It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment: why climate change needs 60,000 artists to tell its story, by Elizabeth Boulton at the Conversation (very PC). This is one of the silliest pieces of PC propaganda for a while, but it is worth examining to see where they are going and how they are spending the tax dollars they took from us. They start by revealing the need for yet more climate propaganda:
In 2013, one of the world’s leading public relations experts… listed 20 key problems with climate communication. One of them was “story fatigue”: bland stories with “highly repetitive and stale” themes.
Climate information is still often confusing, unengaging and absent from the wider public discourse. …
True so far! Now the nonsense starts:
One key risk is complacency – a perception that the issue is now resolved. This is despite the risk increasing, as our response lags.
One study found that Australia had the highest percentage of climate sceptics in the world, (17% as compared to 12% in the USA). Analysis of global attitudes in 2015 found that, while across the world, 54% of people considered climate change a “very serious problem,” in Australia this figure was only 43%.
Actually more polls indicate about half the population in all western countries is skeptical, to varying degrees. Bear in mind that the theory that carbon dioxide is causing global warming is all based on a stupid modeling error, and global cooling is almost upon us.
Communicating the climate message to inform, but also engage and influence behaviour has proven intensely difficult.
Some lies are harder to pull off. A global one about the climate that reduces the wealth of billions and prevents more billions from escaping poverty through cheap energy is very ambitious.
Over a decade of research on this issue has highlighted the need for communication to engage with people’s “deep frames” – beliefs formed over a lifetime, which are mostly subconscious.
Ah, the need to bypass the rational part of people’s brains, to engage the herd instinct so you can apply 20th century mass propaganda techniques.
My research paper … draws upon cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and philosophy, among other fields, to explore the emerging idea that global warming exceeds modern humans’ cognitive and sensory abilities.
‘Cos we’re stupid, says you.
To overcome this impasse, climate communication needs to engage people at a philosophical, sensory and feeling level. People need to be able to feel and touch the new climate reality; to explore unfamiliar emotional terrain and be helped to conceive their existence differently.
You cannot convince us with facts, so emotional manipulation is called for, eh?
How is this to be done? The world must turn to its artists: storytellers, film-makers; musicians; painters and multi-media wizards, to name a few …. I argue we need 60,000 arts and humanities experts to focus upon the intangibles – the communication, engagement and meaning-making aspects of the problem.
No expense to be spared. Have you any idea how much skeptics are funded? We live off a few donations , that people give voluntarily — compared to your side of the “debate”, which luxuriates in huge public expenditure harvested via the taxing mechanism that take people’s money even if they disagree with you. (Sorry to puncture one of your favorite conspiracy theory Mr Warmist, but skeptics are not in the pay of big oil and coal — I get nothing from them.) Yes, it’s also a moral thing — voluntary for the skeptics, compulsion and coercion by the warmists.
And what are they doing with our taxes?
Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has developed a new way of telling the climate story. He recasts global warming as a hyperobject – something which is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” Its arrival, he has said, renders humans “weak, lame and vulnerable.” …
Meanwhile, Gotye’s Eyes Wide Open music video contrasted pictures of present day industrialisation with images of the earth as a barren wasteland.
Finally, the article invokes the Enlightenment as if it supported the warmists. The crucial part of the Enlightenment was that the highest authority changed from religion (e.g. the Pope) to experiment and observation (e.g. what Galileo relied on) . Thus science was born.
The global warmists rely entirely on modeling — there is no direct evidence about how much surface warming is caused by increasing carbon dioxide. Also, they are a little too fond of adjusting and hiding their data. The spirit of the Enlightenment looks instead for evidence, ignoring the high priests of the new religion, and finds instead that there is considerable empirical evidence that the models relied upon by the warmists are flat out wrong is their most crucial aspect (and I don’t mean the temperatures on the surface, the inconvenient and unpredicted pause we’ve been having). The Royal Society’s motto: Trust no-one. The skeptics are in the tradition of the Enlightenment, not these carpetbaggers.
