Why Are Progressives So Lousy at Messaging

In the last decade, scientists have apparently become less convincing to Republicans than the anti-scientific disinformers have been. As the polling discussed in the last chapter reveals, a significant and growing number of Republicans—one in eight as of 2008—simply don't believe what they know most scientists believe. The disinformers apparently have gotten more effective at messaging while scientists, progressives, and environmentalists have gotten worse.

In part, this has occurred because there is an organized disinformation campaign promoted by conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and well-funded bybet雷竞技 companies like ExxonMobil, with key messages broadcast repeatedly by conservative pundits and politicians like George Will and Rush Limbaugh and Senator James Inhofe (R-OIL).

At the same time, the status quo media has treated this more as a political issue than a scientific one, thereby necessitating in their view a "balanced" presentation of both sides, notwithstanding the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists understand humans are warming the planet and dangerously so. Also, increasingly profit-driven media have been abdicating their role in science education. Science writers Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum offer these grim statistics in their recent book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future:

• For every five hours of cable news, one minute is devoted to science.

• Forty-six percent of Americans believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

h•报纸的数量与科学部分as shrunken by two-thirds in the last twenty years.

• Just 18 percent of Americans know a scientist personally.

• The overwhelming majority of Americans polled in late 2007 either couldn't name a scientific role model or named "people who are either not scientists or not alive."

媒体是放弃科学报道,更多and more scientists are starting to speak out, as discussed in chapter 2. But progressives in general and scientists in particular aren't great at messaging. And in part that's because well-meaning but misguided pollsters have convinced some progressives and environmentalists they should downplay talk about global warming and its impacts, which amounts to unilateral disarmament in the battle to explain to the public what will happen if we continue on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions.

Why Scientists Aren't More Persuasive, Part 1

September 30, 2008

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king... . The subtle art of combining the various elements that separately mean nothing and collectively mean so much in an harmonious proportion is known to very few.. .. [T]he student of rhetoric may indulge the hope that Nature will finally yield to observation and perseverance, the key to the hearts of men.

So wrote a twenty-three-year-old Winston Churchill in a brilliant, unpublished essay, "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric."

The ever-worsening reality of human-caused global warming is driving more and more scientists to become desperate about our future. Yet poll after poll shows that scientists and those who accept scientific understanding as the basis for action on climate change are failing to persuade large segments of society about the urgent need to act.

Anyone who wants to understand—and change—the politics of global warming must understand why the disinformers, delayers, and inactivists are so persuasive in the public debate, and why scientists and scientific-minded people are not. A key part of the answer, I believe, is that while science and logic are powerful systematic tools for understanding the world, they are no match in the public realm for the twenty-five-century-old art of verbal persuasion: rhetoric.

逻辑可能被描述为影响的艺术minds with the facts, whereas rhetoric is the art of influencing both the hearts and minds of listeners with the figures of speech. The figures are the catalog of the different, effective ways that we talk—they include alliteration and other forms of repetition, metaphor, irony, and the like. The goal is to sound believable. As Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric, "aptness of language is one thing that makes people believe in the truth of your story."

The rhetorical figures have been widely studied by marketers and social scientists. They turn out to "constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world," as one psychologist put it. We think in figures, and so the figures can be used to change the way we think. That's why political speech writers use them. To help level the rhetorical playing field in the global warming debate, I will highlight the three rhetorical elements that are essential to modern political persuasion.

First: simple language. Contrary to popular misconception, rhetoric is not big words; it's small words. Churchill understood this at the age of twenty-three:

The unreflecting often imagine that the effects of oratory are produced by the use of long words. ... The shorter words of a language are usually the more ancient. Their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek. All the speeches of great English rhetoricians ... display an uniform preference for short, homely words of common usage

We hear the truth of his advice in the words that linger with us from all of the great speeches: "Judge not that ye be not judged," "To be or not to be," "lend me your ears," "Four score and seven years ago," "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," "I have a dream."

In short, simple words and simple slogans work.

Second, repetition, repetition, repetition. Repetition makes words and phrases stick in the mind. Repetition is so important to rhetoric that there are four dozen figures of speech describing different kinds of repetition. The most elemental figure of repetition is alliteration (from the Latin for "repeating the same letter"), as in "compassionate conservative." Repetition, or "staying on message," in modern political parlance, remains the essential rhetorical strategy. As Frank Luntz—the bane of climate progressives, but an undeniably astute conservative messaging guru—has said:

There's a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Third, the skillful use of tropes (from the Greek for turn), figures that change or turn the meaning of a word away from its literal meaning. The two most important tropes, I believe, are metaphor and irony.

"To be a master of metaphor," Aristotle writes in Poetics, is "a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars." When Bush said in 2006 that the nation was "addicted to oil," he was speaking metaphorically. Curing an addiction, however, requires far stronger medicine than the president proposed.

