Global Warming: How to Think Sensibly

The crusade to fight global warming with tough reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions has entered its war-room phase. Already we are seeing the fruits of a multi-million dollar PR campaign: lavish cover stories in Time magazine ("Be Worried, Be Very Worried"), Vanity Fair, and Newsweek; multiple global-warming scare specials on PBS, HBO, and the network news; and, finally, the imminent release of Al Gore's explosive and exceedingly popular documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Soon the Ad Council will begin airing TV spots pulling on the usual heartstrings: We have to stop global warming for the children! One of these ads--featuring a montage of kids counting down "tick, tick, tick"--is reminiscent of the infamous 1964 anti-Goldwater ad.

Underlying this effort is a sense of panic over two things: the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol, and frequent polls showing that Americans aren't buying into global-warming alarmism. The latest Gallup poll on environmental issues found that only 36 percent of Americans say they "worry a great deal about global warming"--a number that has hardly budged in years.

Global warming, Gallup's environmental-opinion analyst Riley Dunlap wrote, puts people to sleep. Even among those who tell pollsters that the environment is their main public-policy concern (who are usually less than 5 percent of all Americans), global warming ranks lower than air and water quality, toxic waste, and land conservation.

There is no conspiracy behind the global-warming-awareness campaign; in fact, the environment lobby is quite open about what it's up to. The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies recently published a plan to elevate climate change to the top tier of the political agenda.

An example of the preeminent propoganda towards global warming the public is exposed today.

Credit: Casey Backs

Copyright: Casey Backs