We are killing the oceans, and in so doing, threatening our own survival. “Unusually warm ocean temperatures this year have led to mass devastation of the world’s corals, and prospects for their long-term survival are grim,” Scientific American reports. “Right now, coral reefs around the world are either bleached, dead from bleaching or trying to recover from bleaching,” said C. Mark Eakin, who coordinates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch:

2010 has been a major, major year of coral bleaching in all of the oceans around the world.

At Newsvine, blogger Colorado Bob has been compiling the extent of this unimaginable catastrophe, finding mass coral bleaching events in the waters off of at least 15 nations, a direct consequence of mankind’s unchecked burning of fossil fuels. The extinction-scale event — caused by the oceans getting hotter and more acidic as storms grow fiercer — is occurring throughout the global oceanic basin, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, from the Pacific Ocean to the Arabian Sea:

Fiji: There are cases of coral bleaching in the furthest islands in the Mamanuca Island group.

Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and East Timor: More than 500 types of coral, living in the so-called coral triangle, are particularly at risk of dying out due to bleaching, according to Andrew Baird of the Australian Center for Coral Studies. The area covers roughly six million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of sea bordering Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and East Timor.

Seychelles, Sulawesi, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia: The worst coral die-off in ten years – possibly ever – has struck across the Southeast Asian and Indian Oceans. The bleaching event extends from the Seychelles in the west to Sulawesi and the Philippines in the east and includes reefs in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Madagascar: “The reefs around Mayotte have experienced the worst bleaching and mortality so far recorded in the Indian Ocean with over 50 percent of corals affected by the bleaching overall and up to 30 percent coral mortality at the worst-affected sites,” says Dr David Obura, Chair of IUCN’s Coral Specialist Group and Director of CORDIO.

Philippines: A severe wide-scale bleaching occurred in the Philippines leaving 95 percent of the corals dead.

Panama: “I’ve never seen bleaching like [it] in Panama,” said Nancy Knowlton, a coral biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama who has been studying the local flora for 25 years. She and colleague Hector Guzman have seen massive reefs die in recent weeks in the enclosed lagoon of Bocas del Toro in Panama after becoming coated with giant sheets of slime, the remains of dead microorganisms. “This is NOT a normal condition on reefs, even bleached reefs. Where last year there were healthy corals, this year there was only gray ooze,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Maldives: The Maldives is currently suffering the most serious incident of coral bleaching since the major 1998 El Niño-event that destroyed most of the country’s shallow reef coral.

Kuwait: A group of Kuwaiti divers has reported bleaching in more than 90 per cent of the country’s coral reefs – a sign that the coral is either sick or dead.

In an added insult, most of the deep-sea corals near the BP oil disaster have been killed by toxic goo.

“Despite only comprising about 0.2 percent of the area of the oceans, coral reefs host a quarter of all marine fish species and perhaps 1 to 3 million marine species in total,” writes Asia Sentinel’s Alex David Rogers. “In economic terms, they provide goods and services estimated up to $375 billion per annum. Around 500 million to 1 billion people rely on coral reefs for food, and 30 million of the world’s poorest people in coastal communities depend entirely on reefs as their primary means of food production and livelihood.”

The first anniversary of ‘Climategate’: The media blows the story of the century

This week marks the one-year anniversary of what the anti-science crowd successfully labeled ‘Climategate’.  The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink, like the Guardian‘s piece — focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science, which is precisely the kind of miscoverage that has been going on for the whole year!

I’ll save that my media critiques for Part 2, since I think that Climategate’s biggest impact was probably on the media, continuing their downward trend of focusing on style over substance, of missing the story of the century, if not the millennia.

The last year or so has seen more scientific papers and presentations that raise the genuine prospect of catastrophe (if we stay on our current emissions path) that I can recall seeing in any other year.

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“A fully burdened cost of diesel fuel approached $400 a gallon”

Simply put, we cannot think about energy after we get there – wherever there may be. Energy security needs to be one the first things we think about before we deploy another soldier, before we build another ship or plane and before we buy or fill another rucksack….

As glaciers melt and shrink at a faster rate, water supplies have been diminishing in parts of Asia. Rising sea levels could lead to a mass migration and displacement similar to what we have seen in Pakistan’s flood. And climate shifts could drastically reduce the arable land needed to feed a burgeoning population as we have seen in parts of Africa.

The scarcity of and potential competition for resources like water, food and space, compounded by an influx of refugees if coastal lands are lost, does not only create a humanitarian crisis but creates conditions of hopelessness that could lead to failed states and make populations vulnerable to radicalization. These challenges highlight the systemic implications and multiple-order effects inherent in energy security and climate change.

Admiral Mike Mullen gave a pretty remarkable speech last month, particularly for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  He was speaking at the Pentagon’s Energy Security Event, “Empowering Defense through Energy Security.”  Here are extended excerpts:

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During the campaign, Rand Paul (R-KY) called the White House pressure on British Petroleum “un-American” and defended BP’s recklessness, saying “sometimes accidents happen.”  Turns out he just can’t quit BP, as ThinkProgress reports in this cross-post.

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If you don’t do aggressive greenhouse mitigation starting now, you pretty much take geo-engineering off the table as a very limited (but still dubious) add-on strategy.

Bjorn Lomborg has one thing right about messaging — if you just keep repeating your disinformation and long-debunked arguments over and over and over again, you can break through to the media and general public.  This is doubly true because the debunkers usually get tired of repeating themselves first.

Now the discredited Dane has a documentary film out, “Cool It” pushing his favorite ‘solutions’ to global warming — R&D plus the (false) hope of geo-engineering — while repeating his fatally-wrong core message that under no circumstances should humanity start aggressive mitigation of carbon dioxide.

Few people have been as thoroughly debunked as Bjorn Lomborg (see “The Bjorn Irrelevancy: Duke dean disses Danish delayer” and “Lomborg’s main argument has collapsed“).  Heck not only has the trailer for his film been debunked, there’s a whole book, The Lomborg Deception, eviscerates his writing and even his footnotes.

Lomborg’s view of geo-engineering in particular is almost completely backwards from what the science suggests.

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An electric motor that cures the rare Earth blues?

If you want to understand NovaTorque’s electric motor, think of french bread. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has devised a highly efficient electric motor that, as an added bonus, is cheaper to produce than conventional motors because it doesn’t rely on magnets composed of rare earth elements like neodymium. “We can use low-cost ferrite magnets,” Dan Mertens, vice president of marketing at the company during a recent meeting at the Emerging Technologies Summit in Sacramento. “Neodymium is 15 to 17 times more expensive.” The company released its first products, two and three 1800 RPM motors, at the end of October. The company, which has received funds from NEA, has been in relative stealth mode for a while.

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Another great climate cartoon, “Fall Weather,” from Tom Toles — along with his super-snarky thoughts on the disinformation campaign and the sorry state of science literacy and education:

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