What a great example of how to breath life into an abstract topic—renewable energy—by turning it into a human character.    Add bits of emotional drama, surprise and slightly-risque humor. . . and the story becomes irresistible!

This award-winning ad by the power company Epuron and the German Ministry for the Environment (BMU) went viral a few years ago,  and has taken on a life of its own,  recently reaching 4+ million hits on YouTube.    A good story always draws a crowd.

This ad was shown at the Climate Reality leadership training in SF last August to illustrate effective communication.

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Weathergirl loses it.       OMG!

Arctic ice cover just reached its lowest point in recorded history. Pippa goes off script and drops some science:   “You wanted a weather report.    This is a reality report!”

Maybe she just read her professional society’s (AMS) recent statement on climate, and just couldn’t take it anymore?

Produced by Deep Rogue RAM.     Hat tip to alert FB’er Ina Warren for sharing this gem.

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Another excellent clip from “How to talk to an Ostrich, a series of short takes by PBS’s Earth the Operators’ Manual.

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Last week at the Climate Reality Leadership Training in San Francisco, storytelling guru Andy Goodman led a spellbinding session on the importance of “changing the story.”    Goodman described research that confirmed what many of us have experienced:  in a public debate, a misleading but vivid anecdote can trump reams of data and logic.    (Anybody remember Ronald Reagan’s wildly exaggerated “Welfare Queen” imagery?)

So often, the only way to dislodge emotionally-charged disinformation is to tell a better, more compelling story.

To see this principle in action, check out this wonderful little clip from Goodman’s Free Range Thinking newsletter about a successful campaign in Troy MI that defeated the Tea Party and saved the city library.    Lots of lessons here! 

Update 8-27:     Want to know the ‘story behind the story’ in Troy?    Check out The Book-Burning Campaign That Saved a Public Library.     Apparently, Troy (pop. 81,000) has a Tea Party mayor, Janice Daniels.   (Daniels made national headlines last year when she declared “I think I am going to throw away my I Love New York carrying bag now that queers can get married there,” and compared homosexuality to smoking.)

Daniels and the  local Tea Party oppose all tax increases, for any purpose.   Though local surveys showed that nearly 3/4 of Troy citizens supported the library, very few were planning to vote in the library referendum.    To counter voter apathy, a local citizen group enlisted (mostly pro-bono) help from an ad agency, Leo Burnett, where  two “creatives” conjured up the reverse-psychology “Book Burning” campaign.

In the end, the measure to save the library passed by 58%.    Yet even some library backers, though thrilled with the result, did not appreciate the ruse.    Does a worthy end justify a mischievous means?

Stay tuned:   The tempest in Troy continues November 12 with a vote to recall  Mayor Daniels.

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Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.                 Richard Muller in New York Times 

This particular ‘road to Damascus’ moment carries weight because Muller was outspoken in his criticism of aspects of the temperature record and he attracted significant funding from the Koch brothers (fossil fuel billionaires who fund climate change deniers).  Arch-denier Anthony Watts took the extreme step of cancelling his vacation and imposing a three-day silence on his blog in readiness for the BIG announcement.  Perhaps he was preparing his next line of defence, or gathering forces for a new defensive position.  He has already reneged once on an earlier commitment to accept Muller’s findings.  This latest announcement backs him into an even smaller corner.

To most working in the field, Muller’s latest announcement merely brings him up to date with where the science was in the mid 1990s.

At this rate, Muller should be caught up to the current state of climate science within a matter of a few years!     Michael Mann

This  event has me thinking of those wonderful defensive structures – the medieval castles of Europe and the Middle East.

Kidwelly Castle, Carmarthenshire, Dyfed, Wales, is a great example. Like most castles, it was constructed in a location with natural defences.  Kidwelly was originally a timber castle built by the Normans about 1100 on a prominent ridge overlooking the river Gwendraeth.

Over the centuries it was rebuilt in stone and embelished with new defensive features.

For more than 400 years Kidwelly Castle provided a safe place for citizens to retreat when attacked and  housed garrison forces that could sally forth to attack mauraders and fight rivals.  Its river, moat, steep berm leading to castle walls, towers, gates, parapets and other defensive features made it relevant and effective.

If an outer defence was breached, the defenders moved back to the next line of defence.  If it came to the worst, defenders could withdraw to a single tower where they could hold out in the hope that relief forces would come to their aid.

Climate change deniers have the same approach to defending the Denial Citadel.  Here are the defensive lines around the citadel.

1. The outermost defence is an earth berm where the mass of defenders rattle their spears and chant, “It’s not warming! It’s not warming!”
2. The next line of defence is the moat where the defenders shout, “It’s warming but it’s not us!  It’s the sun!  It’s water vapour!  It’s a natural cycle!  It’s a squirrel!”
3. Then there are the outer walls of the castle, where diminished defenders run to and fro shouting, “It’s warming, we did it, but it’s not a big problem.  Warm is nice, CO2 is good for plants, Greenland was lovely in the medieval warm period.”
4. Then there is the inner wall of the castle, where the handful of remaining defenders stumble around muttering, “Yes, it’s warming; yes human activity is the cause; yes, it will be horrible – but mitigation is too hard/expensive, so let’s plan to adapt instead.”

