"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Gore Blimey

Two Gore-related items today:




1) I think there must be a team of denialists who troll the net for any mention of Gore.

These people aren't representative of the eWeek readership.

I especially liked the one who blamed his spelling errors on the fact that he was a busy capitalist with no time to spell correctly; this apparently didn't apply to his writing obnoxious and ignorant nonsense about Gore in public.




2) Not that I'm especially impressed with the latest thing Gore has lent his name to.

Anyway what I'd like is for Mr Gore and all to take some of those hundreds of millions and use them to actually convey facts rather than breathless and vague calls to action. People who don't understand the facts aren't especially likely to come up with useful actions.

This isn't even especially effective propaganda, I suspect. Did they do any testing or are they just guessing? It rubs me the wrong way. What about you?

It's sad to see Mr. Gore self destructing at the hands of bad PR people again.

4 comments:

David B. Benson said...

Here is .pdf file presentation which seems to wrok fairly well. Non-scientists need an introduction which says

positive feedback == BAD

negative feedback == GOOD

http://apollo-gaia.org/Presentation5.pdf

Anonymous said...

That scale of money is guaranteed to have come with thorough market research strings attached. As with "New Coke," the Edsel, etc., etc., such research does not eliminate the possibility of error, but I expect that the initial ads constitute a relatively small portion of the budget such that the focus can be shifted in subsequent phases.

It's interesting that the ads are aimed at opinion leaders rather than the general public. Is that segment of the public more likely to be swayed by approqach taken in the initial ads? Very possibly.

One obvious goal of this campaign is to convince Republicans that sticking with their present stance on global warming is a loser. We'll see how that works out in November. For now it's obvious from listening to wingnut radio (which I do with some frequency to try to have a sense of what they're up to) that the daily memos are telling them to ramp up their rhetoric on global warming. It's a risky strategy IMHO since a rapid climb-down will be difficult. OTOH maybe they believe it's already such a core part of their message that no other approach is possible.

Michael Tobis said...

David, that presentation is quite clear, but I don't see any solid argument that it should be true. There are lots of ways things might pan out that, while scary, aren't that scary.

David B. Benson said...

Michael Tobis wrote "I don't see any solid argument that it should be true." I agree. It probably needs a preface with various quotes from "Six Degrees".

Just the appearance of robins on Banks Island, Alaska, wouldn't be enough...