June 06, 2016
Australia scrubbed from UN climate change report after government intervention
Some Green/Left horror below. There's nothing "threatened" in Australia any more! What they are carefully not mentioning is that corals periodically undergo bleaching events and rapidly recover. So a portrayal of the GBR as bleached would be an unfair depiction of the reef as it usually is. Most "threatened" natural features stay that way for a long time so it is reasonable to depict them in their threatened state. But that is not so with the GBR.
And the claim that the bleaching is the result of "climate change" is false, so putting it into a climate change report would be wrong. The warming events of late 2015 and early 2016 were contemporaneous with a CO2 STASIS. Below are the CO2 levels at Cape Grim for the relevant period. The first two columns give month and year and the 5th column gives CO2 levels. So NO PART of the warming events at that time were due to a rise in CO2. They were all due to El Nino
All mentions of Australia were removed from the final version of a Unesco report on climate change and world heritage sites after the Australian government objected on the grounds it could impact on tourism
Every reference to Australia was scrubbed from the final version of a major UN report on climate change after the Australian government intervened, objecting that the information could harm tourism.
Guardian Australia can reveal the report “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”, which Unesco jointly published with the United Nations environment program and the Union of Concerned Scientists on Friday, initially had a key chapter on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as small sections on Kakadu and the Tasmanian forests.
But when the Australian Department of Environment saw a draft of the report, it objected, and every mention of Australia was removed by Unesco. Will Steffen, one of the scientific reviewers of the axed section on the reef, said Australia’s move was reminiscent of “the old Soviet Union”.
No sections about any other country were removed from the report. The removals left Australia as the only inhabited continent on the planet with no mentions.
Explaining the decision to object to the report, a spokesperson for the environment department told Guardian Australia: “Recent experience in Australia had shown that negative commentary about the status of world heritage properties impacted on tourism.”
As a result of climate change combined with weather phenomena, the Great Barrier Reef is in the midst of the worst crisis in recorded history. Unusually warm water has caused 93% of the reefs along the 2,300km site to experience bleaching. In the northern most pristine part, scientists think half the coral might have died.
The omission was “frankly astounding,” Steffen said. [What would be astounding would be if Steffen told the full truth about global warming]
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