Nothing New Under the Sun
Science in the days of John Tyndall, the man who in the mid 19th century identified the greenhouse gases (the greenhouse effect itself was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824) certainly had to deal with Deniers.
After all, it was a period of great scientific discovery, including Darwin’s Evolution by Natural Selection. Scientific discoveries that threatened orthodoxy and ignorance.
Tyndall knew the consequences of Denial and the measure of the people who wallow in it:
” It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.” ~ John Tyndall
He also knew how much point there was to presenting them with facts and reason in the hope that they would assess the facts fairly and objectively:
” Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain.”
So it’s no surprise that Tyndall took the time to try and help educate a broader public about science and scientific matters (“Fragments of science for unscientific people“). Those were simpler times when gentlemen wrote books and gave public talks for other gentlemen. Now with dozens of different types of media and instant global communication that can potentially reach almost any inhabitant on the planet the art of communication has become mind boggling.
Actually it’s not particularly any more complicated or difficult than it ever was, it’s just more incoherent and bewildering. What could and needed to be done was easier to discern then, now it is not so obvious, but the fundamentals remain the same.
In an earlier post I spoke of the need for a coherent, proactive media strategy. It is not my intent to lay one out, but rather to talk about what a media strategy is and what some of the options might be for implementation.
Further, as I stated in another earlier post: “Granted the climate science community is a loose network of a broad spectrum of individuals and groups, with occasional nodes that might be described as coalitions and the like, so I am not suggesting a unified strategy. It’s not only impractical, it’s probably impossible.
Even so, it is possible for us to have a loose strategy that is constantly discussed and reviewed, and which many in the network implement in ways that are suited to their strengths and abilities.”
For the moment I will take it as a given that our goal is to, at a minimum, get the majority of the population educated about climate change, which would include understanding the need to take immediate action.
I do not want to be too cavalier in skipping this as I recognize that i) that is too minimal for many people (including myself), and ii) just what that means is open to a range of interpretation, but it will do for the moment.
Strategy
Let’s start with “strategy” since I find that it is usually misunderstood. A strategy is is an overall plan for how one intends to achieve goals that provides guidance without dictating specifics.
A good strategy is chosen based on analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the respective sides and conducting a campaign accordingly. For example, a historical military commander might choose to use their superior cavalry to gather information for themselves while denying information to the enemy. A chess player might decide to play a cautious, strong defensive game if she knew her opponent was more prone to make mistakes while attacking. A politician might run a campaign emphasizing experience if they know that their voting record lined up well with the issues that concerned the voters in their constituency.
Note that none of the strategies spell out how a particular battle is to be fought. Instead they provide guidance for every situation about whether that battle should even be fought at all. If it should, it then provides guidance as to how. In the above examples:
- Given their superior intelligence gathering the commander would always seek to keep the enemy confused and then only fight battles when he was certain of victory; otherwise they would always retreat.
- Given choices of roughly equal value the chess player would always strengthen their defence rather than develop their offensive position, at least until the expected blunder happened and they could safely start attacking.
- In every speech or interview the politician would refer to their record in some way no matter what the question or issue was. Things like “the voters know from my record that I have always been strong on education, so it will be no surprise that …”
Thinking strategically can be as simple as thinking through how each of us expects our efforts to result in change. If I write a piece on methane clathrates, who do I think will read it and what will they do with that knowledge? How does my piece connect to actual change?
I can write so as to make that more likely, and by thinking it through I more likely to do so. It could be as simple as explicitly stating it at the end of the piece eg “So write to your representative and ….” or “Go to this link and support … .” If a writer fails to do so, informed commentors can always add it to the comment thread.
Media
Too often we see this word and immediately jump to the assumption of “commercial mass media.” Mistake. Media is anything and everything we might use to reach the target audience. Social media, pamphlets, youtube comment threads, church bulletins and community papers, news sharing sites, the blogosphere, pirate radio, street art, poetry jams & open mic nights, billboards, street theatre, public talks, video sharing, organizational newsletters, etc, and even commercial mass media.
However, just saying “commercial mass media” still leaves you choosing from among paid ads, editorials, educating journalists, letter writing to the editor, documentaries, talk shows, news cycle piggy backing, magazines, newspapers, TV, independents vs chain, and so on. You get the picture. Which are chosen and how they are utilized depends on the strategy.
