhagen need to hear this message.”

At the same time CO2 emissions are turning the oceans more acidic, causing damage to corals and all life with a carbonate skeletons or shells and, if unchecked, potentially leading to mass extinctions of ocean life like those of the geological past.

“We are already well above the safe levels for the world’s coral reefs. The proposed 450ppm/2 degree target is dangerous for the world’s corals and for the 500 million people who depend on them,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“We should not go there, not only for reasons of coral reefs, but for the many other impacts that are extremely likely.

“We deduce, from the history of coral bleaching, that the safe level for coral reefs is probably about 320 or 325ppm.

“From fossil air taken from ice cores we know the world has not exceeded 300ppm for at least the last 760,000 years, so we are already in dangerous territory.

“We are already way outside the limits that mother earth has been operating within for millions of years.”

“Then there is sea level rise. The latest scientific consensus that the minimum sea level rise we can expect globally is 1 m. The IPCC’s earlier estimates on this are now seen as far too conservative. A metre of rise will displace at least 30 million people and contaminate the underground water supplies of many coastal cities with salt.

“Tens of millions of people are going to be displaced. This is not just about corals. Big issues of food security and regional security are also at stake, and we all need to wake up to the fact that climate change is not simply about warm days.”

“It will cost less than 1 per cent of GDP growth (over the next 50 years) to sort this problem out. In times of war individual countries have devoted anything from 40 to 70 per cent of their GDP to the war effort, so the effort required to cease emitting carbon is far, far smaller.

“It is completely affordable, completely achievable.

“The consequences of not cutting carbon emissions sharply are extremely serious for humanity. It is time all people understood this.”

Ocean acidification and coral reproduction on the Great Barrier Reef

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“Taking the acid test on the Great Barrier Reef“, National Times, 9th November 2009

Unlike some sexual processes in the animal world, coral reproduction remains a rather magical and mysterious event. And Dr Selina Ward loves it. The thousands of little red bundles of eggs and sperm are, she says, “beautiful”.

But at Heron Island Research Station, as she waits patiently for her corals to spawn, there’s now something more to Dr Ward’s research than simply untangling the mysteries of how corals release their egg and sperm bundles to the ocean currents.

Dr Ward, from the University of Queensland’s Centre for Marine Studies, is looking at how changes in the ocean’s chemistry – driven by increasing greenhouse gases – will affect the reproduction of corals and their ability to “settle” and build new reefs.  And her preliminary results are not looking good.

When coral scientists first looked at the impact of global warming on reefs, they focused on rising sea temperatures and bleaching. This is still a concern and likely to impact large parts of the Great Barrier Reef, but the scientists now believe ocean acidification could be the process that will push the world’s reefs to the edge.

The oceans act as a big sponge for carbon dioxide produced by human industry. Since the industrial revolution, the oceans have soaked up about half of the greenhouse gases produced by humans. That carbon dioxide has reacted with the water, making the ocean more acidic. As the oceans’ pH levels drop, life becomes harder for organisms that rely on making calcium carbonate – such as corals and shell fish, and even tiny but important creatures such as krill.

Coral scientists are scrambling to understand what this process will mean for reef systems. Dr Ward’s colleagues, including well-known reef scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, wrote a paper in 2007 showing that, as carbon dioxide levels increase, the worldwide area reefs can grow will shrink dramatically. Even at carbon dioxide levels of 450 and 500 parts per million (the atmosphere is now at 378 ppm) the area is very small, and does not include the Great Barrier Reef.

Last year, at the International Coral Reef Symposium, Dr Ward said about half a dozen papers were presented on the impact that ocean acidification has already had.  “They found that in the last 20 to 30 years, growth rates have suddenly dropped about 20 per cent. That could be a number of things – it could be water quality issues or that we have reached the temperature peak and it’s too hot. Or it could be that ocean acidification is kicking in.”  Scientists are also discovering that more acidic oceans leave corals even more vulnerable to bleaching.

Dr Ward’s research, which is not yet published, is one corner of this big picture. Her work involves exposing spawning coral to water at different pH levels. She is finding that the early life stages of corals are adversely affected by ocean acidification, with reductions in fertilisation and settlement (difficulty laying down the first skeleton). “If a coral can’t lay down a skeleton, they can’t build a reef, and that is a fundamental problem,” she says.

