Marketing campaigns influence your future

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Graham Readfearn provided us with a fairly succinct review of the PR campaign mounted by people who care more about profit than about pretty much anything else... the so called "Climate Deniers".



I dislike the term "Climate Denier" simply because the "Denier" part implies that there is some sort of debate, an Approve versus Denied false dichotomy. The use of the term promotes the idea that the changes that we see, that we record, that are wreaking havoc around the world might not be real. It's pretty much real as the massive destruction, the body blows to our economy, and the body counts continue to climb. These soulless spawn keep on pushing their positions in the face of verifiable facts, their eyes glazed over with the need to grab all that wonderful money before someone else gets it.

The people who succumb to the "denier" bullshit are the ideological descendants of people who wanted to stay aboard the Titanic because they believed the "unsinkable" hype from the newspapers and White Star Line mouthpieces. (For more of this discussion to chew over, have a look at "How an ‘Unsinkable’ Marketing Campaign Led to the Titanic to Disaster")








What's interesting to me here is how the Fossil Fuel Industry has adopted the same tactics that the tobacco companies used over a generation ago. Some sharp marketeer figured out that they didn't have to disprove anything, they just had to raise doubts and keep raising the doubts, no matter how clear the evidence was. If you keep doing this, you paralyze effective effort to change the status quo. Which in the case of the cigarette folks meant that people kept buying their products, and kept becoming sick and dying, all the while hanging on to the "reasonable doubt" that said they "might not" die from their habit. Here's an old commercial I remember seeing quite clearly, have a look.



Surely Peabody Coal and Exxon/Mobil aren't anything like R. J. Reynolds was back before we stopped them from marketing cancer to our kids.... wait... uh...



Well, so what color is your lifeboat going to be?

Read the article... it starts here:

The Campaigns That Tried To Break The Climate Science Consensus (via Desmogblog)

So just in case anyone wasn’t sure, a major study of almost 12,000 scientific papers on global warming between 1991 and 2011 finds less than one per cent disagree that humans are the main cause. Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study led by John Cook, the Australia-based…

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Skeptical Science has a Roundup!

Some days it's hard to get started when writing a post.

Long ago and far away, in a galaxy much like ours... 

Wait, that's not right.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Yeah, forget that...

Let's try it this way:

Somewhere back around 2010 I started noticing twitter messages from a guy named John Cook in Australia. His web site was great!

Once I managed to sort out that John was providing real, factual information instead of the pseudo-scientific crap being handed out at other blogs with names like "Real Science", or "Climate Depot" it was like an oasis in the desert of fact free claims. Much like an oasis, the problem was finding it to start with.

"'Real Science"

And it wasn't that the others were hard to identify as charlatans. No, if you knew anything at all about science and how the scientific methods worked it was evident that Morano, "Goddard", and Watts were great source material for Onion Network News (The Onion). Confusing "Skeptical Science" with "Real Science" would be like confusing Neil de Grasse Tyson for Sarah Silverman.

John founded the site, and still pays for it out of his pocket, although donations are usually appreciated. Here's the short bio from his site.

John is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He originally studied physics at the University of Queensland. After graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honours year. In 2011, he co-authored the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with Haydn Washington.

There are lots of reasons why I'm excited by this roundup but I'm wasting column inches babbling about it. Check out the embedded list below, and become better informed.

Tweeting Donal.

2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #1 (via Skeptical Science)

Posted on 19 September 2012 by John Hartz Welcome to the inagural edition of the SkS Weekly News Round-Up. It is a spin-off from the SkS Weekly Digest. Enjoy!  Note: Given the breadth of issues covered in the articles cited, the comment thread to this post is open ended. All comments posted must…