A stump from a pine tree cut down after being attacked by the mountain pine beetle in east of Missoula, Montana, July 7, 2011. Some scientists are increasingly worried that as the warming accelerates, trees themselves could become climate-change victims on a massive scale. (Photo: Josh Haner / The New York Times)
Scientist Bruce Melton argues that it's time for the environmental movement and environmental journalism to state the full truth - loudly and often - to counter denialist propaganda. That would entail using the four "poison" words: climate change and global warming.
Climate change messaging is changing these days. One only needs to look as far as the Sierra Club's unprecedented encouragement of civil disobedience with the Keystone Pipeline to see this happening. The polls are telling us that some 70 percent or more of Americans believe the Earth is now warming. This falls to a little over 50 percent when the words "because of man" are added to the question, but it is a majority.
Contrast this with about 97 percent of climate scientists believing Earth is warming and caused by man. Why is there such a difference? Part of the reason is because a pox has been put on these four little words: climate change and global warming.
A self-imposed moratorium in the environmental and broadcast communities has been in effect on those four words since the early part of George W. Bush's administration. Environmental organizations across the nation recognized that negative climate science propaganda was changing public awareness. So those words found themselves being repeated less and less. They were poisoning environmental outreach efforts and their use created distrust.
Why did this happen? Likely, it was almost completely because of propaganda from vested interests. The voices of the propaganda, for various reasons, cast doubt about climate science in much the same way that similar voices (and sometimes the same voices) cast doubt about smoking and cancer, acid rain and ozone-depleting chemicals. The vested interests' work was authoritative and their money and vision allowed them to distribute their message widely...
The discoveries in climate science, however, continue to show the situation is getting worse faster than anticipated. And because of nearly 20 years of delay, as the climate scientists have told us all along, future impacts will be even greater than we have previously anticipated.
Please go here for the entire article: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15421-propaganda-self-censorship-and-climate-change
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War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
- Alice Walker
We've built a new Earth. It's not as nice as the old one. It's the greatest mistakes that humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever. We live on a new planet. What happens next is up to us.
- Bill McKibben
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