[Coral-List] I could not stand by on Earth Day

[Thomas Murphy]

Keven and those who've spoke up,

I couldn't agree more about the PR failure of "climate change". When I was attending university 20 years ago, several of my mentors and professors made a concerted effort to ban that term in lieu using "ocean acidification" as often as possible. They believed, as I too came to, that it had a comparable effect as "acid rain" did. Since my relocation out of academia into the NOAA fleet, I've tried to spread this to colleagues and the communities that we engage during outreach.

We need better publicists! Thank you all for speaking up on this issue. We can't afford to remain quiet out of fear of being accused of sensationalizing the dire nature of the threats we're facing.

Cheers,
-Thomas Murphy


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Thomas A. Murphy

NOAA Ship Rainier
Hydrographic Survey Technician

2002 SE Marine Science Drive

Newport, OR 97365

Phone - 631.241.1599




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Thomas A. Murphy

NOAA Ship Rainier
Hydrographic Survey Technician

2002 SE Marine Science Drive

Newport, OR 97365

Phone - 631.241.1599

________________________________
From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> on behalf of Peter Sale via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2024 7:27 PM
To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Subject: [Coral-List] I could not stand by on Earth Day

Hi,
I watched And scanned numerous media reports on the current global bleaching event. Finally, on Earth Day, I realized I could not stand idly by.  The real message from the 2024 global bleaching event is NOT that corals are once again bleaching around the world. It is that this has been happening since the 1980s and the reef science community has been doing its best to get the seriousness of the situation out there. BUT, the media are NOT conveying that message. They are stuck on bleaching events as a series of one-off events that are terribly sad, but just another nature story.

Over the last 30 years, we have failed to rein in our use of fossil fuels and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is much higher than before. For all our talk, and even after reef scientists got IPCC to project a 99% loss of reef corals by 2100 if we ONLY kept warming to +2.0C instead of +1.5C, the world continues to refuse to get the point. We are trashing the planet and coral reefs will be likely the first ecosystem to be erased.

The short post is at https://www.petersalebooks.com/?p=3515
Happy Earth Day listers.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor
sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca>
www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/><http://www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/>>

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