Where in the World is the Worst Place for Cold Weather?

…In the developed nations of Northern Europe, Northern China and North America, that’s where. Big decisions regarding climate mitigation and adaptation are made there, and not much is going to be done to prevent dangerous climate change when political leaders in the these countries are speaking to chilly constituents.

But take a look at the global climate picture from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia U. for December 2009

In particular, the temperature anomaly for the Arctic is extreme. The UK Hadley Centre Met Office predicted this back in October 2008, and we posted an article about it in May 2009: Arctic Global Warming Spike Imminent.

On January 17, an article by Dr. James Hansen was posted on RealClimate.org, titled 2009 Temperatutes by Jim Hansen. (He has revised it  since then. See our post on January 28 above.) There were many comments to the original article. One of the most interesting was #12 from Aaron Lewis, who wrote:

People believe those lies because public relations professionals got those lies placed in front of the public over and over. Even if people doubt a statement, if it is repeated over and over to them from different sources, people will come to accept it.

For such acceptance, the lie must be simple and repeated often. It does not have to be self consistent or consistent with any other knowledge framework.

Scientists are different from public relations professionals because scientists get tired of saying the same thing over and over and over. (RC may say the same thing a few times. Real PR guys would get those things said thousands of times. Folks have to find, and come to RC. Real PR guys would “push it out”, whether people wanted to read it or not.)

Face it, (climate) science just does not “get” the concepts of public relations and mass communications. Science does not market itself or its products. For one thing, science does not have a marketing budget. Imagine writing a grant proposal to do atmospheric research and putting in a line item that was 30% of the total request to “market” the results.

In contrast, the oil companies and car companies really do understand the fine points of marketing. Each of their products has a fully funded marketing budget.

Our marketing program is called “public education”, and it has been under resourced for a long time.

At West Coast Climate Equity, we’re doing our best at public education, but we need many more people to help with messaging if we are to succeed in raising enough awareness in time to prevent global climate meltdown.