Science, Climate, and Rhetoric

Rhetoric works, and it works because it is systematic. As Churchill wrote, "The subtle art of combining the various elements that separately mean nothing and collectively mean so much in an harmonious proportion is known to very few."

Unfortunately, the major player in the climate debate, the scientific community, is not good at persuasive speech. Scientists might even be described as anti-rhetoricians since they avoid all of its key elements.

Few scientists are known for simple language. As the physicist Mark Bowen writes in Thin Ice, his book aboutglaciologistLonnie Thompson:

Scientists have an annoying habit of backing off when they're asked to make a plain statement, and climatologists tend to be worse than most.

Most scientists do not like to repeat themselves because it implies that they aren't sure of what they are saying. Scientists like to focus on the things that they don't know, since that is the cutting edge of scientific research. So they don't keep repeating the things that they do know, which is one reason the public and the media often don't hear from scientists about the strong areas of agreement on global warming.

The disinformers are so good at repetition that they continue to repeat myths long after they have been debunked by scientists. Scientists, and the media, grow weary of repeatedly debunking the same lies, the same nonsensical myths. But that, of course, only encourages the disinformers to keep repeating those myths.

喜欢我两岁的女儿,他们知道,如果they just keep repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again, they will eventually get their way. And they have. Of course, when your "way" is just to get people to keep doing the same thing they have been doing for decades (i.e., nothing), your messaging task is considerably easier because the default position of most people, the media, and policy makers is "do nothing."

Finally, scientific training, at least as I experienced it, emphasizes sticking to facts and speaking literally, as opposed to figuratively or metaphorically. Scientific debates are won by those whose theory best explains the facts, not by those who are the most gifted speakers. This view of science is perhaps best summed up in the motto of the Royal Society of London, one of the world's oldest scientific academies (founded in 1660), Nullius in verba: take nobody's word. Words alone are not science.

Scientists who are also great public communicators, like Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman, have grown scarcer as science has become increasingly specialized. Moreover, the media likes the glib and the dramatic, which is the style most scientists deliberately avoid. As Jared Diamond (author of Collapse) wrote in a must-read 1997 article on scientific messaging (or the lack thereof), "Scientists who do communicate effectively with the public often find their colleagues responding with scorn, and even punishing them in ways that affect their careers." After Carl Sagan became famous, he was rejected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences in a special vote. This became widely known, and, Diamond writes, "Every scientist is capable of recognizing the obvious implications for his or her self-interest."

Scientists who have been outspoken about global warming have been repeatedly attacked as having a "political agenda." As one 2006 journal article explained, "For a scientist whose reputation is largely invested in peer-

reviewed publications and the citations thereof, there is little professional payoff for getting involved in debates that mix science and politics."

Not surprisingly, many climate scientists shy away from the public debate. At the same time, the Bush administration has muzzled many climate scientists working for the U.S. government. As a result, science journalists, not practicing scientists, are almost always the ones explaining global warming to the public. Unfortunately, the media is cutting back on science reporting in general, and finds reporting climate science particularly problematic.

It is not remarkable, then, that the American public is so uninformed about global warming, so vulnerable to what might be called the conservative crusade against climate.

Why Scientists Aren't More Persuasive, Part 2: Why Deniers Out-Debate "Smart Talkers"

October 13, 2008

In 2007, NPR broadcast a now-infamous climate debate on the proposition "Global warming is not a crisis." In theory, this sounds like an easy win for the "nay" side—"crisis" is obviously the mildest of words to describe the greatest preventable existential threat to the health and well-being of future generations.

但实际上这样的辩论几乎是无法取胜的, even by those who are good at debating in public, a group that does not include very many scientists. As noted in Part 1, scientists are lousy at rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Significantly, rhetoric was discovered and developed by the Greeks and Romans in part to help them win debates, so it follows that modern debates are also won by those who are better at using the strategies and tactics of rhetoric. In his dialogue Gorgias about the master rhetorician, Plato gives him a speech that dramatizes the awesome power of rhetoric:

If a rhetorician and a doctor visited any city you like to name and they had to contend in argument before the Assembly or any other gathering as to which of the two should be chosen as doctor, the doctor would be nowhere, but the man who could speak would be chosen, if he so wished.

So a rhetorician could persuade any audience, no matter how intelligent, that he or she was more of a doctor than a real doctor. No surprise, then, that someone skilled in rhetoric can beat a scientist in a debate on climate.

The 2007 debate had, "speaking for the motion: Michael Crichton, Richard S. Lindzen, Philip Stott" and "speaking against the motion: Brenda Ekwurzel,Gavin Schmidt, Richard C. J. Somerville." The painfully inevitable result as announced by NPR's Brian Lehrer at the end:

And now the results of our debate. After our debaters did their best to sway you .. . you went from, 30 percent for the motion that global warming is not a crisis, from 30 percent to 46 percent. [APPLAUSE] Against the motion, went from 57 percent to 42 percent.. . [SCATTERED APPLAUSE].

