The greatest disservice ever done to climate science was the blind assertion that man made CO2 production had anything to do with it. There is no end of climate based issues available to manage and CO2 was never one of them. It really was a tax scheme by globalists in particular.
A real problem is the reforestation of the whole Sahara back to Bronze Age verdancy. Or dealing with Georgia's decades long drought and the real risk of a decadal drought in the great plains as has happened before.
My point there is ample work to do in restoring water resources world wide and restoring healthy managed forest everywhere.,..
The New Language of Climate Change
Scientists and meteorologists on the front lines
of the climate wars are testing a new strategy to get through to the
skeptics and outright deniers.
January 27, 2019
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/27/climate-change-politics-224295?
PHOENIX—Leading climate scientists and
meteorologists are banking on a new strategy for talking about climate
change: Take the politics out of it.
That means avoiding the phrase “climate change,” so loaded with
partisan connotations as it is. Stop talking about who or what is most
responsible. And focus instead on what is happening and how unusual it
is—and what it is costing communities.
That was a main takeaway at the American Meteorological Society’s
annual meeting this month, where top meteorologists and environmental
scientists from around the country gathered to hear the latest research
on record rainfall and drought, debate new weather prediction models and
digest all manner of analysis on climatic mutations.
Educating the public and policymakers about climate change at a time
when elected leaders are doubling down on denying that it is happening
at all or that humans are responsible for it demands a new lexicon,
conference attendees told me—one that can effectively narrate the
overwhelming scientific evidence but not get sucked into the controversy
fueled most prominently by President Donald Trump.
The hope is to persuade the small but powerful minority that stands
in the way of new policies to mitigate climate change’s worst long-term
effects—as well as the people who vote for them—that something needs to
be done or their own livelihoods and health will be at stake.
The new language taking root is meant to instill this sense of
urgency about what is happening in ways to which everyday citizens can
relate—without directly blaming it on human activity: The spring
blossoms keep coming earlier; seasonal allergies are worsening and
lasting longer; extreme heat is upending the kids’ summer camp schedule;
crops are drying up or washing away at alarming rates.
And wherever possible, climate specialists told me, they are
trying to explain the more frequent and deadly weather events in purely
historical terms: These storms, these droughts, these dramatic
fluctuations in temperature have previously taken place—once a century,
or even once a millennium.
But they keep coming.
“Is it humans or is it not? We really need to get beyond that,” Bernadette Woods Placky Climate Central
Climate Matters is tracking climate trends in 244 cities—including a steadily warming Phoenix
The strategy is being increasingly employed in more conservative
regions of the country, where climate doubt still runs deep—even if
there are signs of cracks in the resistance thanks to the pummeling
pattern of highly unusual and costly weather events.
“They see it firsthand,” Robert Mark Simpson, a professor of
geography at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told me. “There is a
sort of acknowledgment that the climate is changing. They just don’t
think humans are that impactful. [They think blaming humans is] a
conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. economy.”
Simpson attended the conference at the Phoenix Convention Center to
outline his three-year effort to educate farmers about climate change in
western Tennessee and eastern Kentucky, where at some dinner tables the
term remains a political curse word. Tennessee just elected a leading
climate change doubter, Marsha Blackburn, to the U.S. Senate.
It’s a tall order. So, he is also trying another tack to reach the
political and religious conservatives for which farming has been in the
family for generations: warning that the family business might be in
jeopardy—sooner than they might think.
“Will they be able to farm here 30 to 40 years from now?”
Another line of argument he has found to appeal to conservatives’ personal connection to nature.
“Many are hunters and fishermen. They are really tied to the
environment,” Simpson said. He finds he can reach them by trying to tap
into their belief that “we’ve been given stewardship” of the Earth.
But the political headwinds that he and others are up
against—especially in red states where political leaders are unwilling
to accept the scientific consensus that human activity is playing an
outsize role in the changing climate—were on display last weekend.
As winter storms bore down on large swaths of the country, Trump took to Twitter
Then the climate science doubter in chief concluded: “Amazing how big
this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old
fashioned Global Warming right now!”
Meanwhile, despite the Democratic takeover of the House, and a new
commitment to pass climate change legislation, some leading Republican
doubters are still chairing major Senate committees with jurisdiction
over climate policy. That includes Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the new
head of the Armed Services Committee, which just received a Pentagon report
Nowhere is the challenge of convincing the doubters without being
labeled a partisan or environmental zealot greater than in the ranks of
broadcast meteorologists. Local TV weather experts were among the last
holdouts in the scientific community to accept the consensus that humans
are responsible for climate change—so much so that in 2014
then-President Barack Obama met with
“I think a lot of the broadcasters were concerned that there was such
a political divide within the population and if they were very vocal of
any aspect of climate change some subset of their audience would not
view them with a level of trust,” Keith Seitter, a meteorologist and the
American Meteorological Society’s executive director, told me.
Now, some 600 broadcast meteorologists, out of an estimated 2,200 in
the United States, are working with Climate Matters to craft new ways to
tell their viewers about climate change.
“I have changed my presentation a bit,” Jim Gandy, chief
meteorologist for the CBS affiliate in Columbia, S.C., told me. “I used
to start with the science. Now I try to show them how it is changing and
then I go into why it is changing. That may be a more effective
approach. I share the raw data with them that has not been ‘manipulated’
and it throws them for a loop.”
Even in viewing areas considered Democratic strongholds, talking about climate change can be risky.
“You have to be careful,” Bob Ryan, a longtime television
meteorologist in Washington who was the first network meteorologist,
told me. “If you get into policy you are getting into political
quicksand. People don’t want to be lectured to. That doesn’t accomplish
anything.”
So he too is in the habit of explaining related weather events in the
context of how much more often they are occurring than in the past.
“Ellicott City has had a number of 500-year flood events in recent
years,” he cites as one example, referring to the Baltimore suburb.
Society is trying to encourage this
approach nationwide. “There has also been some very specific programs
that have worked with target audiences—even in some deeply red
states—about how do we message some of the science in ways that
depoliticize it,” Seitter told me. “If you start talking about, ‘We are
getting more rainfall than we used to; our climate is different than it
used to be,’ that is different than saying humans are causing it.
They’re not saying a whole lot of why on why it is changing but they are
at least getting people to understand those changes are there.”
Gandy, who helped found Climate Matters in 2010, recounted a recent
presentation he delivered at the Rotary Club in Columbia on the dangers
of climate change and the need to take sweeping actions soon to confront
it.
In attendance was Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican who hailed
Wilson remained for the entire presentation before leaving. One of
Wilson’s aides came up to Grandy afterward to congratulate him on the
presentation, saying he very much enjoyed it.
“I don’t know what he thinks about climate change, though,” Grandy told me of the Wilson aide.
That interaction, of course, highlights a fundamental question about
this new lexicon of climate change: Even if opponents like Wilson can be
convinced it is really happening, don’t they also need to be convinced
that humans are the major cause in order to adopt the right policies to
address it?
I asked Grandy that question. He believes recognition is just Step
One and hopes that once doubters see climate change as the dire threat
it is, it will be easier for them to get on board with the only
solutions believed to be able to rein it in: phasing out fossil fuels
and scaling back our carbon footprint.
After all, he said, climate change “is happening whether they like it or not. If they ignore it, it is still going to happen.”
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