As a scientist, you’d expect me to make decisions rationally. So why have I stopped being a full time sceptic. The reason is that people just didn’t seem to be interested in the subject any longer. I couldn’t point to any statistic to justify that feeling, I couldn’t show you a graph or do a cost benefit analysis showing I had done what I could to change public opinion and my time was now better spent getting around to the things I had neglected for so many years.
However as always Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot has hit the nail on the head with his explanation of the series of global warming film flops this year:
“Hollywood is finding out that the climate scare continues to be nothing more than a big yawn for the public,” Mr. Morano said. “Lecturing the public on climate change is boring, and ticket receipts prove this.” (Link)
Au contraire!
News and Social Media are just begining to report on the coming Global Cooling (perhaps because of Global Boring?)
This is the time to strike before it is too late and get #ClimateChangePlanB into Government.
I concluded a few years ago that we had hit peak interest in AGW. It happened about 2010. We’re now waiting for more data and deep down the public know it, even if they don’t understand the science. Almost nobody is confident of the solutions and expect someone else to pay/reduce.
AGW makes a very boring movie because there isn’t some magic last minute solution that will save us (assuming we needed saving). Cutting CO2 is as exciting as dieting. In truth we probably could engineer cooling without reducing CO2 by tinkering with clouds but we’d have to understand climate a bloody sight better to avoid global cooling. For the green brigade it would be blasphemous to suggest that we don’t need to don sack cloth and ashes for our CO2 sins. What movie crew would be brave enough to suggest it?
The best thing we sceptics might do is to strenuously deny the global warming scare … that is bound to worry the alarmists, who will see it as a coke funded conspiracy to hide the truth.
The public are very used to politicians debating subjects that none of them have personal knowledge about. And almost every adult is familiar with teachers that told them with all sincerity things they now know to be totally wrong. Also, ironically, those “little people” with the most ordinary of lives which politicians and academics think don’t matter, have often been living in the same households for decades and they know the climate hasn’t changed for them. Individually they don’t count, but collectively they are an overwhelming force of scepticism.
I don’t think that there has been a really cold/snow snap where someone hasn’t muttered ‘global warming eh’ sarcastically. They never use the more flexible ‘climate change’.