Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
If you type ‘the planet has a fever’ into Google, it will return 3,120,000 results. And none of them are about Peggy Lee. Or even Aerosmith’s later song with the same name.
It’s famous because Al Gore said it. But what does it mean? I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to deconstruct the misleading use of symbols in climate communications–so far we’ve looked at polar bears, Antarctic ice and sea level. This is a related exercise, but it’s about mental images.
If you’ve got a fever, you’re sick. You need to do something. (I still can’t remember–is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?) This is exactly what Al Gore said when he addressed Congress in 2008.
“The planet has a fever,” Gore said. “If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, `Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
I don’t know if he was the first, but he certainly wasn’t the last. The phrase has been picked up and bandied about everywhere.
But Earth is not human. Anthropomorphizing it really means we can’t talk about it accurately and honestly. It doesn’t breathe, go to the bathroom or watch TV.
To say it has a fever means that you know what the right temperature is. Do we know that about this planet? That’s a serious question, by the way–I’m not being rhetorical. I haven’t seen anyone say that the global mean temperature cannot exceed 17 degrees Celsius or we melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. Typing ‘best temperature for Earth into Google returns 26 million results–and slightly fewer answers. Most of them are variations on ‘I don’t know.’
To compare a planet to a sick human really reduces the level of discussion you can have about it. Especially if objecting to the question gets you labeled a flat-earther denialist.
But it’s an effective way of controlling the discussion and the agenda. Once you say something like that, the immediate question that pops into peoples’ minds is ‘How do we cure the fever?’ How do we fix this indeed?
When the issue is framed in this way, we don’t even discuss climate change or global warming any more. We start defining what type and level of medicine we need.
It’s brilliant corporate communications. It takes command of the issue, defines the parameters of legitimate discussion and cuts the ground from underneath people who would even question basic assumptions. Absolutely brilliant.
And absolutely despicable. A debate born from scientific discovery with consequences that will affect every living soul on this planet gets hijacked for a silly game based on an inadquate metaphor. And it is done intentionally, to paint opposition as those who want the planet to stay sick.
There are variations that are every bit as bad. Some say those skeptical of part or all of the science are like smokers waving away the X-rays the doctor brings of their lungs. Or like people with high cholesterol justifying their next cheeseburger.
Those could actually be worse, as they imply death by inattention and ignorance. And, like the simpler fever, it changes the conversation and our perception of those engaged in it.
A lot of people want to talk about global warming in ways that don’t involve science. They use analogies, metaphors and plenty of hyperbole. They say that it’s because we don’t understand science.
I think instead it’s because the science is inadequate for their cause. Not that it’s wrong, not that it’s stupid. It just isn’t finished yet. We’re still in the data gathering phase, having developed new tools over the past 30 years. We’ve found defects in previous data collection methods, most famously by our host here.
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Great post, Tom. Spot on.
Well said. Quite a good article.
I think this describes pretty well the ridiculousness of the Gaia claptrap.
It is about as scientific as anything out of Hans Christian Anderson … and yet its author is a ‘well respected scientist’ according to the BBC…
Oh, Yes sir, -74 °C. Fever
http://www.wunderground.com/geo/InfoboxBannerPromo_both/global/stations/89606.html
Tom,
As you have noticed at your blog, the true believers cannot even handle a critical review of their metaphors, much less their symbols.
To point out that their claims about polar bears or hockey sticks are less than accurate is to do so knowing they will simply, falsely, claim you are a liar.
To challenge the underlying metaphor of a planetary fever- the assumption that what we are experiencing means Earth is sick- is to strike at the heart of their faith.
Thank you for being bold enough to do so, and to do so accurately and honestly.
“A lot of people want to talk about alleged global warming in ways that don’t involve science. They use analogies, metaphors and plenty of hyperbole. They say that it’s because we don’t understand science.”
I knew Al would show up.
Poor Al Gore, even Tipper doesn’t like him anymore…
“We’ve found defects in previous data collection methods, most famously by our host here.”
True. However, there appears to have been no significant effort to “correct” the defects. Rather, the effort has supposedly been to “adjust” the defects away. In the face of a “requirement” to invest tens of trillions of dollars to “halt” and “reverse” anthropogenically induced climate change, an argument that we cannot afford to get the fundamentals right is ludicrous.