‘Eat your dog’ meme Debunked

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There is a viral meme in the blogosphere and mass media suggesting that a single dog has the same impact as an SUV.  We blogged about it here.  Well, this advice and comparison turns out to have been based on some really dodgy calculations and is officially debunked.  Hopefully nobody took our advice seriously.  (I smell lawsuit).

First, let’s look at that SUV.  The calculations behind the internet meme say that it’s driven about 6,200 miles per year (10,000 km).  And yet, according to the US Department of Energy, a real SUV in the US is driven an average of 13,700 miles annually.  Already, the internet meme is off by a factor of roughly 2.2.  … their mileage assumptions certainly skews the numbers in favor of SUVs, and against dogs.

And then there’s the total energy estimates.  The pet-pessimists estimate that an SUV (in their calculations, a 4.6 liter Toyota Land Cruiser driven about 6,200 miles) consumes 55.1 gigajoules of energy in both fuel and amortized manufacturing energy every year.  That, too, is low.  A Land Cruiser gets about 15.25 mpg in combined city/highway driving — meaning that if it’s driven 10,000 km, it consumes about 407 gallons of gas, or 53.6 gigajoules worth of energy.  …  Yet again, they’ve low-balled the impacts of the SUV in a way that makes dogs look worse by comparison.  (Here, I’m drawing from the data collection and calculations I did for our CO2-by-transportation-mode charts. And I’m looking only at energy, not at the additional climate and pollution impacts of emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks.)

So even before you start to look at dogs, the authors have underestimated the environmental impacts of SUVs by a factor of at least 3.  And that’s not including the indirect impacts of SUVs — the parking spaces we build for them; the roads and bridges they drive on; the impacts of insurance and licensing operations; etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Then there’s flip side:  the authors’ claims about the impact of feeding pets.  The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares — or about 2.1 acres of cropland — to meet a a pooch’s food needs for a year.  There are a little over 70 million dogs in the US (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs).  So by the authors’ estimates it must take about 150 million acres of US farmland to feed our dogs.  In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US — suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all US cropland is devoted to producing dog food.

We use the equivalent of a third of all US cropland to feed dogs?  That’s barking mad!

To see why it’s wrong, you can look from the bottom up, at the foods that dogs eat.  Or you can look from the top down, at the aggregate sales of dog food vs. the entire agricultural economy.  I’ll do both.

First from the bottom up:  what, exactly, do dogs eat?  The anti-pet-ites seem do a good job of calculating dogs’ calorie requirements.  Canines wolf down a lot of food:  a mid-sized dog consumes roughly 30 calories per pound of body weight per day.  (Smaller dogs eat as many as 40 calories per pound of body weight, while larger dogs eat as few as 20 calories per pound.  Call it the yapping-to-napping spread.)  I couldn’t find the average weight of dogs in the US, but the median dog breed listed here has an adult weight of 47 pounds.  If that’s representative of US dogs, then the average dog will eat 1,410 calories today, give or take — which, as I read it, is roughly what the authors’ figures imply.

It always does seem to come back to facts and numbers.

My reactions when I first read about the original meme were: 1) Yeah, dogs have a negative impact (but so does lots of stuff, e.g., washing your clothes-although I hear Jez has sworn off this too), 2) but this seems really exaggerated, dog food is made from the scraps people wont eat after all, 3) this argument was surely dreamed up by a diabolical denier-I can’t think of a better formulated argument to turn people away from measures to reduce AGW.

As a rabid animal rights believer, I just don’t see the moral logic of arguing that humans have any more right to life than a dog or cat.  So if we are going to get this extreme about it, the answer isn’t eat your dog; it is eat yourself (or jump off a bridge).

As David Horton commented on the original post:

I’m searching for a phrase … oh yes, “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. This is reminiscent of the nonsense proposition that because solar panels are black we shouldn’t use them because they absorb and radiate energy and so warm the planet.

I also think we run the strong risk of telling people that nothing they do in daily life can continue. And this is the kind of misconception that denialists prey on (back to the stone age etc). Telling people to kill and eat their pets because they are a major contributor to global warming is going to at best invite (quite rightly) derision and at worst have people say “oh stuff it, I’m not going to do anything if that’s what they are going to try to make me do”.

But I really like the overall idea Jez mentions, of calculating your own footprint, so that you can make your own decisions about how to change your lifestyle.  I do this exercise with  my marine ecology class, and the big surprises are always how big an impact air travel has and the importance of how much and fast you drive, not just the average mph of your car.

