What should President Obama say about climate change in his State of the Union address? Actions speak louder than words, but some words will have more resonance and meaning than others.
So we asked scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, to make his suggestion to the president in this extended preview clip from the next Moyers & Company.
In another excerpt, Leiserowitz explains that single-digit degree changes in our climate are comparable to single-digit degree changes in our body temperature when we get sick.
"I think there's an analogy here -- that little difference in global average temperature, just like that little difference in body temperature, can have huge implications as you keep going," Leiserowitz tells Bill.
Use this tool to find Moyers & Company times and channels in your area.
Follow Bill Moyers on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BillMoyers
http://www.coal2nuclear.com/
The "whatever it takes" part of my recommendation is intended to provide an opening for bold action.
As you note, if he uses this language, the glass is also half empty -- nothing in the statement says how urgent the situation is. I would hope that he could use language that is widely acceptable (almost everyone will agree we don't want a climate catastrophe) and also starts to shift the national attention toward the need for more action.
We need to keep the pressure on all our elected leaders to shape policy that will move us to clean energy, and also do whatever we can individually in the meantime. (also make sure we elect people who understand the issue!)
Republicans in Congress are doing all they can to stop the transition to safe, clean alternative energy sources because they provide competition to the fossil fuel industry.
More Republicans need to be voted out of office, local, state and federal.
"We made a big big mistake in taking the CO2 scare so seriously when the evidence for it was and remains so sparse. Poor people the world over have sufffered the most from this mistake, from increased levels of starvation thanks to bio-fuels pushing up the price of food, through increased fuel-poverty due to subsidies for renewables, to the destruction of one low-cost resource of great importance - the natural environment. Furthermore, we have harmed our children by trying to recrcuit them as eco-activists using scare stories about polar bears and suchlike. Let us move on from here, and celebrate our abilities to cope, to innovate, and to progress despite what the climate may bring us. Let us admit we are in awe of the climate system and its great power. But let us no longer delude ourselves about the scale of our impact on it, or our ability to control it."
The evidence is sparse? So what else could cause sea level rise, global temperature rise, warming oceans, declining Arctic sea ice, glacial retreat, extreme weather events, & ocean acidification? If rising amounts of GHGs aren't the cause then what is? Has NASA, the IPCC, the AMS, the APS, the AGU, the AAAS, the National Science Academies, & numerous other scientific institutions along with 97% of the world's climatologists & scientists overlooked something? If so please inform them. I'm sure they would like to know. Because they believe (because of the evidence) that drought, exacerbated by climate change, is primarily the cause for food shortages. And subsidies for renewables pale when compared to fossil fuel subsidies. And fossil fuel companies have a long, well documented history of destroying the environment by polluting the water, land & air, and this has adversely affected the quality of life & health of many children, making it harder for them to grow up to be healthy, productive adults - adults who, if they live long enough, will curse us & the hot, degraded, prehistoric-like future we will have left them because we were unable to lower the world's CO2 levels.
All these things were going on before the last half of the 20th century, the later part of which is the period we are told the rising CO2 levels were the cause of all bad weather events. To which I say, pull the other leg, it has bells on it.
Not surprisingly the fossil fuel corporations do not agree. They want to use all of the known reserves and are constantly searching out new reserves.
The fossil fuel corporations have some political support in both parties but much more so in one party. (Hint: it is the "Drill Baby Drill" party.) So that turns the science issue into a political issue.
Sea level is determined by the size of the ice sheets and glaciers on land. There are natural climate cycles, most prominently the ice ages that occur about every hundred thousand years. As I explain in my recent book, High Tide On Main Street, sea level goes up and down almost 400 feet with each ice age. For the last 6,000 years sea level has been stable, meaning the coastline has hardly moved. Now the great ice sheets and glaciers are in melt mode due to the greenhouse gas levels -- a science that was established more than a century ago. The shorelines will move far inland. There will be no greater impact on our society. We need to adapt. As Leiserowitz says, we also need to focus our intellect and creativity to slow this rise in temperature that we have caused, altering the Earth's natural cycles.
So, we need someone to load the following segment, that was loaded into the teleprompter in 2003 when G. Bush read his State of the Union address, into the teleprompter that Obama will read from this year.
--“With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these (hydrogen fuel cell) cars from laboratory to showroom, so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.”.
OMG, just 10 years later, this woman actress in CA has her pollution-free Mercedes-Benz Hydrogen Fuel Cell electric SUV; http://bit.ly/Jk5oCG .
But, she can't start driving around America until this Oil Giant installs this splendid Hydrogen Gas Pump; http://bit.ly/RoFCoT , on all of its service station lots to enable her to do so!
And, since the Comander-in-Chief is down in Hawaii, have him go to this military base and take a drive in a POLLUTION-FREE hydrogen fuel cell SUV; http://bit.ly/KF7WMA , so he knows what the hell they are all about !!!!