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A Queensland tourism representative has blamed a drop in Great Barrier Reef tourism on scientists warning of pollution and global warming risks:
A Queensland tourism representative has called one of the Great Barrier Reef's leading researchers "a dick", blaming the professor for a downturn in tourism growth at the state's greatest natural asset. Col McKenzie, the head of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a group that represents more than 100 businesses in the Great Barrier Reef, has written to the federal government asking it to stop funding the work of Professor Terry Hughes, claiming his comments were "misleading" and damaging the tourism industry.
But the Australian Conservation Foundation said tourism representatives and operators like McKenzie should stop blaming scientists for reporting what was happening to the reef and start targeting major polluters to ensure change. Hughes, who serves as the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and is considered one of the world's leading experts on the reef, has been warning of the damage rising water temperatures have been inflicting on the reef for years.
While not disagreeing there was work to be done on the reef's health, McKenzie accused Hughes of exaggerating the damage, which he said has been detrimental to the region's multibillion-dollar tourism industry. "I think Terry Hughes is a dick," he told Guardian Australia. "I believe he has done tens of millions of dollars of damage to our reef in our key markets, being America and Europe. You went to those areas in 2017 and they were convinced the reef was dead. And people won't do long-haul trips when they think the reef is dead."
McKenzie said in 2016, tourism growth in the region had returned to pre-global financial crisis levels, before "that growth died" in 2017, which he blamed on Hughes "negative comments".
Also at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 15 2018, @05:55AM
Houston lasted barely 3 years for us, after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina the air really turned foul, tar dust everywhere (around Seabrook), all the time, in addition to the summer ozone that was literally killing people. We're back in Florida now.
We don't have to cover the whole earth to exploit the whole earth, and I think we're fast approaching a point where we're going to be exploiting 95+% of the productive ecosystems on the planet. There's a point at which exploitation will lead to collapse, that point is very probably > 50%, but do we really need to push our luck and try to exploit 85% when the catastrophic collapse limit may actually be 75 or even 65%? We won't really know until it's too late. Just because most people are crammed into cities doesn't mean that those cities aren't fed by intensive agriculture, trawl-netting, strip mining, etc.
I'd have a lot more confidence in the "stop the population rise by making everybody rich" approach if we were doing it from a population of 700 million, instead of 7B. As people become more affluent, they also exercise a bigger ecological footprint. In my house we consume about 1.75 liters of fresh orange juice a day, I ran that down to an approximate area of orange grove needed to make that juice for us, and came to right around an acre - damn good deal, actually, the juice costs us about $600 per year, and not only do we get use of the land, but also the whole picking, juicing, packaging, refrigeration, and retail process too. But... if India decides that they want to drink juice like my family does, that would require over 500,000 square miles of citrus farms... or, over 40% of the land area of India, just for juice. That's intensively cultivated land, basically monoculture crops, much of it treated with insecticide to keep away pollinators to reduce seed production, heavy fresh water usage that typically impacts areas outside of the groves, and basically no value to wildlife.. Of course, there's not 500,000 square miles in India that's suitable for growing citrus, perhaps not the entire world, but this is just one example of hundreds where increased affluence leads to increased ecological footprint outside the cities.
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