Global warming concern trolls

I think this is basically correct:

Likely headlines predicting a global warming "catastrophe," "disaster" or "cataclysm" after a U.N. report due on Friday risk sapping public willingness to act by making the problem seem too big to tackle, some experts say. ...

"I'm a bit preoccupied that the media, having contributed to every day making another doomsday news headline, then in six weeks time will declare it hysteria and move on," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program.

Still, Steiner said it was clearly right to use words like "catastrophe" to describe effects such as a projected rise in sea levels in coming centuries that could swamp Pacific island states or cities from Shanghai to Buenos Aires.

"It is legitimate to use those words in specific scenarios," he told Reuters. "But does that mean that the whole climate change debate should be about doom and gloom? No, because we are finding that we can do something about it."

But it's probably not correct in the way that the concern trolls of the blogosphere might have us think. The basic concern troll argument these days goes something like this: 'I do believe that the world is getting warmer and that our CO2 emissions are at least partly to blame for that, but when Al Gore, a clueless MSM, and a hoarde of dirty bloggers talk about a 20ft sea-level rise when we know for a fact that seas can rise no more than a mere 20in, that's damaging the trust the public has in science.' The concern troll will then invest an inordinate amount time and effort to find instances of media "hype" in an effort to show how serious he/she is about "science."

That's not to say that there isn't a certain danger in "hype." Consider bird flu: quite possibly a majority of the population think that the threat is over since someone somewhere is doing something about it. It's not, and they're not. In fact, there probably ought to have been protests at Indonesian embassies these past three months, but that's another issue. In effect, the public was promised millions of deaths that didn't occur last winter or the winter before. Is that the reason for "apathy" though? Maybe partly, but it certainly is not a reason not to tell the public about what could happen.

In the case of global warming, things are a bit different since there is a relatively powerful interest group for whom it is important that we as a society do nothing at all to address the problem. After years of telling us that this isn't such a big problem, they now have an enormous motivation to tell us that 1.) it still ain't that big of a deal but 2.) if it is, then it's such a huge problem that we can't do anything about it and we're better off sitting back and letting the dice fall as they may because tomorrow someone will come up with the silver bullet. Well guess what: this is a major issue that we will have to deal with for decades to come and if we don't take the first step now we'll never get to where we need to be.

So is the media "hype" wrong? No. For the first time in a long time the public has been made aware of what could happen and the wheels are slowly grinding towards a possible first step in addressing the issue. If years from now apathy sets in, it won't be because people were expecting to surf down 5th Ave and that didn't happen yet. It'll be because someone wilfully twisted public opinion into apathy.