A few more debates like that and we can all buy beachfront property in Baton Rouge.

Personally, I still do one-on-one debates from time to time, although they are almost unwinnable against a sophisticated disinformer or delayer, like, say Bj0rn Lomborg. But a three-on-three is quite counterproductive, since the other side will just go after your weak link(s). The other flaw in this debate is the proposition. "Crisis" is a losing word—sorry Al Gore—a word the public has grown tired of, since it's been applied to too many (every?) major public policy problem in the last two decades.

In this post, I'll talk a little bit more about why "smart-talkers" like scientists don't tend to win debates. I won't critique the climate scientists in the 2007 debate, but comment instead on two of the disinformers/delayers. Stott spends a considerable amount of time pushing the favorite disinformer narrative that just a few decades ago, scientists believed the climate was cooling but now they believe it's warming. I will explain below why someone like Stott who has spent ten years using "modern techniques to deconstruct grand environmental narratives, like global warming," would devote so much time to repeating such a long-debunked myth.

Even more fascinating is the opening statement from the one nonscien-tist in the debate, the late Michael Crichton, who obviously became very rich precisely because he knows how to put together (fictional) narratives that are compelling to millions of people. He adopts the classic everyman position that is classic old-school rhetoric:

I myself, uh, just a few years ago, held the kinds of views that I, uh, expect most of you in this room hold. That's to say, I had a very conventional view about the environment. I thought it was going to hell. I thought human beings were responsible and I thought we had to do something about it. I hadn't actually looked at any environmental issues in detail but I have that general view. And so in 2000, when I read an article that suggested that the evidence for global warming might not be quite as firm as people said, I immediately dismissed it. Not believe in global warming? That's ridiculous. How could you have such an idea? Are you going to try and tell me that the planet isn't getting warmer? I know it's getting warmer I spent thirty years in California. We used to have something called June gloom. Now it's more like May, June, July, August gloom with September, October, November gloom added in. The weather is very different.

However, because I look for trouble, um, I went at a certain point and started lookingat the temperaturerecords. And I was very surprised at what I found. The first thing that I discovered, which Dick has already told you, is that the increase in temperatures so far over the last hundred years, is on the order of six-tenths of a degree Celsius, about a degree Fahrenheit. I hadn't really thought, when we talked about global warming, about how much global warming really was taking place. . . .

Bullshit? Yes. Persuasive? I'm afraid so. Crichton is identifying himself with the audience—he once believed like they do, but then, gosh darn it, he went looking for trouble and found the actual data. This rhetorical strategy, and Stott's, is not just decades old, not just centuries old, it is literally millennia old.

Let me bring presidential politics into this because, frankly, that is the origin of much of my analysis. Scientists and progressives and Democratic politicians have historically lost debates because they made two fundamental mistakes: First, they have treated the debates as if they were high school or college debates, which are won primarily on the merits of the arguments and volume of evidence presented.

Second, relatedly, they seem to think that appearing smarter than your opponent is a winning strategy, whereas conservatives understand and have repeatedly demonstrated it is a losing strategy. This fact was very well understood by the masters of persuasive language from ancient Greece and Rome through Elizabethans like Shakespeare and by skilled debaters like Lincoln and Churchill, as we will see.

Debates are typically won by the candidate who presents the most compelling and persuasive character. If I can convince you I'm an honest, straight talker, you'll believe what else I say. If I can't, you won't.

辩论通常并不在事实或政策erits, in part because listeners aren't in a position to adjudicate sometimes subtle differences between complex positions—what exactly was the difference between Clinton's health care plan and Obama's? And what exactly is the difference between carbon dioxide emissions and carbon dioxide concentrations?— and because those who are undecided on an issue are typically skeptical of all advocates, especially self-styled "experts." They assume everybody exaggerates to defend their position. In any case, if I don't convince you I'm honest, my stated positions can't possibly matter.

The rest of this post will explain why (those who appear to be) straight talkers beat smart talkers every time, ending with a discussion of the 2004 election.

A History of Faking Straight Talk

A core strategy of rhetoric is to avoid seeming like a smarty-pants, to avoid appearing like Carter, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry—a highly educated (i.e., elite), wonkish speaker—but rather to appear a plainspoken man of the people.

Shakespeare—a master of rhetoric who knew more than 200 figures of speech, like all middle-class Elizabethans—understood that very well. That's why he has Mark Antony say in one of the great debate speeches of all time, his famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen" response to Brutus in the Roman Forum: "I am no orator, as Brutus is, But—as you know me all—a plain blunt man."