Choosing that will in turn require refining the goal somewhat. Just who are we targeting? Everyone? the Deniers? (bad idea) the undecided? Progressives? labour? women? middle class? rural poor?
Having decided a particular target audience informs which media to use and how.Targeting the rural poor with editorials in high end magazines is obviously a bad idea. Far better to start looking at what media the rural poor do get their information from and analysing how you could start engaging them.
Recognizing that your target is the rural poor may mean that writing an article for the local rural newspaper about crop yields in a changing climate will have far more impact than another blog post about arctic ice or CO2 levels. Maybe it would be good to develop a relationship with the editor or one of the journalists (if they have more than one).
As noted, a strategy has to provide guidance without dictating specifics. Everyone has to go with their strengths and resources. In this example I might not start investigating local rural papers, but I might blog more often about the impacts of climate change on the rural poor in the hope that someone else could use it in the manners described.
Equally, just because a loose strategy of emphasizing the use of machinima has been chosen does not mean that everyone should start producing machinima to educate about climate change.
Obviously someone who is influential in their faith community should use that strength and opportunity, but they might do so by using the communities newsletter to point people to particular machinima as opposed to reiterating the scientific argument in print.
Proactive
Quite a few in the climate science community are proactive in the sense of putting the scientific facts out there in the first place. Some proportion of us even craft our message for specific communities such as nature enthusiasts or the classroom. To a more limited extent some of those dealing with the Deniers do so by documenting their funding sources (hence pro-active).
For obvious reasons most of us tend to be more reactive in that we respond to Denier posts by exposing their frauds and hoaxes. The limitation is obviously that the response is always after the fact, and never reaches everyone it should.
For those whom it does reach it only has value in that they have to be aware of the fraud before the rebuttal makes sense.
For the broad issue of climate change science and given the goal of educating the public, which communities would we target and with what strategy? As a sub-campaign of that, what would the answers be for the goal of exposing the Deniers?
Paradoxically we could even have a strategy that is proactive in responding to the Deniers. A simple pro-active approach would be to use the existing, considerable documentation of Denier lies and errors and get more pieces in the general media discussing the Denier reliance on frauds and error to make their case.
Another example, the Deniers have organized efforts at cyber-censorship whereby articles posted to news sharing sites such as Digg, Reddit etc are systematically and blindly voted down to prevent people from seeing them.
A well organized community could vote good articles up before the Deniers strike, or in such numbers as to overwhelm the Deniers. Naturally the pro-science crowd should not behave as the Deniers do, and instead actually read the articles in question to ensure that they are deserving of support. This would have the added benefit of promoting more education on climate issues for the participants themselves as well as the broader public.
Coherent
It’s not that we are incoherent per se, at least not in the sense that our individual posts or efforts don’t make sense. What I mean is that as a collective we have not, as far as I am aware, even had the broader discussion of who we are targeting and what is the best approach to reach them.
As such there is no coherence to our collective approach. My hope is that by discussing strategies we can start to coordinate better and respond more effectively. If the core science bloggers understand that the more general bloggers are targeting a particular demographic then they can do more posts that speak to the relevant issues.
So let’s start the conversation about what would make for an effective media strategy. First we need some loose agreement on the core questions:
- Is the goal described above sufficient, or does it need to be refined?
- What demographic should we be focusing on?
- What are our strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the Denier’s strengths and weaknesses?
Endnote
For obvious reasons a good strategy would NOT refer to the greenhouse effect as the “Tyndall Gas Effect”, nor would it confuse the greenhouse effect with anthropogenic climate change as some Deniers try to do. The use of the term here was merely a device to honour a great scientist and early champion in the fight against the organized ignorance that is climate change Denial.
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
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There is a traditional German saying, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
However, if we fail today to educate the small greedy minority living both in fear and denial of the inconvenient truth, what price will generation hot pay in the year 2050?
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re targets
equals who has influence, who will sustain the change and what matters most urgently
It’s hard to believe it’s actually difficult to get people to care about little, tiny people. It’s still just an abstract issue that babies and young children in the poorest countries, and those of poor mothers in e.g. the U.S. will suffer and die more often.
Babies that can’t breathe in the increased heat and pollution, or babies dying from starvation/dehydration or diarrhea, need medical care. Mothers without insurance, or mothers in areas with no medical care, will not be able to save their babies and they can’t move to areas that are not impacted.
