Dutch Scientist: Democracy Undermined by Silencing ‘Global Warming’ Skepics: ‘The serious scientists who object to climate change on scientific grounds, are not heard and dismissed as bad guys’
…Actual Headline: ‘Experts quiet climate-change skeptics: Warming leads to longer cold snaps’
…Brutal Winter, and Painful Rises in Heat Costs – Up to 54‰ increase
…NASA scientist (James Hansen) turned paid advocate to testify against Keystone pipeline
…Economic ‘degrowth’ proposed to combat climate change – Reduction in salaries does not lead to a ‘reduction in the level of happiness’
Researchers at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the UAB have taken advantage of the current economic crisis to analyse the impact this situation would have.…
Brendan O’Neill: Apathy Towards Climate Change Renews My Faith In Humankind
Brendan O’Neill: Apathy Towards Climate Change Renews My Faith In Humankind
http://www.thegwpf.org/brendan-oneill-apathy-climate-change-renews-faith-humankind/
Far from being irrational, the mass public apathy towards climate change that so freaks out eco-experts is entirely sensible and logical; in fact, it renews my faith in humankind.
The executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, has said scientists and UN officials should stop using “weirdo words” when talking about climate change. By talking in scientific jargon and using acronyms that fly over the heads of Joe and Josephine Public, the climate-change lobby is bamboozling rather than enlightening the masses, she said. Panicked that the public switches off – or more likely sinks into a coma – whenever an expert with more PhDs than sense holds forth on climate change, Ms Figueres says climate-change folk are “just not communicating properly”.
This alleged crisis of eco-communication, the failure of enviro-experts to make a connection with, far less fire up, the man in the street, weighs heavily on green-leaning minds. In the Guardian this week, an eco-worrier says climate-change activists must try harder to bridge the gap between“the abstruse nature of expert discourse” and people’s “ordinary lives”(shortened version: let’s find a way to make really complicated stuff understandable to ill-educated folk more used to reading Heat the celebrity magazine than Heat the George Monbiot book).
All sorts of green groups have come up with communication strategies to address what they view as the public’s apathy (“indolence of mind”: OED) on all matters climatic. Some of the strategies are gob-droppingly patronising. One, titled Communicating Climate Change to Mass Public Audiences, published by the Climate Change Advisory Group, says the masses are likely to feel “sad or angry” when told the economy and their own personal wealth cannot keep growing forever. They will experience “painful emotions of grief for a society that must undergo changes” and they might even adopt “maladaptive coping strategies”, such as “denial of responsibility, blaming others, or becoming apathetic”. And it falls to the eco-enlightened to help the moronic masses through these feelings and encourage them to shift towards “pro-environmental behaviour”. In this reading, the green lobby is Oprah and the dumb public are just so many basket cases plonked on its couch, waiting to have their frazzled minds re-educated with eco-conscious ideas.
It’s not surprising that greenies are racking their brains over how best to communicate with the public, because …