As each defense is breached, some defenders have their ‘road to Damascus’ moment and become advocates for action.  Others fall back to the next line of defence.  A few lost souls remain forever in No Mans Land crying in the wind, “It’s not warming!” or “Look!  It’s a squirrel!”

Time passes and by 2050 the Denial Citadel will be as irrelevant as the ruin of today’s Kidwelly Castle. However, while Kidwelly Castle leaves a beautiful monument to the necessities of past culture, the relic of the Denial Citadel will be a monument to shame.

UPDATE: Anthony Watts’s response to the Muller announcement was, “Look! It’s a squirrel!”  Maybe he thinks that’s a useful tactic at any of the the defence lines – the berm, the moat, the outer and inner walls. Maybe he will still be shouting “It’s a squirrell!” when the last defenders are holed up in the last tower.  Or maybe he has joined the lost souls in No Mans Land, crying out for relevance.

Author: Gillian King. Reposted from Thisness of a That, with permission.

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The pride of lions closes in for the kill, stalking its prey, waiting to spot a weak buffalo.

African lions on the hunt prowl the edge of a herd, single out one buffalo, then hunt as a pack to separate the individual from the herd and bring it down.   In The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Michael E. Mann notes that critics of climate science often use the same tactic, which he dubs ‘The Serengeti Strategy.’

Thousands of climate scientists work in fields as diverse as meteorology, atmospheric physics, oceanography, geobiology, cryospherics, paleoclimatology, geology, and more.   It’s impossible to attack the whole herd—there are too many and they are too strong—so opponents have focused on a handful of vocal scientists and thrown everything at them.

These virulent attacks had a chilling effect, and made many other climate scientists keep their heads down.   But this is  changing.    Once exposed to the light of day, the tactic loses its bite.

Recent media coverage (too little but that’s another story) about the recent heatwaves, wildfires and storms in the US has raised questions about climate change, and a variety of climate scientists have made informed comment.   It has been  heartening to see many ‘new faces’ in the mainstream media alongside the familiar wise heads.

Here are a few new and old faces that I have noticed in the past week.

• NBC: Washington’s Chief Meteorologist, Doug Kammerer.
• PBS: Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
• USA Today: Princeton climate scientist Ngar-Cheung Lau.
• LA Times: Glen MacDonald, the director of the UCLA Institute of Environment and Sustainability; Paul Bunje, the director of UCLA’s Center for Climate Change Solutions.
• Washington Post: Max A. Moritz, fire specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension; Bob Henson, meteorologist and science writer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State Climatologist.
• Yahoo: Jake Crouch, climate scientist with National Climatic Data Center; Greg Carbin, National Weather Service meteorologist; Jeff Weber, a scientist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

One way to defeat the Serengeti Strategy is to quote multiple climate scientists, instead of focusing on a few.  The Guardian recently did this in spades when they quoted the following climate scientists.

• Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Oklahoma; Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, at the Met Office Hadley Centre; Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at the Penn State Department of Meteorology; Dr Clare Goodess, senior researcher at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit; Dr Doug Smith, who leads decadal climate prediction research and development at the Met Office Hadley Centre; Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences; Harold Brooks, head of the mesoscale applications group at Noaa’s National Severe Storms Laboratory; Michael F. Wehner, staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Associated Press/Time did it too, quoting:

• Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona; Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University; Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer; Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory; Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt; and University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running.

In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson counteracted the Serengeti Strategy by referring to institutions, not individuals.  He draws on NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Climate Science Rapid Response Team has played an important role in countering the Serengeti Strategy by offering a ‘matchmaking’ service that helps journalists quickly find relevant specialists who can to answer questions and give informed interviews. This initiative puts journalists, politicians and citizens in touch with hundreds of credible scientists with deep knowledge of every aspect of climate science who can give timely responses.

Now that the tactic of attacking selected individuals is better known, scientists and the media can counter it. This helps to protect individual scientists and their families, and provides opportunities for many more scientists to speak out, with less fear of being deluged with hate mail and threats.

UPDATE 7-9-12:   In real life, it turns out that ‘Serengeti Strategy’ often fails—even for actual lions—when their prey works together and goes on offense.    In “When the Hunters Become the Hunted:  The Amazing Moment When a Herd of Buffalo Turns the Tables on a Pursuing Pride of Lions ,” Daily Mail author captured what actually took place lions, just minutes after the above photo was taken:

Turn tail: The lions go from hunter to hunted as the buffalo quickly swivel round to charge the big cats.

“. . . When the first lion went in for the kill, the buffalo weren’t frightened – I think they realised it was only a young lion, and they weren’t scared at all.

The next thing I knew, the whole herd turned round and started charging towards the lions.    They had no choice but to turn round and run away – I think the young lions must have gone hungry that night.”

If large enough numbers of mainstream climate scientists speak up, can they similarly turn the tables on their attackers?    ‘Serengeti Strategy,’ sayonara?     Stay tuned.

Author: Gillian King, Thisness of a That.

Images: The Daily Mail/Cater’s News Agency and Wizard of Oz.

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