Right Pulse

From ‘your’ ABC:

The audit, by the Global Carbon Project, found carbon dioxide levels from human activities are increasing by about 2 per cent per year, or 1.3 tonnes of carbon per capita….

The 2008 assessment found the nation’s CO2 levels are continuing to rise and among developed nations Australia has the lead on a per capita basis.

“In the basket of developed countries, we compare with the US (its emissions are almost flat at the moment), countries like Canada, with the EU countries, and in almost all of those countries we exceed their emissions rate,” he said.

Should be cause of national celebration. And on other related matters:

Professor Terry Hughes and representatives of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies told a meeting at the Canberra parliament that the future of the reef, and a large chunk of Australia’s tourist industry, was under grave threat from rising sea temperatures.

Just a small increase in average temperatures could cause massive coral bleaching on the reef, he said….

To avoid permanently damaging the delicate balance of life on the reef, and give the world’s largest living organism a 50 per cent chance of survival, global carbon emissions must be cut by at least 25 per cent by 2020, he said.

Ramping up the fear factor. These claims have been made before only to have later been proven wrong. More recently from Chris de Freitas, associate professor in the School of Environment at Auckland University:

The Great Barrier Reef is in excellent health. No evidence exists for a trend of increasing water temperature, nor for damaging regional human impacts outside the immediate vicinity of developed resorts. The reef has withstood past global coolings and warmings of several degrees over many millennia.

And from p.608 of the Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change:

Australian scientists say that “the range in bleaching tolerances among corals inhabiting different thermal realms suggests that at least some coral symbioses have the ability to adapt to much higher temperatures than they currently experience in the central Great Barrier Reef,” citing the work of Coles and Brown (2003) and Riegl (1999, 2002). In addition, they note that “even within reefs there is a significant variability in bleaching susceptibility for many species (Edmunds, 1994; Marshall and Baird, 2000), suggesting some potential for a shift in thermal tolerance based on selective mortality (Glynn 2001et al., Jimenez et al., 2001)  and local population growth alone.”Above and beyond that, however, they say their results additionally suggest “a capacity for acclimatization or adaptation.”