The Short Hot Life of Heartland’s Hateful Climate Billboard
The online spin cycle on global warming has become so fast and toxic that an electronic billboard in Chicago can flash an ultra-offensive message designed to draw attention to a conference of climate contrarians, then generate a global burst of Web traffic and then be withdrawn 24 hours later as “a necessary price to make an emotional appeal to people who otherwise aren’t following the climate change debate” (the statement this afternoon from the Heartland Institute, the group that paid for the messages).
Hopefully that necessary price will include Heartland losing a few more of its shrinking pool of corporate contributors. (The group issued a longer statement tonight on its “realist” message.)
If you haven’t followed this exploding/imploding story carried out at the most extreme, and loudest, fringe of climate discourse, the basics were broken by Leo Hickman of The Guardian early today and then aggregated by Keith Kloor, Joe Romm, Anthony Watts, Jason Samenow and others.
The episode provided a real-time teachable moment for the 50-plus environmental science and management graduate students I worked with this week at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We spent five days exploring communication challenges and opportunities related to addressing the world’s entwined climate and energy challenges. In teams, the students dug in on the views and approaches of everyone from the 350.org volunteers organizing this weekend’s “Connect the Dots” effort to Marc Morano, one of the most prominent professional purveyors of climate doubt.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/the-short-hot-life-of-heartlands-hateful-climate-billboard/?
Poll: Will these people want to be the first on the lifeboat when Starship Earth starts to disintegrate from man made climate change....?
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0 (0%) |
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