这是巧合唯一使用word "rhetoric" in the 2004 presidential debates were George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? In the vice presidential debate, Cheney said to his Democratic rival, Senator John Edwards, "Your rhetoric, Senator, would be a lot more credible if there was a record to back it up." In the final debate, Bush twice repeated almost verbatim the same accusation about Kerry: "His rhetoric doesn't match his record," and again, "His record in the United States Senate does not match his rhetoric." This was only a small salvo in the Bush team's war on Kerry's language.

It is a mark of wily orators that they accuse their opponents of being rhetoricians. Winston Churchill, who wrote a treatise on the use of rhetoric in political speech at the age of twenty-three, himself once opened an attack on his political opponents, saying "These professional intellectuals who revel in decimals and polysyllables."

Returning to the Roman Forum, Marc Antony says:

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men's blood: I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know

So Antony is a man of the people, just reminding them of what they already know. Antony was, in fact, a patrician, like Bush. Indeed, Antony was a student of rhetoric, but his repeated use of one-syllable words lends credibility to his blunt sincerity. It is a mark of first-rate orators that they deny eloquence.

林肯是一个“简单朴素的“演讲者,左右the legend, a legend he himself worked hard to create. In a December 1859 autobiographical sketch provided to a Pennsylvania newspaper, Lincoln explained how his father grew up "literally without education." Lincoln described growing up in "a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. ... There were some schools, so called." He offers one especially colorful spin: "If a stranger supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard." No fancy talkers here. Lincoln modestly explains the result of the little schooling he had: "Of course when I came of age, I did not know much." And after that, "I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity." All this from a man who in the previous year had proven himself to be one of America's great orators in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and who during the course of his presidency would demonstrate the most sophisticated grasp of rhetoric of any U.S. president, before or since.

Lincoln opened his masterful February 1859 Cooper Union speech echoing Shakespeare's Antony: "The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them." (In Antony's own words, "I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know.") These are the words of a man who had memorized Shakespeare from William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, a treatise that included Antony's famous speech.

Does this sound, from Crichton, a little familiar?

I myself, uh, just a few years ago, held the kinds of views that I, uh, expect most of you in this room hold.

If you want to switch people's viewpoints, pretend like you once held their views. It is a twofer. First, you can pretend you're just like one of them. Second, you draw people into the narrative, since they become intrigued about how someone who used to believe as they did now believes differently. Classic storytelling—you need to create a hook for the listener early on or they will tune out.

Returning to rhetoric, the master orator who denies eloquence was such a commonplace by the sixteenth century that Shakespeare resorted to it repeatedly. Consider his King Henry V, a master of oratory, who delivered the most famous pre-battle speech in the English-language:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother

After the British triumph at Agincourt, King Henry V woos Katherine, the daughter of the French king. Yet, even though Kate's hand was one of Henry's conditions for peace, the master of rhetoric still treats us to his tricks.

When Kate says she doesn't speak English well, Henry says he's glad, "for, if thou couldst, thou wouldst find me such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown." He's just like a farmer, a man of the people. He adds, "But, before God, Kate, I cannot look greenly nor gasp out my eloquence, nor I have no cunning in protestation; only downright oaths, which I never use till urged, nor never break for urging." Like Antony, he disingenuously denies eloquence. The reason orators use this trick: Being blunt and ineloquent means they must be honest and steadfast.

Here is Bush in his Orlando campaign speech on October 30,2004:

Sometimes I'm a little too blunt—I get that from my mother. [Huge Cheers] Sometimes I mangle the English language—I get that from my dad. [Laughter and Cheers]. But you always know where I stand. You can't say that for my opponent.

For a blunt language-mangler, that's surprisingly old-school—very old school—rhetoric.

Henry urges Kate to "take a fellow of plain and uncoin'd constancy, for he perforce must do thee right, because he hath not the gift to woo in other places." Because he is not a clever orator, he must be an honest and constant man. Then Henry compares himself to an imaginary rival: "For these fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into ladies' favours, they do always reason themselves out again." In short, the other guys are flip-floppers and liars. They talk smarter than I do, but that's exactly why you can't trust them.

This is precisely why the disinformers like Stott and Crichton love to repeat the global cooling myth, love to say, as Crichton has one of his fictional environmentalists claim in State ofFear, "In the 1970s all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming."

This clever and popular attack tries to make present global-warming fears seem faddish, saying current climate science is nothing more than finger-in-the-wind guessing. This attack appeals especially to conservatives who want to link their attack on climate scientists to their favorite attack against progressive presidential candidates—that they are flip-floppers. It's been debunked time and time again.*

Consider Bush's stump speech in Wilmington, Ohio, the day before the election, discussing his September 2003 request for $87 billion in Iraq war funding and Kerry's vote: "And then he entered the flip-flop Hall of Fame by

* 2008(主要文献综述的公告of the American Meteorological Society concluded, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then."

saying this: 'I actually did vote for the $87 billion right before I voted against it.' I haven't spent a lot of time in the coffee shops around here, but I bet you a lot of people don't talk that way." In Burgettstown, two hours later he said, "I doubt many people in western Pennsylvania talk that way." In Sioux City, Iowa, a few hours later, "I haven't spent much time in the coffee shops around here, but I feel pretty comfortable in predicting that not many people talk like that in Sioux land." And in Albuquerque, he said, "I have spent a lot of time in New Mexico, and I've never heard a person talk that way."

