Saturday, April 23, 2016

a canary with a fever


Sometimes the canary in the coalmine dies quickly and at other times it slowly expires. The 93% coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef this year is a bit of both and shows how these extinction events really happen - they are not linear - they don't happen all ordered and knowable - they happen in bursts, in slides and then plateaus and then cliffs and so on. The Great Barrier Reef is a coughing canary and baring aliens and superheroes is likely to be gone within a decade or 4. This bleaching is caused by sea temperature rises and this is contributed to by fossil fuel burning and that is not even close to stopping or even slowing down. Environmental activists know that even as governments sign a global climate change deal in New York to limit global warming by at least two degrees that this is just a minimum response practically worth nothing other than the ability to skite about it, just like our idiot Minister, back in their home countries.

news.com.au
But environmental activists want greater action from the government at home. 
“Australians can see right through the hypocrisy of the government talking about the reef’s health while allowing the mining and burning of coal to go on at unprecedented levels,” Greenpeace Campaigner Nikola Casule said. 
“Our reef is dying before our eyes. We need a credible plan to mitigate climate change and move to a coal-free economy,” he said on Friday. 
This month the Queensland Government gave the go-ahead for Australia’s biggest coal mine, Adani’s Carmichael mine in the Galilee basin. It has been hugely controversial because its potential impacts on the reef due to dredging and increased port movements.
Yep the BIGGEST coal mine - but these same 'people' will weep and gnash when the reef is dead - "Why didn't someone tell us, oh why didn't someone do something". Scum is too good a word for these greedy exploitative bastards.

Reading about the demise of the Great Barrier Reef often, as in nearly every time, leads to the value of the reef and oh how the MONETARY value is placed above and beyond everything. This just makes me sick.

Be in the moment and enjoy the today you are in for the diversity of your experience and the myriad interactions with other living entities that you enjoy. The times are changing and changing fast...

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