[Coral-List] Reefs and climate

John Ware jware at erols.com
Fri Jul 11 11:02:12 EDT 2014


  The actual headline is:


  "Climate change 'not wholly to blame' for reef death in the Caribbean"

Not "Wrongly blamed".
John

Eugene Shinn wrote:

>There is a lot of confusion out there.
>
>*Climate Change Wrongly Blamed For Reef Death In The Caribbean*
>The Times, 3 July 2014 
><http://thegwpf.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=df64dac669&e=804bb8caa5>
>
>Ben Webster
>
>Action to save coral reefs in the Caribbean has been delayed by the 
>misapprehension that climate change is the primary cause of their 
>decline, a leading scientist said.
>
>The main reasons why the area covered by live coral has more than halved 
>since the 1970s are overfishing and coastal pollution, according to Carl 
>Gustaf Lundin, director of the global marine programme at the 
>International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
>
>Mr Lundin helped oversee an analysis by 90 experts of 35,000 surveys of 
>Caribbean reefs over the past 40 years. Their report, published 
>yesterday, concluded that climate change had wrongly been blamed for a 
>problem that had largely been caused by local factors which could have 
>been controlled by better regulation.
>
>The report says: "Climate change has long been thought to be the main 
>culprit in coral degradation. While it does pose a serious threat by 
>making oceans more acidic and causing bleaching, the report shows that 
>the loss of parrotfish and sea urchins --- the area's two main grazers 
>--- has, in fact, been the key driver of coral decline in the region."
>
>The report, by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network 
><http://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=155b88204b&e=804bb8caa5>, 
>the IUCN and the United Nations Environment Programme, says that the 
>remaining reefs could disappear in the next 20 years unless action is 
>taken to protect parrotfish, which eat the algae that smothers reefs.
>
>  
>

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