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

Mon Apr 29 13:57:32 UTC 2024

Dear Thomas, Peter and colleagues

Agree 100% about getting the message right. As a marine scientist who has focused my efforts on public communications for quite a while, let me identify a giant obstacle that makes being a science/coral reef “publicist” nearly impossible - funding. 
Who pays for people to speak out for the public good, spend their time writing, creating videos, going on-air, and speaking when you are not doing PR for an organization, not publicizing a specific study at an Institution or agency. I have been very fortunate to have some side jobs in the past that allowed me to write, work with the media, and do a lot of public speaking. I’ve also been fortunate to get some small grants (thank you) and to work with organizations that sometimes pay for travel. 

My fiance and former broadcast meteorologist Dave Jones and I have a book coming out in October with Columbia University Press: Megalodons, Mermaids, and Climate Change: Answers to your ocean and atmosphere questions. We have a chapter on coral reefs that addresses the crisis that started years ago and is reaching a catastrophe now and how while coral restoration is part of an effort to save what is left, if the background conditions are unsuitable for coral growth, no amount of restoration and replanting will help. We use easy to understand language, some humor in the book, and have lots of media contacts that have expressed interest. We very much hope to be science “publicists” including for coral reefs. We were very fortunate to get grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NASA Heliophysics to write the book….but finding funding to publicize it, go on a speaking tour etc is proving difficult - we have not given up. It’s not about selling books (which most people think - believe me you rarely make $$ on popular science books), but about engaging the public and improving understanding and critical thinking. We are both very experienced public speakers and love interacting with audiences and making science engaging. I hope we will be able to help increase the public’s understanding of what is going on with coral reefs and to support policies and investment to curb emissions and combat climate change (as well as other detrimental activities harming the ocean and atmosphere).

Keep up the fight.

Sincerely
Ellen

Ellen Prager, PhD
Earth2Ocean, Inc/StormCenter Communications
Recently Released: Escape Undersea 
@elprager

> On Apr 25, 2024, at 6:47 PM, Thomas Murphy via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
> Thomas A. Murphy
> 
> NOAA Ship Rainier
> Hydrographic Survey Technician
> 
> 2002 SE Marine Science Drive
> 
> Newport, OR 97365
> 
> Phone - 631.241.1599
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
> 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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