James Hrynyshyn is a freelance science journalist based in western North Carolina, where he tries to put degrees in marine biology and journalism to good use.
If the "Reality" anti-coal advertising campaign represents the best American environmentalists can come up with, Matt Nisbet is right. Communicating the facts about global warming to the masses is simply beyond our ability. Fortunately, there are others who understand how to craft a message that might actually work. As usual, the Brits demonstrate a superior ability on this score. Check out this ad from Europe's Big Ask campaign:
One can quibble about the exaggerated and inconsistent reference to how much the Earth has warmed so far — the ad's narrator first talks about "almost" a degree centigrade, then says it's "more than" a degree, while the actual number is somewhere between 0.6 and 0.8 °C — but overall, I think this works much better than the clever, but ultimately unsuccessful Reality spots, which hit all the right buttons among those who are already with the program, but will do little to change minds or provoke action.
The only problem with this approach is the ad is almost four minutes long, making it a challenge to hold the attention of anyone under the age of 40.
Comments
When they say we must act now, what does this actually mean?
To me it sounds like a call for a high tax on petroleum or aircraft fuel such that it makes it so expensive that the majority of people will stop using these means of transport, thus reducing this source of CO2 release.
I understand that there are vague plans to increase alternative energy production but that doesn't sound like its really going to make a sufficient dent in the current production requirements.
What am I missing? What does acting on climate change actually entail?
Posted by: Sigmund | December 23, 2008 5:08 PM
Tax is one option. Unfortunatly for the regular Joe it's the one they'd feel the soonest. the problem with taxing people into choosing alternatives is that there needs to be sufficient alternatives readily available so that the overall effect can even be felt by corporate industries and energy producers - which is where governments come in. Energy companies require regulation to force any real change in their habits other than which is just marketable for them (greenwashing). My buying a Prius and switching to compact fluorescents won't even register with them; a mandate that their production meet certain goals or be within certain parameters will. It will also have a more immediate affect on GHG emissions than the long process of everyone at the bottom changing their individual habits and maybe having energy producers notice at some point.
It also means better CAFE standards (which has finally been put in place). Again, government taking action.
It means changing how farm equipment is classed. (which currently allow get out of CAFE standards free for the most polluting vehicles made - which are not farm equipment)
It means zoning laws and building codes that require tighter controls on pollution/emissions.
It means mandating that all new federal buildings be LEED certified.
It means taking Bush's bullshit GHG Intensity reduction and throwing it in the trash and replacing it with a real goal.
I would rather pay more because energy/gas/cars cost more because it is making efforts to minimize GHG emissions due to gov't action and regulation rather than pay more in the little personal things in the hopes that it MIGHT have an effect UPstream on industrial/energy production GHG emissions. Most people who really care about the issue are already doing the latter.
Posted by: Brodie | December 23, 2008 6:46 PM
Neat video. Stealing that.
Item one; we could appoint someone as secretary of Energy who actually understands the need for, and the complexities of a national smart grid... Check. Item two: get a presidential science advisor with background in environmental science but not ignorant of economics... Check. And maybe put someone in NOAA who actually gives a damn about the ocean and atmosphere... Check.
Sorry, I'm just feeling happy and optimistic lately. The medication will wear off soon, I'm sure.
Posted by: george.w | December 23, 2008 6:55 PM
This crap needs to stop. The activity of Bush and many Governments will be shown to be criminal. Whether they pay for this malicious intention is another matter.
Posted by: paulm | December 23, 2008 7:17 PM
I watched it - AND posted it on my facebook profile :D
Posted by: Arikia | December 24, 2008 3:16 PM
We (the global warming joke whack jobbers) need to control the world (the majority i.e. common sensicals)! We mustn't stop our climate jihad until everyone is taxed and submits to our religion. Merry Warming to all disciples and to all of us AGW nutters, may our christmas be hot and next year bring us socialistic power to control the masses (somehow??? : ( ).
Posted by: You can call me Al | December 24, 2008 5:08 PM
"Not doing it [fighting global warming] will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, uhmm, not ten but, uhmm, 30 or 40 years, and basically none (really?) of the crops will grow at all. Most of the people will have died (really?) and the rest of us will be cannibals (oh really?)." — direct quote, AGW nutter, CNN founder Ted Turner. Let's all waller in it.
