An "Inconvenient" Situation
By James Hamilton
Imagine my surprise yesterday during a visit to one of my favorite bookstores: I saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" - the former VP's polemic on global warming - in the teen section. The book's cover clearly states the contents have been re-worked for a younger audience. Gore's marketing people are geniuses!
"Grab them young." Good propagandists have known this for generations so it should come as no surprise that the global warming crowd is targeting young readers.
Michael Barone had some cogent thoughts on this recently:
"Sometimes politicians get things upside down. They ignore problems that are plainly staring them in the face, while they focus on dangers that are at best speculative. Consider two long-range issues that are not pressing matters this year but pose, or are said to pose, threats a generation or two away. One of them you don't hear much about: Social Security. The other you hear about all the time: global warming. Yet this gets things upside down. We have an unusually precise knowledge of the problems that Social Security will cause in the future. But we don't know with anything like precision what a continuation of the current mild increase in temperatures will mean.
"Politicians resist fixing Social Security because the short-term costs are well understood by voters and the long-term benefits, while clear to actuaries, are invisible to voters because no one is decrying them with religious intensity. The politicians sprint to address global warming because the short-term costs are unknown to voters and the long-term benefits, while unclear in the extreme to those who rely on science, are portrayed in apocalyptic terms by the prophet Al Gore."
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