Happy Valentine's day? or happy climate change readings?

Today, 14 February 2011 or our so called Valentine’s Day, it is funny to write my impressions on three articles conveying information on global warming through nonscientific, but well-read and respected magazines.  This is funny to me because who cares for global warming when, based on vox populi, it is time to buy presents and call our loved ones to finally say how much we love them.  I do not mean that the latter idea is erroneous at all, but when should we start caring for real environmental issues? 

I asked during the last three days (Fri, Sat, and Sun) to 15 young people (8 females and 7 males) that I found by chance on campus, grocery store, vicinity of apartment or walking down the street about two topics: climate change and about Valentine’s day.  By far, they spent much more time and put far more excitement when talking about today’s celebration than climate change.  Even more, they said that they still doubt about climate changes are happening (not just global warming) and that thing was depressing. 

I am starting my blog with these statements because the people I talked to were students from MU, but none of them related to environmental sciences.  So, I was wondering if there is or is going to be any particular time of the year or day that we should spend documenting ourselves about global warming or climate change or alternative energy supplies (to mention a few)? 

Now, I am finally going to start describing my opinions on the three articles we were given to read and discuss tomorrow in our seminar.

1. “Earth at the tipping point: global warming heats up” by Jeffrey Kluger.  This article contains a good wealth of scientific information and jargon throughout the text.  The author does a pretty good job intertwining processes and environmental events, and clearly explaining the technical terms used (especially because he is not a scientist).  From my point of view, it is biased towards a cataclysmic view of the theme and had several overly negative expressions.  These characteristics are “golden land” for skeptic people to keep strengthening their postures towards global climate change.  In terms of organization and flow of the ideas, I would assign this article a quality level of poor (in comparison to the other several readings we have reviewed during our seminar).  The ending section of “what we can do”, it falls too short from being complete, organized, and insightful.  But, out of the three articles, this was the one with more scientific information in it.
2. Is global warming responsible for wild weather?  This article is much shorter, does not get into much depth in the topics, have some references or sources backing up the statements, and finally give a subtle message of “get ready for the unexpected …… because it is happening” with reference to global warming.  Although presenting some references, it gave me the idea of being vague and I’d have liked to see more data supporting what was being written.  Although short and superficial, it gives a good outline of the global warming scenario with some bits of alarmism. 
3. Climate-change strategy: be afraid – but only a little by Bryan Walsh.  This article was the shortest, most recent, and straightforward to its take home message: fear tactics do not work well in conveying the global warming message to the society.  He backed up this posture with a study on Americans and some examples of using media to communicate potential catastrophic event in our future.  He wrote a saying by a writer and activist bill Mckibben, “you can’t negotiate with the planet, but you have to negotiate with the public” … without scaring them!  The question is how can we make average people understand facts that go against their well, long-rooted ideas?  Should we just wait till the “appropriate time or special day” comes by for negotiating with the society?  How much is too much passion, alarmism, jargon, text, bias, or time to put into any article to effectively communicate current environmental issues to the majority of our society?  Should we keep writing and asking for the “magical recipe” to get the “balance compelling writing” and then to start negotiating and acting towards local or global measures in favor of the environment?  Or should we just start using our limited current scientific information and make it available to the society in every format that we feel fit to?  To me, it is scary to find college people (with certain level of education) still thinking that “it might happen or not, who knows?”, “That is depressing, we better go out shopping and get ready for Valentine’s day, don’t you think so?” I scratch my head and walk away pondering about the last comments and what I should do about it.
4. These three articles allow me to compare styles, postures, techniques, and length of writing when addressing environmental issues such as climate change or global warming.  I do not think there is a single secret formula for effectively writing scientific information for the society, but practice makes perfect and attitude, ethics, a combination of writing techniques, and hard work can help in doing so.