Global Warming in Wonderland and the Green PR Machine
Audrey Jones /
These are times straight out of Alice in Wonderland, as everything becomes an “un-birthday” and definitions are turned on their head. Climate change scientists, according to The Washington Times this last weekend, are turning to PR, rather than data, to defend their work. Then there’s Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who yesterday continued to make patently false job-creation claims to sell the administration’s radical environmental agenda. His timing was unerringly bad, as his statements came on heels of further evidence that two front-runners—California and Europe—are discovering that their “green” policies are producing more red (ink) and less green(backs).
It is not very often that scientists need to resort to crisis communications, but we’ll take it as further confirmation that the whole world of global warming has hit a crisis point. Among the strategies being considered figure taking out a back-page ad in the New York Times. What is of more than passing interest is the defensiveness with which these scientists have met criticism. One of them groused to the Times that climate scientists were facing nothing less than “well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”