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sting on the reef...
bluebottles (picture by Gus Leonisky)
Leaked diplomatic cables show the Federal Government watered down reef protection laws in 2009 to avoid a dispute with the US government.
In 2006 the Government extended the Great Barrier Reef's compulsory pilotage system to the Torres Strait to force large carriers and tankers to use a marine pilot to navigate through the Strait.
The system was designed to prevent accidents and spills.
But cables published by WikiLeaks show the United States and Singapore opposed the system.
The cables detail concerns raised by the US and refer to legal action considered by the Singaporean government.
The cables say Australia agreed in 2009 to wind the system back to avoid harming its relationship with the US.
The agreement means owners of ships are not penalised for breaching the system if they do not call at an Australian port.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-12/leaked-cables-reveal-watered-down-reef-laws/2881960
- By Gus Leonisky at 12 Sep 2011 - 7:32pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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the reef in danger...
Weak climate change targets could mean the end of coral reefs by 2100 if ‘urgent action’ isn’t taken. A new report by the Institute of Physics (IOP) suggests nations have failed to commit to high enough targets to reduce emissions, and warns, unless these are raised, CO2 levels leading to ocean acidification could destroy coral reefs by the end of the century.
The IOP’s analysis of the Copenhagen Accord, the international pledge agreed at last year’s Copenhagen climate change conference, criticises individual nations’ targets to reduce emissions as too 'low' and 'weak' and states a global temperature increase of up to 4.2 º C and the end of coral reefs could become reality by 2100 if national targets are not revised...
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/614395/coral_reefs_could_disappear_by_2100.html
meanwhile, in burning perry's country
...
But Texas—which has also experienced the driest 12 months in the state's history—is far from the only corner of the U.S. to swelter this summer. This week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that nationally the summer was the second warmest on record, with an average summertime temperature of 74.5 F, which is just a smidgen below the record summer of 1936. Four states—Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Louisiana—all set records for summertime heat. (That's right—if Texas hadn't broken Oklahoma's 77-year-old record, Oklahoma would have busted the figure itself.) And while the worst of the heat was experienced by the Southwest, including Texas—as the NOAA map below shows—not a single state in the lower 48 experienced temperatures below the August average.
Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/09/09/texas-sets-records-during-the-second-hottest-summer-in-u-s-history%e2%80%94and-the-worst-is-still-to-come/#ixzz1XjHhk4ib
GLOBAL WARMING IS ON.
In geological terms, present global warming is super fast and furious... Basically the learned scientific community is looking down the barrel of not much more than the next 90-year period to achieve the same change of temperature upward than what happened in the last big very "fast" melt — over around 2000 years, from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago...