Australia, a clear example of a planet unable to deal effectively with climate change

In recent days Australia has been mentioned in the news for two different stories, which read together show how humankind seems unable to implement effective actions to tackle climate change, that is manifesting itself in an increasingly worrying way.

John “Charlie” Veron, internationally recognised as, perhaps, the greatest expert on coral reefs, raises a dramatic alarm about the state of the Australian Great Barrier Reef, an area that is as large as Italy and which supports an ecosystem that is so diverse and complex that it can be compared to an underwater tropical forest.

After the extensive death of 2016 and 2017, it seems that the barrier is getting more and more difficult to recover, so Veron hates to predict the future of the barrier, simply because “it cannot be anything other than absolute massive death”.

It is such a worrying situation that Veron supports the existence of a phenomenon of a mass extinction comparable to a “man-made asteroid” that would compare to the dinosaurs being wiped out. And that is not exaggerating the phenomenon is also proven by the essay “The sixth extinction” by Elisabetta Kolbert, winner of the Pulitzer for non-fiction in 2015.

In the interesting CNN documentary are also mentioned the $ 400 million that the Australian government has assigned to a series of research programs aimed at saving the Great Barrier Reef from a fate sadly linked to climate change.

On the other hand, the government crisis of recent days, and this is the second news in question, led last week the Prime Minister in office, Malcolm Turnball, to give up the targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions previously signed, in order to overcome the first distrust of its majority and finally to give way to the candidate of the most conservative wing of the party, which does not hide the will to promote the coal sector.

It is the usual worrying mantra that repeats itself: science clearly launches its yell of alarm, politics sometimes comes to stimulate research programs on the subject but does not prove capable of dealing with the problem in a radical way, drastically reducing at the base of the use of fossil fuels.

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