“the
rules
of the
game
Recommendations to the Climate Change Communications Working Group:
Evidence base for the Climate Change
Communications Strategy
The game is communicating climate change;
the rules will help us win it.”
http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/RulesOfTheGame.pdf
“17. Use emotions and visuals
Another classic marketing rule: changing behaviour by
disseminating information doesn’t always work, but emotions
and visuals usually do.”
They openly admit to using manipulative tactics. But; there is good PR and evil PR. futerra of course does GOOD PR, not evil PR. How do they know that? Well, they have a code of ethical conduct! From their “blog”: Is all PR evil?
http://www.futerra.co.uk/blog/836
The question about what is the ideal temperature of the world is a very good one.
As a thought experiment (and reality check) try imagining what would happen if the activities of mankind were lowering CO_2 levels in some fashion. Imagine writing the IPCC report. What dire predictions would lowered CO_2 levels and global cooling lead to. How about the following list
1. Shortened growing seasons
2. Colder summers
3. Slower growing plants due to reduced CO_2 levels
4. Reduced global precipitation (less rain) (cooler = drier)
5. The above four factors are a quadruple whammy that could be expected to dramatically reduce crop yields
6. Global famine – global war
7. Likely ice age
8. Mass extinctions
9. etc
Oh – you could have fun writing such a report. Indeed it would be a lot easier to fill such a report with dire predictions of calamity than the real IPCC report . Now bear in mind that increased CO_2 levels means the opposite to all the above. This is a problem how exactly?
This Gaia story may have some merits 😉
CO2 levels have been dwindling since millions of years.
We’re pretty close to the point that the photosynthese proces will come to a halt due to lack of CO2. (~200ppm).
Perhaps Gaia put mankind on this earth to burn fossil fuels and release some of the bounded CO2?
Gaia is just fine, humans however….
I assume the idea of “fever” is derived from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and I know he’s use the fever concept to describe AGW. So it’s a sort of serious idea of considering the earth a living organism. Depending on how you define “living”, it might even be possible to defend that position in a rational manner, although I haven’t studied the particular reasoning in this case.
But fever implies more than alive, it implies a higher organism, a warm-blooded one. One that actively maintains its temperature. That’s a lot more far-fetched.
Also, the metaphor, when you make it explicit, seems to contradict the idea of runaway global warming. A warm-blooded animal maintains a specific body temperature and usually resists changes to that temperature. In this sense it’s more like Willis Eschenbach’s thermostat hypothesis. (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/)
You’re right, it is despicable that the debate is controlled by nonsense in the attempt to crush honest argument. And worse that opposing views are suppressed by the MSM working under the guise of a free press. That is why the warmers, if they can use words like that so can I, can make outrageous comments and slander opposition without being taken to task. And that is how they control the debate. To take it one step further, the congress and judiciary are willing accomplices, or should I say accessory to the fraud with law and regulation. Partners in crime.
Some nitpicking: the phrase “the planet has a fever” actually turns up far fewer results – 161.000 when i tried.
Far too many, one might think, but still quite a difference…
A good post, otherwise!
Tom, everyone knows CO2 levels have been a lot higher in the past.
What “forced” CO2 levels then?
But as high as it was, it went back down again.
What caused that?
The planet does not know the source of CO2.
If you look at “average” temperatures, we are in the low part of average right now,
and only a small ppm of CO2 above the point where all life on this planet would die.
How in this world did warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, CO2 levels a scant higher than death, become a bad thing?
Another great post Tom. Many thanks.
Mussing on the prognosis of the patient, Mother Earth, as I sat here watching the life ebb and flow of TS Igor, I had a realization of sorts.
Planets have magnetospheres, that create aurora effects at the poles. The sun has a spheroid of solar wind effects extending to the heliopause, the leap of understanding flashed as I saw the possibility that it is simply the flexible, fluid, magnetosphere of the sun.
It is just that the plasma floating in the outgoing solar wind are the conductive medium that they used to call the ether, but saw it as static and not moving. The speed, density, and localized flow patterns are influenced by the electromagnetic conductance of the whole set of mediums.
The background galactic fields interacting with the heliopause also form an aurora effect on the forward side as the solar system as it moves through the galaxy. The slow long wave modulations of the coupling of the galactic wind as it passes through clouds of dust and gasses, will be affected by the electromagnetic conduction, density, and magnetic permeable content of said gas and dust clouds.
If periods of time when the surrounding galactic clouds acted to defuse the galactic field strength away from the solar system in it’s travels, then the couplings into the sun from the outside influences, would allow the solar system to become fluidly balanced and the SSB would be in the free fall condition Lief insists it is now.
