Liberal leader Tony Abbott, in a bid to grab the fishing industry vote, has declared Marine Protested Areas will be ended if the liberals are elected on the 21st of August.
Whilst the Liberals have a direct action plan to reduce carbon emissions by 5% on 2000 levels, this business-almost-as-unusual will not set the example needed to stimulate the rest of the world to make the necessary deep cuts in emissions to limit the degree of climate instability.
Has Abbott now recognized the impact of his Climate Action policy and linked it with his plan to abolish Marine Protested Areas to ensure a fishing frenzy before the fisheries collapse under the impacts of behavioural changes wrought by carbon emissions from human activity or is it all simply short term vote grabbing reaching out to wealthy fishing interests at the long term cost to Australian’s supply of fish?.
Personally I favour the vote grabbing sectoral and vested interest approach, but perhaps the Liberals have a plan to live high on the hog during the last throes of what they know to be the end.
Read for yourself …
Carbon Emissions Threaten Fish Populations
ScienceDaily (July 27, 2010) — Humanity’s rising carbon dioxide emissions could have a significant impact on the world’s fish populations, according to groundbreaking new research carried out in Australia.
Baby fish may become easy meat for predators as the world’s oceans become more acidic due to CO2 fallout from human activity, an international team of researchers has discovered.
In a series of experiments reported in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the team found that as carbon levels rise and ocean water acidifies, the behaviour of baby fish changes dramatically — in ways that decrease their chances of survival by 50 to 80 per cent.
“As CO2 increases in the atmosphere and dissolves into the oceans, the water becomes slightly more acidic. Eventually this reaches a point where it significantly changes the sense of smell and behaviour of larval fish,” says team leader Professor Philip Munday of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) at James Cook University.
“Instead of avoiding predators, they become attracted to them. They appear to lose their natural caution and start taking big risks, such as swimming out in the open — with lethal consequences.”
Dr Mark Meekan from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, a co-author on the paper, says the change in fish behaviour could have serious implications for the sustainability of fish populations because fewer baby fish will survive to replenish adult populations.
“Every time we start a car or turn on the light part of the resulting CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, turning them slightly more acidic. Ocean pH has already declined by 0.1 unit and could fall a further 03.-0.4 of a unit if we continue to emit CO2 at our present increasing rate.
“We already know this will have an adverse effect on corals, shellfish, plankton and other organisms with calcified skeletons. Now we are starting to find it could affect other marine life, such as fish.”
Earlier research by Professor Munday and colleagues found that baby ‘Nemo’ clownfish were unable to find their way back to their home reef under more acidic conditions. The latest experiments cover a wider range of fish species and show that acidified sea water produces dangerous changes in fish behaviour.
“If humanity keeps on burning coal and oil at current rates, atmospheric CO2 levels will be 750-1000 parts per million by the end of the century. This will acidify the seas much faster than has happened at any stage in the last 650,000 years.
“In our experiments we created the kind of sea water we will have in the latter part of this century if we do nothing to reduce emissions. We exposed baby fish to it, in an aquarium and then returned some to the sea to see how they behaved.
“When we released them on the reef, we found that they swam further away from shelter and their mortality rates were five to eight times higher than those of normal baby fish,” Professor Munday says.
He adds it should be clearly understood that this impact is likely to happen independent of global warming, and is a direct consequence of human carbon emissions.
The research team concludes “Our results demonstrate that additional CO2 absorbed into the ocean will reduce recruitment success and have far-reaching consequences for the sustainability of fish populations.”
Professor Munday adds “In its 2008 report on the state of the world’s fisheries the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said “the maximum wild capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.” If you add the impact of ocean acidification and other climate change impacts to this, it means there are grounds for serious concern about the future state of world fish stocks and the amount of food we will be able to obtain from the sea.”
The article “Replenishment of fish populations is threatened by ocean acidification” by Philip L. Munday, Danielle L. Dixson, Mark I. McCormick, Mark Meekan, Maud C.O. Ferrari and Douglas P. Chivers appears in the latest issue of PNAS.
And,
Act on carbon scheme by 2012: study
BEN CUBBY, The Age
July 29, 2010
MOST Australians want a more ambitious emissions trading scheme than the one abandoned by the Rudd government, whether or not the US and China take similar steps, according to the most detailed study of public attitudes yet undertaken.
The study came as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was set to publish its annual State of the Climate report overnight, confirming that the past decade was the hottest on record.
The report was also expected to point to satellite and ground-based thermometer measurements showing that the past 12 months were the warmest since records began, in line with climate change projections.
The two-year emissions trading scheme study found most of the 7000 randomly selected respondents wanted to see carbon trading operating before 2012, even though it would be likely to increase some of the costs of living.
”The results clearly showed that we do not want to wait for the Americans and the Chinese to act, which was a surprise,” Professor Jordan Louviere, director of the Centre for the Study of Choice at the University of Technology Sydney, said.
”The Gillard government would benefit from taking a serious look at the work the University of Technology has done because we have consistently shown in four separate studies, with a very large sample of voters, what the community will and will not accept in an ETS,” Professor Louviere said.
The Centre for the Study of Choice survey interviewed people in four phases from August 2008 about their preferred ETS model.
Rather than offering ”yes/no” questions about an ETS, researchers presented them with a sliding series of possibilities that forced people to make realistic trade-offs between deeper emissions cuts, later starting dates for a scheme, and costs.
The consistent themes since 2008, including a final round of questions this month, were a strong preference for starting emissions trading straight away and exempting transport from the early years of a scheme.
Most people also wanted to redistribute some of the revenue raised by an emissions trading scheme to help low-income earners and seniors, reduce taxes, and invest in research and development as well as compensating polluters for their having to buy carbon permits.
”Overall our results suggest that Australians are committed to a climate-change plan that works. They believe that it is happening and clearly recognise that there are substantial costs to adopting a plan,” Professor Louviere said.
The study was not designed to find out what proportion of the population support emissions trading.
The federal government postponed its emissions trading scheme after legislation was blocked three times in the Senate.
The government said it would reconsider the issue in 2012.
It announced last week that, if re-elected, it would institute a ”citizens’ assembly” of about 150 people to assess the merits of a carbon trading scheme, and climate change action more generally.
Article HERE
