On this lovely rainy day (no doubt caused by Global Warming) I am cozying up to the Bill McKibben reader. In it is this gem (among thousands of others):
So here’s my plan. Let’s give global warming a new, scarier name. El Piquante Grande perhaps? Or La Chaleur Enorme. Do these sound malevolent enough? How about Hell on Earth? Maybe then it will start to sink in.
Didn’t the FDA just approve new gruesome labeling for cigarettes? And Maryland now forces all high school graduates to become “environmentally literate?” Then it’s only a matter of time before he gets his wish. Here’s my warning. Imagine the reaction if I applied the same rhetoric to my criticisms of the dingbats in DC?
By the way, if it requires making the name sound scary to convince people that there is something to be seriously scared about, that should tell you something. Is there, for example, anything inherently scary about the word cancer? If it sounds scary it is because people have come to understand what its implications are. I would argue that people are at least as familiar with the science of global warming as they are the science of cancer, if not more. It’s this rhetoric that has pushed me out of the mainstream environmental movement, which I used to be a very dedicated member of.
Me too. Got to where I couldn’t read the paper. Every article ( it seemed ) was misanthropic, ultimately derived from our sins against the environment.