Some very bad news about the state of the world’s coral reefs:

A downward trend tied to warming seas has not reversed and the world has now lost nearly one-fifth of its coral reefs, according to a global survey released Wednesday.

Much of the rest could be destroyed within 40 years by increasingly acidic seas if warming continues unchecked, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network stated in its report.

“The report details the strong scientific consensus that climate change must be limited to the absolute minimum. If nothing is done to substantially cut emissions, we could effectively lose coral reefs as we know them, with major coral extinctions,” network coordinator Clive Wilkinson said in a statement.

…

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains a list of threatened species worldwide, cited warming as the latest and most serious threat to coral, already damaged by destructive fishing methods, nonnative species and pollution like raw sewage.

“If nothing changes, we are looking at a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in less than 50 years,” Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the IUCN Global Marine Program, warned in a statement. “As this carbon is absorbed, the oceans will become more acidic, which is seriously damaging a wide range of marine life from corals to plankton communities and from lobsters to seagrasses.”

Among the enviroscenti this is hardly a surprise. You can find dozens, probably hundreds, of articles published in the last few months talking about the rampant devastation of the world’s coral reefs caused by anthropogenic climate chaos, even if they didn’t report it with such sharp details. In fact, I think it’s clear that for those of us who follow environmental issues closely, the reefs have become a symbolic measuring stick of just how much damage we’re doing to the atmosphere and everything that depends on it (including us) by spewing out tens of billions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Pondering this a bit, amidst a lot of other pondering of such issues that I’ve been doing lately, I have to ask: What would it take to make mainstream consumers and voters care about this, especially at a time when so many of them are justifiably terrified of the economy? Even in good times I think it would be incredibly difficult to convince mainstreamers that this is not just a topic worthy of their attention and passion, but something that should cause them to (gasp!) change their behavior. It’s all so abstract–we partake in our “normal” daily activities here, invisible CO2 is emitted (sometimes a great distance from us, such as at a coal-fired electricity plant), and over decades it builds up enough to raise the planet’s temperature and turn the ocean acidic. Surely this is a plot for some big-buck Sci-Fi movie that requires Bruce Willis or Tommy Lee Jones or Nicholas Cage to fly a space ship into an asteroid, right?

The coral reefs present just one example of a pattern we see repeatedly endlessly: Scientists discover some environmental issue. It gains more and more attention in the form of funding for further studies, and we discover that it’s worse than we thought, whether because of the imminence of the problem or the difficulty/expense in ameliorating it. It quickly becomes a Big Issue among the enviroscenti, but it never makes the leap to mainstream awareness, unless someone like Al Gore comes along and all but physically forces us to pay attention. Then those motivated by finances or ideology jump into the fray, and the next thing you know we have slick TV ads that reassuringly tell us not to worry our little heads because CO2 or coal or whatever is, in fact, a Good Thing.

And here’s where I have to make a confession: I’ve given up talking to people in social settings one-on-one about energy and environmental issues, unless I know in advance they’re interested and receptive. It’s just not worth trying to break through that brick wall with one glass hammer after another. Perhaps I will recover from this funk, as I have the previous N times, convince myself that this time I really have found an effective way to break through to people, and reach for yet another glass hammer.

How do you cope with this issue? Did you ever try to “fight the good fight”? Did you fight it and surrender? Are you still fighting?