Why Are We Killing Coral Reefs? | David Newman's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC
Coral reefs are likely to become the first ecosystem completely destroyed by humans, predicts Dr. Peter Sale, a leading United Nations ecologist. His new book, Our Dying Planet, explains:
“It is not pollution, or overfishing, or mass bleaching, or climate change, or any of the other factors I have mentioned that is killing our coral reefs. It is all of these factors together. Or, to put it more plainly, the cause of the destruction of coral reefs is us.”
Sale's conclusion echos the immortal words of cartoonist Walt Kelly, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
Matt Ridley on Rebels Who Win Nobels | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com
Perhaps it's at least worth guessing which of today's heretics will eventually win a Nobel Prize. How about the Dane Henrik Svensmark? In 1997, he suggested that the sun's magnetic field affects the earth's climate—by shielding the atmosphere against cosmic rays, which would otherwise create or thicken clouds and thereby cool the surface. So, he reasoned, a large part of the natural fluctuations in the climate over recent millennia might reflect variation in solar activity.
Dr. Svensmark is treated as a heretic mainly because his theory is thought to hinder the effort to convince people that recent climatic variation is largely manmade, not natural, so there is a bias toward resisting his idea. That does not make it right, but some promising recent experiments at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) raise the probability that Dr. Svensmark might yet prove to be a Shechtman.
2007 Nobel Peace Price
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