Anyway, for full disclosure, we have two dogs, two cats, two horses and three kids.  These things just happen.  My wife is a vet, so stray pets seem to find their way into our home.  I like dogs and cats, but have been lobbying for years to cleanse our family of them.  In part because of their environmental impact.  But really because I want to free us up to travel more, internationally, which will really do wonders for the planet…

Paul Gilding: Time to prepare for the “One Degree War”

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BlackCockatoo

Paul Gilding (activist, CEO, environmentalist and journalist) recently sent me this article:

Amidst the noise of the day-to-day debates, we have lost sight of the simple logic of the advice coming from the world’s top climate scientists. Despite the uncertainties in the details, the science carries one underlying message from which we can draw only one rational conclusion.

It is time to declare a global emergency and mobilise all available resources, political will and human ingenuity towards one task – to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change to an acceptable level.

Gilding and his co-author, Jorgen Randers have released what they call the ‘The One Degree War Plan’:

What would a rational response to the climate science look like? If you stripped away all the politics and debate and took a fresh look, what would be the logical action plan?

It is a plan that shows what humanity can achieve – and we believe will achieve – when it develops a rational response to the climate threat.

Building a robust plan and the support to implement it is of course an enormous task. So we think now is a good time to start.

The paper is a fascinating and surprisingly easy read – thoughtful, insightful and very well presented. Click here to download in the ‘One Degree Warplan’ in full (.pdf format, 21 pages), or follow this link to Paul Gilding’s website (Cockatoo Chronicles) to read the brief and background to the paper.

Corals likely to starve in a high CO2 world

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This is a little late in posting, but here is a video from a few weeks ago on Australia’s Channel 7 national news interviewing Alicia Crawley, a PhD student from my lab on the impacts of CO2 and ocean acidification on photosynthesis in corals. In a nutshell, Alicia’s research indicates that under higher CO2 scenarios, the symbiotic algae in corals are unable to protect themselves from the high light levels found on coral reefs, leading to starvation of the coral itself (click here to read the full journal article in Global Change Biology, “The effect of ocean acidification on symbiont photorespiration and productivity in Acropora formosa”). Click here for a transcript of a radio interview on ABC national news interviewing Alicia and a host of Australian marine scientists on the very real impacts of ocean acidification.

Great effort Alicia!

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7461976&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Online Reefs (Part 2): Darwin and the ‘reef problem’ in the XXI century

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In the second part of a series of videos and lectures on coral reefs and climate change (Online Reefs) is Dr Roberto Iglesias Prieto. Roberto is a lead research scientist at the Unidad Academia Puerto Morelos in Mexico, who has a long and distinguished career investigating the symbiont responses to coral stress. Roberto is a charismatic and captivating speaker, and his presentation is well worth watching for both scientists and anyone with an interest in coral reefs. Click here to see the first seminar in the series (Online Reefs (Part I): Climate change and ‘Survival of the Fittest’ among coral-algal symbiosis) by Todd LaJeunesse.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7462072&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1


Preservation of coral reefs: why isn’t the majority heard?

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A recent study done by the University of Oregon and the University of Hawaii shows that majority of people visiting the coral reefs in Hawaii deeply care about their protection.  This might not be surprising due to the large amount of money that tourism brings to the economy of Hawaii, and with over 80% of those tourists visiting the marine and coastal areas of Hawaii, the protection of the reefs should be of utmost importance:

“Virtually no one wanted expanded use of coral reefs to the extent it might degrade them for enjoyment by future generations, and many were willing to endorse any level of protection needed, even if it meant banning human use. These views toward coral reefs reflected peoples’ core personal values and are unlikely to change much, scientists said.”

“It was really quite astonishing, almost shocking how much people wanted this resource protected for its own sake,” said Mark Needham, an assistant professor of forest ecosystems and society at OSU. “We fish and hunt wildlife for food or sport, we cut trees for timber. In most natural resource issues, we find conflicts over management for economic value versus environmental preservation or protection, but we really didn’t see that here.

“Our surveys found overwhelmingly that people visiting coral reef areas did not think that human use and access were the most important issues when it came to these areas,” he said. “And if anything was to have a deleterious effect on reef ecosystems, they would want it stopped.” (Read more @ Science Daily)