And if this does not scare people enough, the writer thinks that "maybe we need to tell a few lies":
In order to avoid catastrophic climate change it’s essential that we act now, but that small fact hasn’t stopped it slipping down and off the list of what’s important to the majority of voters.
The problem can’t be with the issue’s importance. The evidence is all there, and it’s terrifying. Climate change is without a doubt the single biggest threat the human race has faced since the last ice age.
Maybe the real issue is with the wording, because ‘climate change’ just doesn’t sound that bad.
Every night I go to sleep, and every morning I wake up and the climate has changed. It’s called the weather.
Now if a corporation is having trouble selling a product, do they give up? Maybe they do eventually, but they try almost everything before that and step one is to rebrand.
Which involves altering very little apart from a product’s appearance, and hoping that’s enough.
It’s why Kentucky Fried Chicken is now ‘KFC’, British Petroleum is ‘BP’ and Justin Timberlake left NSYNC and got a haircut. You need to check out some of the old photos - he looked like a sheep.
So instead of ‘climate change’ what about we call it ‘extreme disasters happening right now’, ‘massive worldwide death machine’ or ‘crazy killer weather’?
You might not care about stopping ‘climate change’, but I’m sure most of us want to stop ‘crazy killer weather’.
These new titles also have the added benefit of being exactly what will happen if we continue to do so little.
Another problem is that most of us only care about what’s happening day to day, and not at all about anything that hasn’t happened yet on a big enough scale to really effect us, no matter certain it seems.
In order for us to start acting on climate change then, maybe we need to tell a few lies.
Read the entire column here
Read the entire column here
3 comments:
"Climate change is without a doubt the single biggest threat the human race has faced since the last ice age."
Insanity must be pretty high on the list too. As always.
The Huffington Post page is headed "HUFFPOST COMEDY", to be fair.
And so, while the Huff Post may at times publish nonsensical items without that comedy byline, such as the "instructive timeline
(with links provided there, to each of its scientific sources)" to be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/global-warming-is-rapidly_b_4499119.html,
this one may be a weak attempt at comedy rather than strategy.
Not even the Guardian, given as one of those "scientific sources", supposedly for a Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research prediction,
suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060, goes as far as backing up that timeline claim. To see what is being misrepresented by this
"award winning journalist", have a look at
When could global warming reach 4◦C? [Richard A. Betts et al, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2011) 369, 67–84]
As this "timeline" has been reproduced widely, including by our Irish National Trust, An Taisce, I examined it in some detail at
Through Giant Green Goggles
When Universities - http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2002Q4/211/notes_greenhouse.html - teach their students that the atmospheric back radiation has the same heating power as the Sun and no-one falls on the floor laughing then humanity's biggest problem is its gullibility.
The simple model of a one layer atmosphere used to explain the greenhouse effect is absurd beyond belief yet a significant proportion of the advanced world is in a panic over something that is impossible.
The radiation from a cooler object does not increase the temperature of a warmer object - EVER. This simple truth was demonstrated (proven) experimentally by some very advanced pioneers of science more than 2 hundred years ago yet today the believers accept without question an absurd construct - the atmospheric back radiation has the same heating power as the Sun !
There is no accounting for gullibility or stupidity.
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