I felt that i should address a couple of the points you raised in your comment about communicating climate change on Prometheus.

First off, note I write about ‘Communicating Climate Change’ not about ‘Climate Change’, this is important because by and large your defense of alarmism is based on the fact that this position is better labelled ‘realistic’. In other words, I agree with what you are saying about climate change but think that it misses a very important point.

This depends somewhat on how you wish to see the role of yourself and the media as a whole. The assumption would be that as someone who is concerned about climate change you would not see value in an educated public that sat passively by as the world came to an end?

Knowledge is not enough for action and in fact can be–and this is the scary part–not meerly ineffective but counter productive.

For many reasons, that are covered in the book about which you where commenting, people generally respond to alarming (if not alarmist) tone by doing a range of things, none of which are productive. You will be aware of the notion of tipping points? Well, try this idea on for size, there are 12 regional tipping points of natural origin, one example is arctic ice melt leading to more arctic ice melt. There is a thirteenth tipping point, this is represented by a refusal to engage…despair.

According to empirical research fear can act as an effective motivator when:
1.An individual fears for there personal safety.
2.They have very specific methods to avoid this risk.
3. They positively appraise there abilities to carry out these measures.
4.They beleive these measueres will work.
5. They see the investment (financial/effort/time) for these measures as small or achiveable.
6. They see the loss from taking these measures and not carrying on as usuall as small.
7. They consider all of this in a ‘Central’ pathway i.e they are sitting down thinking rationally not percieving these peripherally.

I expect that the whole climate debate will only become more level-headed once governments realise that knee-jerk policies based on alarmist counsel simply won’t work.

Catastrophic: a sudden, extensive disaster or misfortune

Shocking: Causing shock

Terrifying: extremely frightening

Devastating: to confound or overwhelm

Can anyone explain to me why any of those are inappropriate for a report than said human society will ‘most likely’ raise temperatures by 4C by 2100 unless it takes drastic action (my words, but how else would you desribe a complete overhaul of the lifestyles of millions, if not billions of people) to cut emissions?

here’s another:

news: interesting or important information not previously known.

attacking newspapers for picking out the bits of the report that appear to take the debate forwards (the effects of carbon cycle feedbacks for example, which only seem to be shifting the estimates in one direction) is as pointless and idiotic as complaining that a library won’t sell you fish.

does the 2006 report not paint a picture that is “worse” than the 2001 report?

again, to the dictionary:

worse: the comparative of bad

Mike accuses us of “appealling to fear to generate a sense of urgency”

Guilty as charged. Is it not frightening? Is it not urgent?

David Adam
Environment correspondent
The Guardian

Alarmist and proud of it
(Alarm: to fill with apprehension; to warn about danger, alert)

Do you think that the Chinese are more convinced by a politician in a state of panic, or by one that has a well-founded case and workable solutions?

Probably Mike Hulme is right, but isn’t the chief purpose of the alarmist tone in the UK to stiffen the spine of British politicians in their efforts to get the US and China to move? And aren’t we in fact seeing greater pressure from the UK? Everyone there seems to know that the only way to have effective climate change policy is to have the most significant emitters agree to do something.

One may also ask whether the more moderate tone of US reporting on AR/4 and more generally has been helpful in getting citizens and policy makers to confront those so-called “challenging policy choices”.