Archives

Natural News

November 24, 2000

About the article

This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.

See the article in its original context from November 2000.

Brought to you by

Open Original Page

Amid reports of a sharp rise in the death of the world's coral reefs, NASA has released satellite images that could provide a helping hand in locating dead or dying reefs. Previously, coral reef health has been monitored by direct, underwater observation. Many scientists regard the sharp decline in reef health as alarming. United Nations-sponsored research estimates that 20 percent of the world's coral structures have died or become badly damaged in the past 20 years and that most of the world's coral could be similarly threatened in the next 50 years. -CNN Good luck to Ms Barrie Quappe and Mr. McKeeva Bush. Ms Quappe is the new executive director for the National Trust and Mr. Bush is the new government minister responsible for environment.

Let's hope that they both can find the courage and the public support to buck the current culture of environmental destruction in the name of short-term profit. -GH A study by Canadian researchers concludes that nature acted fairly rapidly to clean up the mess left behind by humans in lakes, once the pollution has stopped. -UPI Three previously unknown species of mouse lemurs, the world's smallest primates, have been discovered in Madagascar, scientists announced this week. -AP At the urging of renowned naturalist Jane Goodall, the U.S government has endorsed two measures that will better protect the world's great apes. The Great Ape Conservation Act, written by Sen. George Miller (D, California), cleared the Senate Friday. The bill, which creates an annual federal fund of up to $5 million for conservation research, now heads to the White House, where President Clinton is expected to sign the measure into law within the next two weeks.

The House of Representatives passed legislation that could help establish chimpanzee sanctuaries for the animals after they are no longer needed for biomedical research. -Environmental News Network A leading Caribbean environmentalist has warned that the main pillars of several Caribbean economies - the banana and tourism sectors - were coming under serious threat from global warming. Professor Al Berger, Director of the University of the West Indies' Department of the Environment, said what was even worse was that because of the longer term effects Caribbean leaders appear not to be taking the threat seriously. -CANA A report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) says global warming is happening, and is probably already affecting the weather.

The report says human activities are at least partly responsible for what is happening to the climate. It does not rule out the possibility of fundamental destabilisation of the global climate. -World Wide Fund for Nature Earth's average surface temperature could rise from 2.7 degrees F to almost 11 degrees F over the next hundred years, according to a draft report from the United Nations' intergovernmental panel on climate change.

The difference may not sound like much of a change. But in comparison, the Earth's average global temperature now is only about nine degrees warmer than during the last ice age. -CNN