Simple steps, like switching to energy efficient light bulbs, can reduce damaging greenhouse gases

Sunday Mail Brisbane
Sunday 2/11/2008 Page: 11

IT doesn't sound like much a one to two degree hike in average temperatures in Australia since 1910. But it's trouble. According to experts, global warming is causing climatic chaos around the world. Some predict the by-products of modern industry could see temperatures across Queensland rise by up to two degrees within 20 years. And six degrees by 2078.

Warmer average temperatures mean higher tides as the polar caps melt, longer droughts, more bushfires and the potential loss of icons such as the Great Barrier Reef and threatened fauna and flora. It comes down to greenhouse gases and the level of pollution being pumped into our atmosphere in unprecedented levels that have accelerated dramatically in the past decade. For millions of years, naturally occurring layers of gas enveloping Earth including oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane, have helped warm and cool the planet.

They have maintained temperatures that sustain life while absorbing and expelling unwanted warmth, kept heat in and allowed some out. But the burning of coal and oil has created a glut of greenhouse gases a dangerous build-up stopping heat created by the global population and its industry from escaping to space. Effectively, the gases are clogging the world's sensitive windows. And it gets hot when the windows are shut.

The 1990s was the hottest decade on record, with 1998 a particularly bad year. In just nine months, a searing heatwave wiped out 25 per cent of the world's coral reefs a bleaching event that impacted heavily on the Great Barrier Reef. Sections of the 2300km-long reef are remnants of a once-vibrant world. The changes started small. On the reef, a one to two degree hike in water temperatures disturbed near microscopic algae. The algae, attached to coral, allowed the reef to convert sunshine into energy. The energy created food, colour and life for the world's largest continuous coral reef.

The reef is like a giant alarm bell, a unique ecosystem that tolls when the environment gets out of kilter. Australian Institute of Marine Sciences former chief scientist Dr "Charlie" Veron believes the reef will be dead in just 42 years. "If we keep increasing greenhouse carbon dioxide, by 2050 at the very latest, the only corals left alive will be those hiding in refuges such as deep outer-reef slopes," Dr Veron told ABC Radio in May.

"The rest of the Great Barrier Reef will be unrecognisable. Bacterial slime, largely devoid of life, will be everywhere." Sceptics say world temperatures have always fluctuated. In the Cenozoic era, 65 million years ago, water temperatures were 15 degrees warmer than now. In the Oligocene era, about 30 million years ago, Antarctica's first glaciers were formed.

The difference now is time. While previous climate changes evolved over thousands of years, the changes we are seeing now have occurred over the past 50 years and increasingly so in the past 15. "Corals speak unambiguously about climate change. They once survived in a world where carbon dioxide from volcanoes and methane was much higher than anything predicted today," Dr Veron said in a recent interview. "But that was 50 million years ago.

The accumulation of carbon dioxide then took millions of years, not just a few decades. Then there was time enough for oceans to equilibrate. And for life to evolve solutions." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up in 1988, continues to urge change based on its worldwide research.

Recommendations include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by cutting fuel and electricity consumption. Simple and inexpensive measures include properly inflating car tyres and using energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs to slash individual greenhouse emissions.