Saturday, February 21, 2004
The disappearing Reefs:
The Australian reefs are said to be disappearing and are expected to be completely wiped out by the year 2050.
Environmentalists have been warning about the reefs for years. They say that the cause is mostly global warming as the reefs have very low tolerance for temerature changes. Combine this with pollution and they are not expected to survive. The results of this will be felt all over the world. In an ideal world market forces would work to increase there value to the point where it would be financially profitable to save them. I suspect that in this case it will not work. The destruction is happening too fast and scientist say it could take 300 - 500 years for them to re-generate. Unfortunately, the damage that we have done to the eco-system may take many more than the fifty years left to fix, if we can fix it at all. I don't know where it will all end, but it seems very scary to me.
The Australian reefs are said to be disappearing and are expected to be completely wiped out by the year 2050.
Environmentalists have been warning about the reefs for years. They say that the cause is mostly global warming as the reefs have very low tolerance for temerature changes. Combine this with pollution and they are not expected to survive. The results of this will be felt all over the world. In an ideal world market forces would work to increase there value to the point where it would be financially profitable to save them. I suspect that in this case it will not work. The destruction is happening too fast and scientist say it could take 300 - 500 years for them to re-generate. Unfortunately, the damage that we have done to the eco-system may take many more than the fifty years left to fix, if we can fix it at all. I don't know where it will all end, but it seems very scary to me.
# posted by Wil Smith : 9:12 a.m.
