Now that actor Charlie Sheen has taken over American media, you wouldn’t think much else is going on in the world. (Imagine if climate scientists were interviewed as often as Charlie Sheen has been interviewed lately!)

It’s amazing how a celebrity or minor issue can cause American corporate media to obsess about that one thing to the exclusion of most everything else.   Another example — the unrest in Libya gets a lot of media attention because it affects the cost of oil. The unrest in Wisconsin (still ongoing) gets much less attention because it only affects the paychecks of middle class public employees — a much less interesting topic to our corporation media.

Who is directing and determining the content of much of American corporate media?  The various fossil fuel industries.  They are experts in distracting the American people, to say nothing of outright lying to us.  The other biggest media influencer is the Republican political machine backed by Wall Street. These influences are also the same groups and organizations trying to halt meaningful pollution regulations and climate change mitigation.

The Koch Brothers are two of these ‘influencers” — oil billionaires,  involved in polluting the world and condemning future generations to a very dangerous, difficult existence in dealing with climate change.  They are two of the main funders of the corporate climate change denier machine.   Rachel Maddow of MSNBC describes it all below.

Many stories are pointing out lately just how much trouble the world really is in and the environmental challenges we face due to human activity.  Human activity dangerous to the environment includes not just transportation and inefficiency in buildings but also outright pollution; air pollution and literally, garbage.  These things also threaten the actual viability of the ocean to support life.

Shouldn’t this be discussed more on American corporate media?  (After all, eventually it will negatively impact the fishing and tourism industries, if it hasn’t already.)

A recent study has found that all of the world’s coral reefs could be gone by 2050. If lost, 500 million people’s livelihoods worldwide would be threatened.

The World Resources Institute report, “Reefs at Risk Revisited,” suggests that by 2030, over 90 percent of coral reefs will be threatened. If action isn’t taken soon, nearly all reefs will be threatened by 2050. Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states, “Threats on land, along the coast and in the water are converging in a perfect storm of threats to reefs.”

The AFP suggests that these threats include overfishing, coastal development, pollution, and climate change. Warming sea temperatures lead to coral bleaching, a stress response where corals expose their white skeletons. In 2005, the Caribbean saw the most extensive coral bleaching event ever recorded, often attributed to rising ocean temperatures. CO2 emissions are also making the oceans more acidic. Because of the rising acidity levels, some scientists claim we will see conditions not witnessed since the period of dinosaurs.

Lauretta Burke, one of the report’s [...]