Conversation Curtailed

The Conversation ,an Australian left-wing university blog funded by the Labor government was formed to promote articles by academics and stimulate discussion on a wide range of topics as long as that discussion is "on topic" which means usually toeing the leftist line. The latest article is on communicating climate change :

Visualising climate change

In a recently-released paper looking at how people visualise climate change, Saffron O’Neill at University of Exeter joined other researchers in the UK, US and Australia, to see how people engaged with climate change images drawn from mass media sources in those countries.

They investigated responses to images ranging from icons of nature, such as coral reefs, snowstorms, bushfires, cracked ground and ice sheets to human made phenomena, such as wind farms, traffic jams, low reservoirs, smoke-stacks, and fuel pumps and then images of political leaders.

For each image they wanted to measure:

1) “salience” – whether it raised the importance of climate change
2) empowerment or “self-efficacy” – the sense of being able to take any action on climate change.

My comments below on the article lasted only microseconds before they were removed as breaching Conversation "standards" or "off topic" - I don't know which.

There are major problems in communicating climate change hysteria because most of the old scary things used in the past have been proved false. The polar bears are increasing in number according to rangers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323452204578288343627282034.html

Global warming as defined by global temperature has stalled and is on the decline.

 Sea ice is breaking all-time records in Antarctica and there has been a huge rebound in summer ice in the Arctic with the shortest Arctic ice melt on record.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current.png

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2013.png

Since alarmists now have to resort to "hidden" effects such as the so-called deep ocean heating and antarctic ice somehow melting in the deep these do not lend themselves to sexy images.

Pictures of horrendous snowy winters in the Northern Hemisphere don't work well and pictures of corn crops in trouble are few and far between with the record harvests this year.

It is probably best to carry on and make things up as usual.