Great Barrier Reef Countdown to Extinction
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(Photo by Getty Images)
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Starting with the good stuff: Last week the Great Barrier Reef made the short list of 28 landmarks in the running to be named one of the New Seven Wonders of the natural world, in a contest run by Swiss-based New7Wonders.
And remember that guy who won "The Best Job in the World"? He's from the U.K. and was selected to get the job of caretaker for a bunch of tropical islands on the Great Barrier Reef. His main job was to clean a pool, blog, tweet, and get people to come visit Paradise. On the second day of his job he misspelled the name of one of his islands, and the entire (jealous) world wanted to impeach him. Having made more typos than I care to remember, I vote we cut him a break.
I was feeling pretty good about the Great Barrier Reef until someone Stumbled a Times Online story that quoted former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science as saying that warm waters will basically kill the Great Barrier Reef within 20 years.
Since this scientist, Charlie Veron, is the foremost expert on the topic, we have to believe him. He also had more scary stuff to say in the story, about global eco-system collapse and mass extinction events. Then he brought up all of the stuff about lost jobs and economic impact and I had to put my hands over my ears and go read a Garfield comic to calm down again.
Once my blood pressure returned to normal (A fat cat in a lasagne pan! Ha!) and I could start to process this terrifying, and interesting, information I realized that once again it all boils down to CO2. This is a reminder that we don't have time to put off the little -- or big -- efforts to reduce our cabon footprint on the world.
It would be a shame for the Great Barrier Reef to be named one of the New Seven Wonders of the natural world, only to disappear a few years later.
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