Sarah Palin, in her stump speech, makes an almost identical criticism of Obama: "We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco." He is not one of us. He's two-faced. Yes, it may seem laughable coming from the Palin-McCain team, but even laughable works when it uses the tools of rhetoric—Palin here [or her speechwriter] is using antithesis—placing words or ideas in contrast or opposition, one of Lincoln's favorite rhetorical devices: "with malice toward none; with charity for all." And she is placing Obama into a very old narrative about liars, flip-floppers, and Democratic candidates for president.

Kerry's self-defining quote—"I actually did vote for the $87 billion right before I voted against it"—has the powerful elements of eloquence. Sadly for Kerry, this is the precise reason it stuck in the mind. It has the repetition and sound of two memorable figures found in famous political quotes, antithesis ("voted for" versus "voted against") and chiasmus, words repeated in inverse order (in this case, "I.. . vote for" and "before I voted"). Little wonder it was ripe for exploitation through repetition and sarcasm.

President Bush in 2004 had everything down cold that we expect from a master rhetorician: The repeated simple words, the repeated phrases, and the message that his opponent is inconsistent and inconstant because he's too clever by half and doesn't talk the way you and I do. Yet at the same time, Bush managed to leave the impression that he himself is rather slow and inarticulate. Ironically, the (all-too-many) Democrats who attacked Bush as being stupid merely gave him a free pass on all his lying and made him seem more genuine and credible to many voters.

As hard as it can be sometimes—and even I fall into the trap from time to time—it simply makes no sense whatsoever to attack your opponents as being stupid. Call them liars before calling them stupid.

Why did Kerry flip flop? Bush had a simple answer. The president told every audience that Kerry's most revealing explanation "was when he said, the whole thing was a complicated matter. My fellow Americans, there is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat."

Rhetoric retains the power to move real people. In a 2005 post-election analysis, journalism professor Danner quotes one Dr. Richardson-Pinto saying to him at Bush's Orlando rally: "It doesn't matter if the man [Kerry] can talk. Sometimes, when someone's real articulate, you can't trust what he says, you know?" And Richardson-Pinto is a doctor, someone whose credibility depends on being articulate.

So, yes, being smart, talking smart, and using big words may impress some in the audience—but most likely only those who already agree with you. It may cost you credibility with the very people you are trying to reach.

I fully understand that many scientists don't want to spend the time needed to learn how to be persuasive to nonscientists. Indeed, Part 1 discusses how scientists are punished for being popularizers. But it is a skill that can be acquired, not really more difficult than differential equations. In any case, if you won't spend the time, or don't want to be known as a pop-ularizer, then simply turn down public debates. This is not an amateur's game. The stakes are way, way too high.

Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica's Phrase "Our Deteriorating Atmosphere" Isn't Going to Replace "Global Warming"—And That's a Good Thing

May 3, 2009

In a front-page article Saturday, "Seeking to Save the Planet, with a Thesaurus," the New York Times opens with some mostly bad messaging advice from ecoAmerica:

The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is "global warming."

The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice, and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.

对全球变暖的警告,而不是firm advises, talk about "our deteriorating atmosphere." Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up "moving away from the dirty fuels of the past." Don't confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like "cap and cash back" or "pollution reduction refund."

Yes, ecoAmerica is pushing the inapt phrase, "our deteriorating atmosphere" over "global warming" (and even over "climate change"). And ecoAmerica recommends generally skipping or dumbing down most of the climate science message. And ecoAmerica is pushing stuff that is just plain counterproductive—I quote now from material they handed out at a two-hour presentation I attended last week:

It is also important to accept people's uncertainty about climate change but move past it with messages such as "whatever caused it, scientists know what will fix it."

Not. Definitely not. I'm not sure it even makes sense for moderate politicians talking to groups of swing voters and trying to push a very, very short-term message about the climate bill. But I'm quite certain it would be a suicidal message for climate science activists, for anyone seriously concerned about averting catastrophic global warming.

We know what is causing global warming and climate change. To suggest that we don't is the equivalent of undermining the essential credibility of our message and of what we are trying to do—help the public and policy makers make decisions based on science to preserve the health and well-being of their children, grandchildren, and the next fifty generations.

I have previously argued that phrases like "whatever caused it, scientists know what will fix it" are pure gobbledygook. If humans are not thecause of global warmingthen in fact scientists don't know how to fix it.

