Jun 16 2009, 8:20PM
Climate Change Will Make You Sneeze! (Are we scared yet?)
As the debate over Waxman Markey Climate Legislation heats up,
something big and scary from experts at 13 government science agencies
has appeared: The Authoritative Assessment of National, Regional
Impacts of Global Climate Change.
As the name implies, this is an enormous, authoritative report, but
it's certainly not the first. What is remarkable about the report is
how it reflects a growing trend towards personalizing the impact of
climate change. Hence slide five in this powerpoint
showing that pollen levels will double by 2075. Message: You (or your
kids) will sneeze! Another alarming slide shows that the climate of
Illinois could become more like that of East Texas. And the South? Hot.
I'm sure that some will accuse the report of politicizing the science,
but I don't think that's the case. Instead, I think climate scientists
have decided to abandon the dry statistics (which were driven by
political considerations) and talk about what they actually see in the
future. One of the problems with climate change science is that much of
the discussion has been confined to probabilities and scenarios, and
translation of what this actually means has largely
occurred among the climate cognoscenti. (I wrote last month about high
level discussions of the potential necessity of eating jellyfish. We
really aren't getting that on the evening news.) This report brings
makes some of these conversations more accessible. But after a decade
of confusing reports--and even disasters like Katrina-- will the economy-logged public
demand action now?
Side note: I find this historical graph of how weather has dramatically increased
grid outages since 1992 to be almost more shocking than the future trends. The
Obama administration is putting together a cyber-warfare agency in part
to protect the grid from attack. But who needs terrorists when you've
got squirrels and the weather to do the job for you? Add in the Gulf
Coast's oil infrastructure's vulnerability to hurricanes (and the
Strategic Petroleum Reserve is located there too) and you have... uh...
the perfect storm.
I don't think the report 'politicizes' the science, I think it dumbs it down, at the EXPENSE of making the information accessible. All these statistics and elaborations are impossible for the average citizen to digest and weigh in the first place. The so-called linkage with real effects you cite as innovative in this study is as abstract as the statistic themselves. It is so overpowering that people either:
1. Tune it out from the beginning.
2. Believe the whole thing is impossible to understand.
3. Believe mankind is doomed no matter what.
Environmentalism needs to clean up its act and find new ways to popularize its messages. They make huge mistakes when they:
1. exaggerate
2. use a shot-gun way of explaining the woes of climate change instead of zeroing in on the three key climate-altering dynamics that are the most dangerous or easiest to control. That is, narrow your target.
3. make environmentalism a personal moral issue, which may draw the scrupulous in but will alienate legions of others.
Fear-mongering and non-stop doomsday forecasts have dominated the 'environmental movement' since the publication of "The Silent Spring" over 30 years ago. Sentiment as a message doesn't work.
Try something else.
Here's a link arguing why the chart on weather related grid outages may be unpersuasive and may include specious reasoning.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/06/calling-bs.html