Posted by: Ted the Tard (one of yours) | December 24, 2008 7:42 PM
Happy Global Warming Day everyone. I think we can all agree it's so good to have a religious cause so that it feels like we have a purpose in life. Having an alarmist made-up cause makes it that much better. Gore bless!
Posted by: My Hair is on Fire II | December 25, 2008 9:27 AM
Next up - record warming this winter. Following the record cooling. Which followed warming. Which followed cooling. For around a million years or so. Due to, solely of course, our manmade guilt for living. Happy Cooling due to Warming due to cooling or warming or both due of course to existing. pseudo-skwonk.
Posted by: Skwonkie the pseudo-Xmas AGW Parrot | December 25, 2008 9:35 PM
Are we going to be OK? Or will guilt kill mankind? so many questions..................
Posted by: mehmeh | December 25, 2008 11:49 PM
In my opinion the largest threat for California are cataclysms and ecological catastrophes. Not important is how many money we have because one tragedy can us take all.
Posted by: alufelgi chromowane | December 26, 2008 6:43 AM
Guys we came up with some great ideas on how to make everyone into believer zombies on board with your new religion. Read our book for details.
Posted by: Jim Jones and Charlie Manson | December 26, 2008 1:34 PM
"Unless we announce disasters no one will listen"
Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
"Sea levels have been rising steadily since the peak of the last Ice Age about 18,000 years ago. The total rise since then has been four hundred feet...For the last 5,000 years or so, the rate of rise has been about seven inches per century."
"The Medieval and Roman warmings, with their intervening cold periods, present a huge problem for the advocates of man-made global warming. If the Medieval and Roman occurred warmer than today - without greenhouse gases, what would be so unusual about modern times being warm as well?"
"The temperatures at the North and South Poles are lower now than they were in 1930. The Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of land pointing north towards Argentina (and the equator) has been getting warmer...The other 97 percent of Antarctic has been cooling since the mid-1960s."
S. Fred Singer, Distinguished Research Professor, George Mason University and Dennis Avery, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute and co-authors Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years.
"Climate prediction is complex, with many uncertainties. The AASC recognizes climate prediction is an extremely difficult undertaking. For time scales of a decade or more, understanding the empirical accuracy of such prediction - called 'verification' - is simply impossible, since we have to wait a decade or more to assess the accuracy of the forecasts."
The American Association of State Climatologists.
"There is not such thing as consensus science. If it's a consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't a consensus. Period. The greatest scientists in the world are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
Environmentalism has alread killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s."
Michael Crichton, Science writer and author 'State of Fear'.
"The positive aspects of global warming appear to have been downplayed."
A UK House of Lords report on the science of Kyoto
The European Union has established by fiat that a two-degree rise in global temperatures would be quite dangerous. However, this data is not scientifically sound."
Yuri Izrael, Vice President of the International Panel on Climate Change, the body responsible for the Kyoto Protocol.
Q. "Don't you believe that we're ruining our planet?"
A. "Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't"
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic.
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
Mark Twain
Posted by: My Hair is on Fire III | December 26, 2008 1:51 PM
All you infidels must submit to our AGW pseudo-religion. We will continue jihad until you accept the pseudo-science of Saint Gore and submit to our taxation, regulation and loss of freedom plans. You cannot disprove our holy computer model as it is sent down from the heavens and 100% unprovable either way. You must blindly submit or else. You are dirtier than the soles of our shoes. We will impose warmingsharia law upon you pig dogs. We will control your life. Bend over and submit. Algore Akbar.
Posted by: Ike Eee Yue | December 27, 2008 11:09 AM
hahahha find another stupid liberal cause of the moment. the house of cards is flat on the table....hahahahahah
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
Posted by: D'OH | December 27, 2008 11:59 PM
I heard there will cooling and heating today. Naturally, of course. hmmm. wow.
Posted by: Meh Meh | December 28, 2008 11:27 AM
knock knock. who's there? Glow. Glow who? Global warming idiot zealot jihadist religious support believer socialist stupid liberal moron no-life loser need-a-crisis morally superior nutjob climate whacko proven wrong with real observed data once again. get it? hahahhaahhahahaha
Posted by: Adam Sandelerr | December 28, 2008 5:50 PM
meh meh - haha. LOL
Posted by: Yuppers | December 28, 2008 8:12 PM