Desperately seeking 'Mind Bombs'

The DECC 1 minute 10 second TV ad, surprisingly, was allowed to run. In it, a little girl grows more and more fearful as her dad reads a bedtime story about climate horrors that could be inflicted on families (and household pets) by a scary carbon (not carbon dioxide) emitting monster.

The Australian government is keen on MBs too. It has spent over $15 million on ad campaigns designed to convince the public to share its alarmist ideology. Young adults, not the general population, were selected as the target of its 2010 Shout Out for Climate Change project. Focus group research presumably concluded they were the most receptive demographic of voting age.

Bomb making is a dangerous business. A new MB can explode in your face. This is what happened to 10:10, a UK-based environmental group, last October.

Its video showed authority figures (teacher, CEO, soccer coach) literally blowing up anyone in their groups who expressed doubt about the logic of reducing carbon emissions. After a storm of public protest, 10:10 was forced to withdraw it.

Eugenie Harvey, 10:10’s UK director, later issued a public apology for the 3 minute 59 second implosion. “At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change,” she wrote. “Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.”

MBs can be words and phrases. Climate change is now a powerful MB. Almost a synonym for God, or at least His eco-archetype, Gaia, it is all powerful, present everywhere, and just as incomprehensible.

Clever MBs morph into other variations. When ‘anthropogenic global warming’ anxiety began to fade, activists switched to climate change, then global climate change, then climate disruption, catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and so on, all with ‘tipping points’. ‘Climate protection’ and ‘climate-proofing’ recently entered the lexicon.

Today’s ‘short-term chaotic noise’ (aka weather), allegedly is punctuated by more ‘extreme weather events’ than ever before. Televised EWEs can be big MBs, easily promoted as ‘evidence’ for nasty (human-induced) change.

The “war on carbon” continues to be a popular political MB. Is this kind of combat rhetoric effective? Britain’s first Green MP, Caroline Lucas, thinks so. She recently called for a revival of the country’s Second World War spirit to help it meet carbon emissions targets. “We need to mobilise as a nation in a way we haven’t seen since 1945″, she said. People then were willing to put up with so much deprivation “because they knew there was no alternative”.

Earth System Science is for some an MB prototype with promise. Others see it as further evidence of science’s infatuation with computer modelling. With echoes of The Limits to Growth, a 1972 report for The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, ESS recasts our “predicament” with climate change as the villain. Its promoters, like high priests of a future Ecotopia, intend to identify “behaviours incompatible with long term societal aspirations on this finite planet” and presumably try to correct them.