What if all of the things we know about the sun being affected by the mass and angular momentum, and the resultant interactions between the sun, solar wind, activity levels with sun spots, flares, and CME’s, being tied to the interactions of these effects, but as a product of the ongoing changes in the local galactic weather so to speak.
This isolation of the solar magnetosphere, might then be the precipitator of the long periods of ice ages, any time the solar system moves through a cloud of ionized dust/gas that diffuses the magnetic fields around us.
In the current mode as the changes in galactic field flux shifts, it varies the phase of power that drives particles into the heliopause, causing the aurora effects recently discovered on the leading edge of the heliopause. Just as currents are inducted into the atmosphere of the earth, in geomagnetic storms, that follow ion conduction paths on tidally perturbed air masses, to effect weather spots on the surface.
So as the galactic fields drive the induction coupling into and through the solar system it alters the overall angular momentum content, that is transferred into to speed up the whole system, or out from the sun to slow down, through all of the conductive path ways out to the heliopause. The necessary transfers of angular momentum, in the resultant interactive changes between the planets, and their moons, take all five forms gravity, tidal, declinational orbital variances, electromagnetic, and it’s attendant homopolar induction results that run the LOD components as well as ion charge gradients across frontal boundaries.
The compounding of the base cycles is modulated by the dynamics of the interactions of the multiple bodies in the solar system. If we just look at it from the “sun is the center” aspect, we miss all of the nuances of the drag and push of the long term galactic field changes. I would suggest a study of the properties of the solar system local neighborhood, in regard to gas/dust populations and polarization properties due to residual effects viewable due to conductance of large scale galactic fields. To better get a handle as to how soon we could really expect the next ice age to start up again if at all.
Just because the sun’s orbit around the center of the galaxy, has in the past come into areas that are conducive to insulation from galactic field flux does not mean that it will always happen.
Rasputin, Timothy Leary, George Noori, the Reverend Moon, James Warren “Jim Jones,” the Pied Piper, etc, etc. There are just some people who will immediately connect with the oddest, weirdest stuff. There ego’s push them to revolt from whatever there perception is of authority. Or just to be down-right rebellious!
Vigilance is the never ending answer, of should I say chore. Independence from the will of others. Thanks for the great post.
Tom is so right about the use of the word fever. Rant warning – I am fed up with the constant framing of climate issues and the clever choice of language that pulls in additional unspoken, but nonetheless alarming context even if is it is totally unwarranted.
Anna v had a short rant about the term ‘forcing’ a few days ago (link to comment) on a another WUWT post. I think that is another term where the additional context is very useful to the AGW cause.
@tryfan:
I get over 3,000,000 results when typing ‘the planet has a fever’ (note the single quotes) in Google. Double-quotes give me 161,000 results. In the article, Thomas uses single quotes.
The scientific community can be very introverted. When will they encompass the world of marketing and public relations and stop preaching to the converted? Scientists talk in a different language to Joe Six Pack and will need to address this vast audience with easily digested and carefully crafted positioning statements and MSM-friendly messages. This means a concerted and consistent spend to get the best professionals in the marketing industry to translate scientific truths to the public in a powerful way. Gore et al do it with awesome skill and any successful corporation knows that it works.
Nice article, Mr. Fuller.
One does get sick of baby talk.
You’ve found a niche that can use a good scratch.
Seems like the Earth is in more jeopardy when it’s in an ice age than if it gets warmer.
BenAW, your post above is a nice little gem, which I must ponder. Thanks
I had the pleasure to meet Jim Lovelock. He was incredibly interesting and an inspiration as a scientist whose work has somewhat overlapped.
I must confess that I like to imagine that the earth has some sort of consciousness. (I’m not saying that is what Gaia is about.) But rationally, those spouting that we must “save the earth” are simply childish in their thinking.
Tim says:
September 11, 2010 at 6:56 am
“The scientific community can be very introverted. When will they encompass the world of marketing and public relations and stop preaching to the converted? ”
You are obviously a visitor from the past; accidentally fell into a puddle of liquid nitrogen and had to wait for 10 years until scientists were able to bring you back to life. Hello, visitor from the past! Futerra is a UK eco-PR agency and has published their “Rules of the game” in 2005:
Futerra Sustainability Communications – leading thinking – Rules of the Game Cover Futerra and The UK Department for Environment published the Rules of the Game on 7 March 2005. The game is communicating climate …
http://www.futerra.co.uk/revolution/leading_thinking