Let me run through some of the reasons why their climate messaging analysis is neither reliable nor strategic:

1) Other recent messaging and polling analysis contradicts it. I heard an extended presentation just last month from a different group with their polling, and they did not recommend shying away from the science. They simply suggested not making it more than half your message. That's certainly what I recommend. Indeed, other people in the audience with me at the ecoAmerica presentation made the same point that they had seen polling with different conclusions.

2) Many of ecoAmerica's findings are based on dial group responses. If somebody has a controlled study on whether a phrase that gets a positive response in a dial group is actually more persuasive or more memorable over the long-term than a phrase that gets a negative response, I'd love to see it. Obviously if you give people a dial to turn when you are telling them bad news—"you have diabetes"—they aren't going to like to hear that message. But if you are a credible source, I suspect they are more likely to take action (especially as more symptoms reveal themselves) than if you just tell them—"eating tasty fruits and crunchy vegetables will help youlive longer," which would probably score much better on a dial group. You need both messages. Equally.

In fact, I believe it was ecoAmerica's president and founder, Robert Perkowitz, who conceded to me after the meeting that people will sometimes give a negative dial response to a message that in fact turns out to be an effective and persuasive messaging strategy. I believe that ecoAmer-ica work's onclean energymessaging is pretty good, as I discussed in Part 1, because I think the dial groups can tell you which positive message works better than another positive message. But I think the dial groups are largely useless for helping you with what I'd call "reality-based messaging" on climate.

3) The dial groups (but even the focus groups to a certain extent) are essentially passive ways to measure a response to a message to a very targeted audience. If you were giving a short speech in front of a large group of swing voters, then in that narrow case, their results might be useful to factor in. The vast majority of people I know don't do that. We sometimes go out and give talks, but then we have a lot of time to explain ourselves. I also have serious doubts about using some of their suggestions for many other audiences, including the media.

4)“我们的恶化气氛”是一个没有前途的ph值rase. It is too inapt and unwieldy to be picked up by the key message pushers. ecoAmerica wants to tie in the general frame of"pollution threatens your health and your children's health." That is always worth talking about. But it is very hard to see how a six-syllable word is going to be a core element of successful messaging, especially in a passive phrase like that. Now ecoAmer-ica was also pushing the word "damage," and I do think an active phrase like "we are damaging the atmosphere," isn't bad. But the message isn't strategic, which brings me to the key point.

5) We are engaged in a multiyear messaging struggle here. The planet is going to get hotter and hotter, the weather is going to get more extreme. One of the reasons to be clear and blunt in your messaging about this is that even if you don't persuade people today, the overall message will grow in credibility as reality unfolds as we have warned. To shy away from telling people the truth because they don't want to hear it or they think it's liberal claptrap is just incredibly un-strategic. ecoAmerica doesn't want people to talk about "global warming." And—even worse— they don't want people to talk about extreme weather, which, as I have previously argued, is in fact the same thing that the climate deniers want. You must tell people what is coming, not just because it is strategic messaging, but also, I believe, because we have a moral responsibility.

True, if you use phrases like "global warming" you will activate certain frames in the audience because the right wing and fossil fuel disinformation machine have done a tremendous job politicizing this issue, making it seem like just another liberal-conservative argument, rather than a science versus anti-science argument. But does that mean we concede the powerful science frame just because the other side is more consistently effective and repetitious with their messaging? No.

The New York Times reports:

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. "We know why it's lowest," said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. "When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say 'global warming,' a certain group of Americans think that's a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage, and other such issues."

我认为伯寇维兹已经落后。为什么“罗west"? Lots of reasons. Probably the two most important factors that drive what the public thinks is important are (1) How the major news stories are framed by the media, and (2) What the White House focuses its messaging effort on. The media by and large downplay the issue—since they basically believe they "did global warming" back in 2006 with Gore's movie and in 2007 with the IPCC report. Also, environmentalists who talk to the media follow ecoAmerica's bad advice and largely fail to tell the public about the link between extreme weather and global warming.

媒体也淡化the issue because their primary source for information on climate science—climate scientists—also downplay the issue. As one top UK environmental editor wrote recently, "Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction."

And let's please remember a 2007 report by the House Oversight and

Government Reform Committee concluded: "The Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policy makers and the public about the dangers of global warming." For eight years! So I don't think it's a big surprise that global warming is not a bigger issue for the public, especially in the midst of the biggest recession since theGreat Depression.

Let's remember that while progressive messaging has been scattershot at best, the right-wing disinformers have been both persistent and effective in their disinformation campaign. They have politicized this issue and pushed a partisan framing. But that is hardly a reason for climate science activists to give up explaining the issue to the public.

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. "Energy efficiency" makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of "saving money for a more prosperous future." In fact, the group's surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term "the environment" and talk about "the air we breathe, the water our children drink."

"Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspira-tional language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence, and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology," said the e-mail account of the group's study.

