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Selling the dead-dog brand of “climate change” — it’s so ugly, they need 60,000 artist-marketeers

Oh the woe! It’s another pointless round of climate-communication-angst.

The Conversation: Elizabeth Boulton

It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment: why climate change needs 60,000 artists to tell its story

The root problem, supposedly, is that skepticism is spreading. But the real reason is not the communication, it’s the message itself. It is a dead dog. It’s boring, repetitive, wrong, and the end of the world came and went already. Oh wolfitty-wolf.

So stop being unengaging:

Climate information is still often confusing, unengaging and absent from the wider public discourse.

Engage people: set up a real debate, put some reputations on the line and watch the ratings sour. Let Professors pit their wits against skeptics.  Toss in a live audience of engineers and geologists. (Hehe.)

Linguistic analysis found that the most recent IPCC report was less readable than seminal papers by Einstein.

Get with the game. The unreadableness is deliberate. Einstein wanted people to understand his papers.

The older IPCC publications are easier to read. (Try the FAR report.) Back in the days when scientists weren’t trying to pretend the hot spot was there, wasn’t a fingerprint, and doesn’t matter. They weren’t trying to hide The Pause while they announced yet another explanation to explain the pause that wasn’t there. The confounded sentences are an asset. When the message is bad, you don’t want the audience to understand.

Looks like advertising-speak to me:

… climate communication needs to engage people at a philosophical, sensory and feeling level. People need to be able to feel and touch the new climate reality; to explore unfamiliar emotional terrain and be helped to conceive their existence differently.

There are multimillion dollar Coke campaigns with less psychoanalytic depth than this. (The doggier the message, the harder the sell). When docs were selling penicillin they didn’t need to “explore unfamiliar emotional terrain”.

How much money is on this pyre?

Under the global Future Earth initiative, a team of around 60,000 scientists and social scientists has been assembled to understand and report on the physical, tangible dimensions of the problem. I argue we need 60,000 arts and humanities experts to focus upon the intangibles – the communication, engagement and meaning-making aspects of the problem.

 Never waste a million when you can waste a billion, right?

Science-communication angst starts with the science. Get the science right and that will solve most of the communication problems.

Oh the truisms:

 Humanity will never be able to defeat a threat it cannot perceive.

Exactly. Go ye Warrior, and fight the imperceptible threat…

 

It’s time that the warmists awoke,
To the fact that their cause is a joke,
As their art it appears,
Can make silk from sows’ears,
Having first bought a pig in a poke.

— Ruairi

 

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