www.ucsusa.orgAn ad campaign featuring climate scientists as children attempts to gather support for government intervention on climate change.
At heart, America’s global warming scientists are just “curious kids who were always trying to figure out the world around them.”
So says the Union of Concerned Scientists environmentalist group, which is sponsoring a national advertising campaign “to showcase the dedication and personal histories of scientists studying climate change.”
With ads in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times Magazine and on transit kiosks in Washington, D.C., the group hopes to tell the stories of global warming experts in human terms.
“Scientists often talk about their work, but we hear far less about what led them to track our warming planet,” says the creative director on the UCS’ advertising account. The campaign is supposed to counter what the UCS describes as “a litany of personal attacks by industry-backed sources to discredit scientists” – and, more broadly, to shore up popular support for government action on climate change.
As the campaign underscores, environmentalists worry that public – and thus political – support is waning for tough climate and energy legislation.
Polls are all over the place, as the San Francisco Chronicle recently reported. But the trend line doesn’t suggest emerging consensus. In March, Gallup said 48 percent of Americans believe the threat of climate change is “usually exaggerated,” up seven points from the year before. A Stanford professor's survey released last month reported 74 percent of Americans believe the world is growing warmer. That’s down 10 points since 2007.
Skepticism about climate science flared during last year’s so-called Climategate scandal, which centered on hacked e-mails from a British research center that depicted some of the world’s leading global warming experts in unflattering terms. Among other things, the e-mails portrayed the scientists as seemingly plotting to dump public documents to avoid compliance with the Freedom of Information Act; conspiring to boycott a scientific journal because it had published papers written by global warming skeptics; and refusing to provide scientific data underpinning their conclusions for peer review.
Their universities have exonerated the scientists and, more importantly, declared the science behind global warming to be unassailable. Predictably, critics complain the investigations were a whitewash.
The UCS ad campaign may simply show how, in the political debate on this important issue, Americans are often being subjected to “argument by anecdote,” as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank writes.
Perhaps because the science behind climate change is considered too complicated for ordinary people to understand, proponents and skeptics alike resort to easy-to-intake but irrelevant anecdotes to make a case.
And so, advocates of tough measures to address global warming can portray climate scientists as good guys and point to this summer’s scorching East Coast heat wave, while debunkers accuse scientists of playing hide the ball and recall last winter’s “Snowmageddon" blizzard in Washington, D.C.
In California, global warming is a prospective issue in the races for governor and U.S. Senate. Jerry Brown, Democratic candidate for governor, says evidence of global warming has "never been stronger"; GOP candidate Meg Whitman would postpone implementation of AB 32, the state's Global Warming Solutions Act, saying it will cost too many jobs. On Monday, the Union of Concerned Scientists made public a letter signed by more than 100 Ph.D. economists contending that in the long run it will be better for California's economy to put the law’s tough clean-air provisions into effect ASAP.
Meanwhile, Sen. Barbara Boxer, the incumbent Democrat, has pushed cap-and-trade legislation. GOP-challenger Carly Fiorina is opposed, saying the measure Boxer favors “will punish manufacturers and small-business owners and put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage with nations like China and India.”
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