You Don’t Win Friends With Salad…or Global Warming

In the lead up to Blog Action Day this is the first of our posts on Environmental Issues.

Last year’s Stern Report on the economic cost of Climate Change gave many world leaders a whole new position on environmental issues. The realisation that they were not just talking to a bunch of treehuggers about the environment, but in fact most of the developed world was asking how they as leaders were planning to tackle the issues. The release of Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ added to public awareness of the disastrous implications of Global Warming. I don’t know if you felt it too but there was a massive shift - it was almost like you could feel our collective consciousness heave and all of a sudden Climate Change was everywhere.

I’ve purposely used two terms to describe the one thing in the above paragraph. Global Warming and Climate Change mean the same thing but they have two very different implications. Global Warming is a scary concept that brings to mind melting icebergs, Hurricane Katrina and Manhattan becoming Atlantis. Climate Change doesn’t really have that kind of emotional impact - not all of us like change but it’s often a gradual thing and we don’t always notice it. Seems to me this is why our leaders and the media use the term Climate Change when they want us to listen and act rationally and Global Warming when they want us to run for the hills in fear.