[Coral-List] PBS story on Florida reef
Peter Sale
sale at uwindsor.ca
Fri Dec 7 14:00:28 EST 2012
Hi Doug,
It was good of you to draw attention of coral-list to the recent News-Hour
story on the Florida reef and coral decline. I also had seen the story.
It was reasonably accurate, as far as it went, but one thing struck me,
and I wonder if others notice it as well.
The story focused on warming and acidification as the stressors that are
of most concern. And it focused on culturing coral for grow-out to
restore the reef, and on lab experiments to understand the synergy between
warming and acidification. But it said absolutely nothing about the need
to curtail warming and acidification if we want to avoid the future which
is coming.
In fact, to state the obvious, if Acropora is dying due to factors like
warming and acidification (perhaps the case) and other unmentioned factors
like diseases, all of which are still present in Florida waters, how does
coral culture and replanting actually help in the long term?
PBS, for those listers outside North America, usually does a lot better
than this. It seems the particular elephant in this story was too big to
tackle. Meanwhile, in Doha, the elephant watches a conversation that seems
to be going nowhere.
Peter Sale
Peter F. Sale
Assistant Director
United Nations University
Institute for Water, Environment and Health
www.inweh.unu.edu www.petersalebooks.com
UNU-INWEH The United Nations Think Tank on Water
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