No, not the laws of thermodynamics!
Cool stuff! As a marine scientist, I have never thought about burning sea water. Obviously, sea water doesn't burn by itself, which leads to the thing that's never talked about on the TV clip: what is powering that big radio wave generator in this guy's lab? The answer: electricity, which is probably produced by a big coal-fired power plant down the street! Given the pesky laws of thermodynamics, we know that more energy is being consumed to generate the radio waves than is being produced from the sea water. Perhaps this is a more efficient way of generating hydrogen from water than existing approaches ... or maybe not.
Until our nation switches from fossil fuels to renewable energy, this discovery isn't going to do much, if anything, to change the climate or lower ocean levels or otherwise solve our current climate problems. To generate enough hydrogen to power all of our transportation needs (planes, trains (!!), and automobiles), it has been estimated that we would need to double our number of electricity-generating power plants (Link:
Hydrogen economy - where does the hydrogen come from? - not an "authoritive" source, but it generally agrees with what I've read elsewhere). Note that this wouldn't necessarily reduce our fossil fuel combustion, unless all of those new power plants were powered by renewables.
So, getting back to the title of this thread, I suspect that this is not the death of the coal train (unfortunately). Sorry to sound like one of those "global warming people" but, well, that's who I am.