Well, I'm all for dropping the word "environment" (see my Earth Day piece below). As I've said, Messaging 101 is to be specific. Yes, "jargon" is bad. But details about science, economics, and technology are what people are hungry for. They are what make you seem more credible.

Yes, if you are giving a 10-minute speech in front of swing voters, skip the details. Duh. But most of the rest of the time this just isn't good advice.

Yes, aspirational language is important to use. But a core tenet of rhetoric is to speak truthfully about what you know. If you don't know the climate science, then you probably shouldn't talk about it. But frankly if you don't know the science, you will be eaten alive by the informed conservative doubters in your audience, not to mention any professional deniers you might be debating or who might be on the same panel. A classic technique of rhetoric and debating is to go after your opponent on whatever they are weakest. That's why you need to know the science and how to explain it and defend it.

So if you are out there pushing gobbledygook, a savvy conservative or clever contrarian (or even a sharp reporter) will make you look like an uninformed fool. Remember the key line of the smarmy tobacco lobbyist in the must-see movie, Thank You for Smoking: "I don't have to be right. I just have to prove you might be wrong."

So the anti-science disinformers have the easier end of it on global warming messaging—they can throw out 100 lies and succeed if even one sticks. That's no reason to walk away from the science. Quite the reverse.

Indeed, I think at some level, some of ecoAmerica's recommendations are elitist, suggesting that we can't explain the facts to swing voters—that they can't handle the truth—but instead we need to use obscuring or vague phrases to persuade them. I couldn't disagree more. And I'm not alone.

The fact that our best communicator—President Obama, "The FDR of clean, safe sources of energy that never run out"—takes every opportunity he has to speak about capping carbon dioxide and avoiding catastrophicglobal warming impactsis probably the clearest evidence that the rest of us climate messaging amateurs should also keep doing so.

I mostly agree with this sentiment from the end of the New York Times article:

Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, an expert on environmental communications, said ecoAmerica's campaign was a mirror image of what industry and political conservatives were doing. "The form is the same; the message is just flipped," he said. "You want to sell toothpaste, we'll sell it. You want to sell global warming, we'll sell that. It's the use of advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion."

He said the approach was cynical and, worse, ineffective. "The right uses it, the left uses it, but it doesn't engage people in a face-to-face manner," he said, "and that's the only way to achieve real, lasting social change."

I do fully agree that engaging people in a face-to-face manner with the truth is the only way to achieve real, lasting social change.

But I don't think there's anything wrong with using the best techniques of rhetoric (even if they have been partly rediscovered and abused by the advertising industry) in your messaging. You'll never win a debate against a skilled debater without rhetoric. But you'll never win on this issue by downplaying the scientific reality.

What you need to know is not how to avoid talking about climate science to the public. What you need to know is how to talk about climate science to the public—and that is a key focus of this blog.

Let's Dump "Earth Day"

April 19, 2009

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

Last year, I wrote a piece for Salon, "Let's Dump 'Earth' Day." It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day has been on my mind for a year now—and all the more so today because the New York Times magazine just published an interview with our Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary, Steven Chu, in which he says "I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day."

Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees—and we haven't finished them off. . . yet. So if every day is Earth Day, then April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I'm updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates.

I don't worry about the Earth. I'm pretty certain the Earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I'm very certain the Earth doesn't worry about us. I'm not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the Earth into a barely habitable planet.

Arguably, concern over the Earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. Only environmentalists cling to Earth Day. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we're doing with our cars andpower plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don't think I'm ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn't drill for oil there. But that's not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet's next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.

I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has destroyed their feeding habitat—the polar ice, probably by 2020, possibly sooner—polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?

I am a cat lover, but you can't really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie Alien? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.

Apparently there are some plankton that thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn't look like we're going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don't see how I'm in a position to march on the nation's capital to protest their extinction. I won't eat farmraised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.

If thousands of inedible species can't adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like kudzu,cactus, cockroaches, rats, scorpions, the bark beetle, Anopheles mosquitoes, and the malaria parasites they harbor. Who are we to pick favorites?

I didn't hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the Earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn't wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the Earth, he wouldn't have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn't have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.

And speaking of God, Creation Care is also woefully misnamed. If humans are special, invested with a soul by our Creator, along with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then why should we sacrifice even a minute of that pursuit worrying about the inferior species?

All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for—sharp cuts in greenhouse gases—is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know—and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd—care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren't so good at articulating that perspective. I'm with them.

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge orthe polar bearsis not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn't smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel's back? The hundredth species we wipe out? The thousandth? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 4°F from preindustrial levels—and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer—then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years. And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.

So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can't live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.

The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.

Two years ago, Science magazine published research that "predicted a permanentdroughtby 2050 throughout the Southwest"—levels of soil aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California. The Hadley Centre, the UK's official center for climate change research, found that "areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8 percent to 40 percent." On our current emissions path, most of the South and Southwest will ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl.

Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than theatmosphere containstoday. On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century—so much for being "perma"—and that amplifyingcarbon-cycle feedbackwill all but ensure that today's worst-case scenarios for global warming will become the best-case scenarios. We must save the tundra. Perhaps it should be small "e" earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.

As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps as much as 2 inches a year by century's end. (A 2009 Nature paper on sea level rise using data from coral fossils suggested "catastrophic increase of more than 5 centimetres per year over a 50-year stretch is possible." The lead author warned, "This could happen again."). If we warm even 7°F from preindus-trial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 80 feet higher. The first 5 feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to occur this century on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don't consider this to be an abstract issue.

Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, most of them will be gone by century's end.

So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can't go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world's great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word "rival," after all, comes from "people who share the same river." Sure, desalination is possible, but that's expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we'll need even more carbon-bet雷竞技 .

Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water—too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do ProLife Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.

We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn't it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves "wise" twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet's livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo "sapiens," at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.

day-indeed,整个年should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations. Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the Earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can't preserve ourselves if we don't preserve a livable climate, and we can't preserve a livable climate if we don't preserve the Earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole Earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II-scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let's call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst—yes, if worse comes to worst—at least future generations won't have to change the name again.

Murder, He Wrote

March 1, 2009

An excellent climate blogger, Johnny Rook, is dying. I'm hoping that you will take a look at his website, Johnny Rook's Climaticide Chronicles, and post a comment for his family.

His most recent post, no doubt a great struggle to write, has some breaking news: "Alert:Wilkins Ice ShelfCollapses According to Spanish Scientists." As you can see he hasn't been able to post much recently for reasons he explains in his February 5 post "My Doctor Doesn't Think I'm Going to Die Today—Updated."

Rook makes a plea in that post I'll repeat here because it is something that you perhaps can respond to in your comments:

My diaries, as those of you who are regular readers know, often contain depressing information about how temperatures and sea levels are rising, how seaice and glaciersare melting and shrinking, how deserts are growing and heat waves becoming longer and hotter meaning that agriculture is becoming less and less possible in many places, how extreme weather is becoming more common and more intense, how oceans are becoming acidified, how species are going extinct, ecosystems are being rendered uninhabitable for the creatures that live in them, and how famine and diseases are spreading.

When I write about solutions I often focus on how people and governments are mostly oblivious to what is happening and to how little time we have left to act boldly and forcefully to effect the radical change that the scientists tell us is necessary. I agree absolutely with what Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, told the LA Times in an interview a couple of days ago.

I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen.

I understand that such news can depress. At times it depresses me but, more than anything else, it has filled my life with meaning. I have a mission. Before I die, I want to have some sense that this beautiful planet that has provided the context for my life will have some chance of enduring. I want to die with hope, believing that my teenage son and his children and your children and their children will live in a world that is reasonably hospitable to human beings.

I don't know how that can happen if people will not face the reality of what is taking place in the world. So, I continue to sound the alarm, even though I know that most of what I write is discounted as alarmist or simply ignored as too uncomfortable to deal with.

Johnny Rook shares my initials and my sensibilities on climate, so I understand how optimism can be hard to come by.

My father, while he was alive, watched Murder, She Wrote—the TV series that starred Angela Lansbury as mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher. He would joke that the most dangerous place on Earth was in the company of Jessica Fletcher, because wherever she was, somebody was going to get murdered.

Humanity is, as the name Climaticide Chronicles makes clear, in the process of murdering the climate. Everywhere Rook—or any of us—looks, there is more and more evidence of that crime in process.

But it is not too late. The murder can be stopped. I wouldn't be blogging if didn't know that for a fact. The fact that catastrophic climate change, say, post-2040, is irreversible does not mean it is unstoppable if we act now. I'm sure Rook feels the same way.

So there is hope as long as people like Johnny Rook are willing to use their energy—even their last drop of energy—to tell the world what is to come on our current path and how we can stop it.

I hope you'll tell his family that.

Johnny Rook Says: March 1st, 2009 at 4:56 pm Dear Joe,

Thank you for such a touching encomium.

Humanity is, as the name Climaticide Chronicles makes clear, in the process of murdering the climate. Everywhere Rook—or any of us—looks, there is more and more evidence of that crime in process.

But it is not too late. The murder can be stopped. I wouldn't be blogging if didn't know that for a fact I'm sure Rook feels the same way.

I am proud to say that my nineteen-year-old son, Aleks and a friend, Andrew, did make the choice to go in my stead and are already in DC for the Powershift Action. I know this is going to be a very exciting time for both of them, and that they will carry the battle into the future until we have succeeded.

It's getting harder and harder for me to write, even simple comments like this, but my thoughts and sympathies are with you always.

UPDATE: Johnny Rook died the next day.

Continue reading here:Afterword

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