Sid Maher in the Australian describes another attempt to sidestep denial, ignorance and self interest: The term "climate change" could be replaced by "climate challenges" if a federal commissioned marketing study is taken onboard. The study of attitudes to climate change among farmers, commissioned by the Agriculture Department, found only 27 per cent of those surveyed believed human activity was causing climate change, compared with 58 per cent of urban dwellers.As well, primary producers are "very resistant to carbon trading". "It fills them with dread, and there were strong negative reactions towards it," the report says. Handed to the department late last year, the report warns that terminology that fails to take into account the attitude of primary producers towards human-induced climate change risks failure. The term "climate change" sets up negative reactions among primary producers for a number of reasons, from scepticism through to perceptions that they are being held solely responsible for causing climate change, it says. "Preferred terms such as 'climate challenges', 'prolonged drought' and 'risk management' are accepted, better understood and more likely to motivate change."
The report, prepared by Sydney-based marketer Instinct and Reason, was aimed at developing a communication strategy as the government seeks to sell its climate change message. It says many primary producers feel climate change and mitigation efforts are no more important compared with other significant challenges such as low prices, increasing costs, labour shortages and declining profitability.
"Many primary producers expressed the view that human-induced climate change is yet to be proven and dismiss the idea that it is behind the climatic situations they currently face. Instead, they prefer to see it as yet another period of drought or change in conditions that will eventually pass."…
Sign rendered pointless by the 2007/2008 Australian drought. Rawnsley park station , South Australia, shot by Peripitus, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
2 comments:
Brian,
You have a great blog!!
The recent floods in Australia may be raised by many people as evidence against reframing climate change as a long drought. Perhaps reframing it in terms of climate extremes (more severe droughts, bushfires and flooding) may be more useful.
I was looking back on a post that I did on the "Extremes: Climate and Water in the Southern Hemisphere” conference held in Melbourne back in Feb 2009 and thought it may be helpful.
At that time, Australia was experiencing:
1)record flooding in Queensland
2)record heatwave temperatures across much of Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria (e.g. Melbourne reached 46.4 degrees, the highest in 154 years of record-keeping).
3)record duration of high temperatures (both Adelaide and Melbourne set records for the most consecutive days above 43degrees).
4)the worst 'natural' disaster in Australia's history - bushfires that had (at the time) already claimed almost 200 human lives, countless property, habitat and wildlife too.
It seems that the climate extremes continue to be a great challenge for Australia (and Brasil, etc, etc).
Yours,
Random Man on Planet Earth
ps Do you live in Australia?
I awoke to this in the paper today:
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/weather/hotter-colder-wetter-its-a-new-world-of-extremes-20110115-19s1d.html
''The consequence of global warming is like putting your foot harder on the accelerator, you still have variation, you still go up and down hills. But you've got more energy in the system to push in both directions, so you go down hills faster and you go higher up the hills.''
Yours,
Random Man on Planet Earth
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