Desperately seeking 'Mind Bombs'

Scream Louder?

Concern about how to deal with AFS is indeed spreading. US science teacher, Greg Craven, almost became a casualty of his own MB last December at an American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. His speech was on why America was not listening (to climate alarmists) and what should be done about it.

You have done an abhorrent job at communicating climate change to the public so far. Because what you've been giving them up to now, as a scientist, is information. And with the terrifying divergence between public opinion and scientific opinion in the last few years, with public opinion in the U.S. plummeting over the last several years, that strategy clearly is not working. So it is time for a radical change in tactics.

[Applause.]

So what’s the key to better communication when you have already done the 3,000 page reports, the 50 page glossies, the televised adverts, posters in schools, coloring-in competitions, brochures, feature length documentaries, and interviews on every current affairs program in the Western World? The answer: scream louder.

But will a new wave of screaming Mark II MBs change the public mood or derail what Craven described (incorrectly) as a “ruthless denial machine”? It seems unlikely. The current situation is not due, as some claim, to “poor communication”. AFS is the inevitable outcome of strident folk pushing doom-and-gloom scenarios for too many years. The public has had enough. It has had enough of shouting out for climate change, of moralising lectures about carbon footprints, of convoluted mind games posing as genuine explanation, of dodgy projections masquerading as predictions, and contrived (or genuine) climate hysteria.

It is rightly more concerned about real and current (not distant) natural (not allegedly anthropogenic) disasters, like the recent hurricanes and floods in north-eastern Australia, and record-breaking cold weather in the northern hemisphere. Emotion about future threats no longer works, except with - religious and climate - fundamentalists. So the proposed screaming Mark II MB will be obsolete soon too.

Meanwhile, international agencies are pursuing more Orwellian tactics, under the guise of developing a “new scientific language”; all part of the orthodoxy’s continuing attempt to alarm us. Hamburg’s Climate Service Center and the US National Research Council are setting up groups to “communicate climate data better.” The CSIRO is apparently proposing a “national research charter” to “better coordinate communication” of its perspective.

The IPCC also wants “a more careful language”. According to Spiegel Online’s Alex Bojanowski, it recently sent scientists a code of conduct on journalist interaction. They should avoid using words such as “risk” and “uncertainty” in interviews “to prevent misunderstandings – and to keep from doing the climate protection movement any further damage.”

This could be difficult. A recent critique of the IPCC’s evaluation of evidence and treatment of uncertainty by the InterAcademy Council noted (page 35, chapter 3) that “assigning probabilities to imprecise statements is not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty. If the confidence scale is used in this way, conclusions will likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of ‘very high confidence’ will have little substantive value.”

The public, as AFS diagnosticians Ted Nordhaus & Michael Schellenberger noted in a 2009 article, “may not know climate science very well, but they are not going to be muscled into accepting apocalyptic visions about our planetary future – or embracing calls to radically transform “our way of life” – just because environmentalists or climate scientists tell them they must.”

The jury is still out, but recent polls suggest another alarmist blitz would be counter-productive. It would entrench the growing perception there is something very wrong with official climate change discourse. Oh well, as the 10:10 director said, “we live and (hopefully) learn.”