Great Barrier Reef 'will be bleached-out wasteland in 25 years' | International News | News | Telegraph

Great Barrier Reef 'will be bleached-out wasteland in 25 years'

Global warming could turn Australia's Great Barrier Reef into a wasteland of bleached coral in 25 years, says a scientific report leaked yesterday.
The extraordinary diversity of marine life found on the 1,200-mile-long reef could be little more than a memory for future generations unless the emission of greenhouse gases is curbed, it says.

The effects of bleaching can be seen already in sections of the Great Barrier Reef, whose size can be gauged from space
The reef, the world's largest living organism, will become "functionally extinct", according to the confidential draft of a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due to be released later this year.
Coral bleaching in Australian waters is likely to become an annual occurrence by as early as 2030 due to warmer, more acidic seas, it says.
Bleaching happens when the water temperature rises to the point where it kills the tiny polyps that make up the coral, leaving behind the white limestone skeleton of the reef. "We've got a major economic and environmental problem unless we heed the call of these scientists," said Don Henry, the head of the Australian Conservation Foundation. "I think the science is getting clearer about just how serious and urgent it is."
The Great Barrier Reef covers 134,000 square miles off the coast of Queensland — an area only slightly smaller than Germany or Japan. It consists of hundreds of interlocking reefs which each year attract two million visitors.

Even a slight deterioration of its rainbow-coloured corals would be a huge blow for the £1.8 billion-a-year tourism industry.
Around 500 experts are meeting in Paris this week ahead of the release on Friday of the IPCC's first report since 2001 on global warming. The panel is highly regarded for its neutrality and caution.
Last year the Australian government said that it was considering using vast sunshades to protect the reef.
But the cloth, which would be held in place by floating pontoons, could only ever cover a fraction of the reef.
The draft IPCC report said that several other World Heritage listed parts of Australia would be devastated by global warming, including Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, made famous by the Crocodile Dundee films, and the Snowy Mountains in the south-east of the country.
Kevin Rudd, the leader of the opposition Labour party, said that John Howard, the prime minister, had failed to act on curbing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
"Mr Howard has had more than a decade to act on the Great Barrier Reef and on climate change and has failed to act," Mr Rudd said. Gallery
• The Great Barrier Reef starts south of the Tropic of Capricorn and ends in the Torres Strait, just south of Papua New Guinea
• It consists of around 2,600 separate coral reefs
• There are 400 different types of coral, 1,500 species of fish and 4,000 types of mollusc
• Drilling has indicated that the coral may be 1,640 feet thick in places
• The oldest parts date back 18 million years
• The reef's most dangerous inhabitants include sharks, venomous scorpion fish, the blue-ringed octopus and deadly box jellyfish