Coral ABC

Charles Birkeland, who is with the Hawaii Cooperative Fishery Research Unit, wrote earlier today to say:

"I believe that it is distractive to focus on global warming. Like overfishing, destructive fishing methods, pollution, sedimentation, dredging, increase in CO2, etc, global warming is a proximal or superficial problem and the ultimate causal problem is the rapid growth of the human population and the concommitant economic demands on resources".

This argument is laid out more fully in Ratcheting Down the Coral Reefs, a paper he published in Bioscience in Nov 04 (Vol 54 No. 11).

So: abstain, be faithful, wear a condom...and save a coral reef? I'm reading the paper now.