How to sell Global Warming

Apparently people are losing interest in global warming: it’s especially hard to keep up enthusiasm in the UK, which has had the coldest December for 120 years.

So, as the headline proclaims, Green Groups Try to Sex Up Climate Change: there’s nothing like a spot of scientific objectivity to get your point across. Thus we have pallid naked bodies strewn at random across what appears to be a large iceberg; at least we know the real reason why all the polar bears fled. You can see immediately how much more convincing this is than the usual boring old hockey stick graphs:

And then, for those who remain unswayed, we have Al Gore as Messiah:

The search for a new messiah: Just as Martin Luther King Jr. awakened the civil rights movement, the climate cause needs its own messiah, says environmental researcher Andreas Ernst from Kassel University. That messiah’s analogous message might run along the lines of, “I had a nightmare,” Ernst suggests. Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his film that jolted viewers out of their climate complacency, seemed to be successfully fulfilling this role for a while, but he has since all but disappeared from the public eye.

For die-hard sceptics unmoved by this barrage of dispassionate, empirical evidence, there is one last appeal from an organisation that has sexed things up like few others: the Anglican Church of Canada. The Rev. Stephen Drakeford in the Diocese of Toronto is preparing for a Green Lent (page 9):

The working group has been thinking and praying and planning since October about offering a green Lent. We are inviting people to fall in love with the earth again. When people fall in love, they do new (and sometimes crazy!) things: make sacrifices, change values, reorder their lives, and move across the country to be with another. What would happen if we really fell in love with God’s creation?

Naked bodies lying on an iceberg, Al Gore as Messiah, and falling in love with the earth during a green Lent. If that doesn’t convince you things are heating up, nothing will.

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