Crisis point in Australia's wet tropics

[The_jackalope]

'I’m seeing it disappear before my eyes': crisis point in Australia's wet tropics

Last summer, in November, Queensland biologist Professor Stephen Williams was at a workshop in Vietnam when he received an urgent email from home. It was from a ranger he knew who worked for the World Heritage-listed wet tropics area around Cairns.

Something unprecedented was happening at the top of Mount Bartle Frere, North Queensland’s highest peak. At 1611 metres high, the mountain’s upper reaches are in what is meant to be a cool temperate zone.

But instead of normal summer readings at the peak, which rarely top 25, temperatures had soared past 35 degrees for six days in a row, culminating in one scorcher of 39.

In March, worried about the impact of the November heat wave, Williams carried out a spot check on one of the area’s most iconic and vulnerable creatures, the lemuroid ringtail possum, which he’d been studying for nearly two decades. These creatures are endemic, meaning they live nowhere else except in these high wet tropics pockets. The results were another shock.

At sites where he used to reliably record some 20 individuals an hour, he was now finding only three or four. It was a similar story elsewhere on the mountain slopes and on the higher sections of the tableland.

Bird species unique to the region are being similarly affected. “It’s distressing,” he says. “This is what I have spent my life working on, and I’m seeing it disappear before my eyes.”

Gaia is on her hands and knees, coughing up blood.

[The_jackalope]

1. 80 years sooner than expected...

“We had predicted that the loss [of the cool adapted mountain species] would happen on current trajectories by the end of the century. But we are seeing it now,”

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. All the effects are happening sooner than expected.

We hear it over and over every day now.

It would be wonderful if the media..papers and tv...were to have a climate change report front and center,
every day, so people could grasp how much danger we are in right now.

[progree]

2. Australians need to have more kids -- there's a chance one of them will find the solution to the

problems of overpopulation. And we will have more Mozarts to entertain us as well (OK, I know he was more Austrian than Australian). Besides, kids bring joy beyond measure, and by being joy-seeking, aren't we making the world a more joyful place

or something like that.

(sarcasm)

[The_jackalope]

3. +1

[hatrack]

4. But . . . but . . . technology! Public-private partnershps!! Tax credits!!

[The_jackalope]

5. Here's to human ingenuity!

Humans have never met a problem they couldn't solve,
in order to create a worse problem a little later...