Who do I think should be targeted? Health care professionals (given their prestige/importance ie. ability to define and influence environmental health goals); labour (given the breadth and depth of the democratic infrastructure they have developed); farmers (given their central role in managing resources, food production, water); and the poor (given the immediacy of their need for self-advocacy since they will suffer very, very disproportionately and have no resources to cope).
That sounds good, at least for now. 🙂
Jeez, that’s a good question. Other than the fact that “our” numbers are greater, I can’t think of any actual strengths that matter strategically. Being “right” or “coherent” doesn’t really count, given how the world has pretty much entered a “post-truth” era.
— frank
One thing I do frequently and think others should do more of, is leaving comments at mainstream media articles online.
I do this at NYTimes, CNN, CBS and AP articles, as well as the occasional LA Times or other major newspaper website. The idea is to go out beyond the ususal climate blogs, that so many people don’t read. My homepage, from which I access these news outlets is MyYahoo, which means that AP articles’ comment sections are actually Yahoo comment sections. This one is a tough audience, usually dominated by what appear to be tea baggers repeating sound bites of climate change denial. In short, yahoos.
For example, yesterday, AP ran an article about seeing places like Glacier Park before there are no glaciers there. I posted maybe a dozen comments full of facts and detailed rebuttals about climate change, and to my surprise, got lots of thumbs up. I guess it was hard to ignore them, since there were so few substantive comments otherwise. Of course maybe the usual trolls just missed that article, or maybe I just struck a chord with the moderate readers. Other times, my comments have been “hidden” because they were ganged up on with thumbs down votes.
What I really want to see is hard hitting documentaries about the climate change denial PR campaign, akin to Naomi Oreskes’ book “Merchants of Doubt” and “Climate Cover-Up”. I think we should all be reaching out to the movie and tv industry folks that are sympathetic to environmental issues, in order to make this happen. The man who created the documentaries “No End in Sight” and “Inside Job” would be the ideal person to tackle this one. I will be writing to Ed Begley Jr., to encourage him to spread this idea to associates. Idealy, such a movie would be out before the next election in 2012.
This is definitely on the proactive side of strategy.
Sailrick:
Unless this documentary project is the type that the whole world can literally participate in — a, um, crowdsourced documentary? — I’m afraid that smacks too much of ‘let’s ask someone else who’s not myself to unf███ the world’.
— frank
It is true that you can lead a horse to water, but can’t making him drink. However you can hold his head under water until he drowns.
Yes, I agree we need some good, hard hitting documentaries on the professional denialist PR campaign. In the making of the documentaries I would suggest finding and using some emotional trigger words to keep the amateur denialists from looking away. It was one thing thing I noticed with the documentary “The Denial Machine”, it would not hold a denialist’s attention and they would be distracted by dust motes and things. But I have noticed if a program has the same emotional trigger words that the professional denialists use, that word will immediately command their attention. I am talking about using words and phrases like ‘Climategate’ and ‘Global Warming is Hoax’ which will command their attention for reinforcement, but insteadgive them the actual facts about the PR campaign and Global Warming.
In fact I would suggest taking a good hard look at the denialist tactics and start figuring how to subvert the tactics themselves. For the deeply brainwashed denier (and lets face it, the tactics being used are a form of brainwashing) the use of emotional trigger words inserted every two or three word in something the denier doesn’t want to hear can be used to trigger seizures.
I know this seems a bit extreme, but I am fed up with the denier scams and the people who fall for them.
Berbalang:
Are there techniques to fry or rewire ideologues’ brain circuits using nothing but words and pictures? I imagine that this will be an extremely powerful weapon — the kind of thing which certain agencies will be extremely interested in.
— frank
The group “The Other 98%” had a weird idea: they projected a film exposing the Koch brothers onto the walls of the David Koch Theater.
No doubt the extreme right will be frumious!
— frank
frank:
Mainly frying their brains, I never had any luck with getting one to change an opinion, but self destructing is another story…
Monbiot came very close to the technique with Ian Plimer in trying to get him to answer questions. You can tell just the repetition of Plimer’s name upset him. (I found the debate on the internet, it was broadcast on an Australian channel and Monbiot appeared via satellite.)
Perhaps we should have a private conversation sometime.
Berbalang:
Thanks. My e-mail address is on my blog. I don’t know if Greenfyre is interested in this direction, so you may want to include him in the conversation or not…
— frank