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  Yahoo News 2 Feb 07
Global warming threatens Australia's Barrier reef
By Rob Taylor

The Australian 1 Feb 07
Scientists warn of hysteria over state of Barrier Reef
Matthew Warren, Environment writer

HYSTERIA surrounding the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef could lead to less being done to protect it from immediate threats such as pollution and over-fishing, scientists have warned.

Recent reports based on a study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be released tomorrow, have predicted that the reef will be extinct within decades as a result of rising sea temperatures caused by global warming.

But reef experts claim the impact of climate change on the reef is more complex, and say other threats are far more immediate.

John Pandolfi, a marine scientist from the University of Queensland's Centre for Marine Studies, sees climate change as a much longer-term prospect than the threat posed by pollution from cities and agriculture, and over-fishing.

"There are some incredibly pressing issues for coral reefs around the world that don't involve climate change," he said. "The danger is that we tend to focus on things like climate change but tend to ignore these other pressures.

"If we ignore the other threats, climate change isn't going to matter because the reef isn't going to be there."

He said while the science of how coral responds to and recovers from bleaching was still evolving, the damage was caused by a sustained higher-than-average water temperature over summer for two weeks coupled with direct sunlight.

Bleaching occurred on the Barrier Reef in 1998 - the hottest year on record - and 2002. James Cook University physicist Peter Ridd said while global warming posed a serious threat, its impact on the reef was unproven.

He said the reef was one of the least-threatened natural systems on the planet. "Sure, if we get a 5C to 6C temperature rise, we will have a problem, but then if we get a 5C or 6C temperature rise the other problems we are going to have are going to be so unbelievably terrible that the Great Barrier Reef will be the least of our worries," he said.

Cairns-based dive instructor Ben Gralow said he had not noticed any major changes in the condition of the reef in the past six years. "A couple of reefs have gone backwards but then there have been another couple that have improved," he said.

Coral Reef Research Centre director Terry Hughes said the incidence of bleaching globally had risen significantly in recent years, with evidence that the ability of reefs to recover between increasingly frequent bleaching events was weakened by threats such as local pollution.

"I don't think many biologists take the extreme view that the Barrier Reef will be dead in 30 years, because there is very strong evidence of some species being hardier than others, and some are more mobile than others," Professor Hughes said. "We'll still have a tourism industry, there will still be corals, but they're likely to be a rejuggled version of the species composition we have today."

Professor Hughes said the alarming reports risked diluting the public's commitment to addressing all the threats to the reef.

"People will just throw their hands up in the air and say coral reefs are stuffed, let's just go and save some rainforest," he said. "I don't think people are doing coral reefs any favours by indicating there is nothing we can do about it."

Yahoo News 2 Feb 07
Global warming threatens Australia's Barrier reef
By Rob Taylor

CANBERRA (Reuters) - From a boat at sea, Australia's Great Barrier Reef seems invincible -- its myriad corals stretching 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) beyond sight.

But the reef's vastness and wave-smashing outcrops mask fragility in the face of climate change threatening to bleach its fluorescent depths the stark white of death.

The reef, and possibly the A$5.8 billion ($4.5 billion) tourist industry it underpins, will be "functionally extinct" by 2050, a draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned this week.

"Climate change is clearly a threat to the corals and the tiny plants that live in the tissues, but the issues go far beyond coral. Corals build a structure in which thousands of species live," Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral bleaching researcher, told Reuters.

Coral bleaching due to rising temperatures has struck many reefs around the world, hitting the Indian Ocean, parts of the Caribbean and Australia. It occurs when corals living at the edge of their temperature tolerance expel the tiny animals that live inside, turning colorless and exposing their calcium skeletons inside. Death follows unless the water soon cools. Global warming bringing temperature rises of between 2 to 3 Celsius (3.6 to 4.8 Fahrenheit) makes future salvation less likely.

"Coral bleaching can occur for a number of different reasons. But more recently, its been occurring because the seas in the tropical parts of the world are becoming too warm," Hoegh-Guldberg said.

Climatologists say Australia is suffering an "accelerated climate change," making the Great Barrier Reef's World Heritage corals at particular risk.

The reef is home to more than a third of the world's soft corals, more than 1,500 species of fish and six of the world's seven marine turtle species.

Indian Ocean corals were harder hit than Australia's in 1998, with 50 percent dying along its western rim in months.

"But of course we're only in the early days of climate change and it's of great concern that we've been seeing the type of increase in bleaching in severity and frequency that we've seen in other parts of the world," Hoegh-Guldberg said.

The new Australian of the Year, scientist and climate warrior Tim Flannery, said a new IPCC report on climate change blaming humans for rising global temperatures underestimated the speed of climate change, warning its findings were conservative.

"The actual trajectory we've seen in the arctic over the last two years if you follow that, that implies that the arctic ice cap will be gone in the next 5 to 15 years," Flannery told Australian radio. "There's a 10 per cent chance of truly catastrophic rises in temperatures, so we're looking there at 6 degrees (Celsius) or so, that would be a disaster for all life on earth." ($1=A$1.29)
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