War On Weather.

While browsing through various Ted Talks recently, I noted that Al Gore was raising that old chestnut about global warming being too nice a name to excite public action. He seemed to favour Climate Crisis, though to my ears that seems equally lukewarm. If the predictions are correct, then surely Climate Catastrophe is closer to the mark?

From a marketing perspective, I would argue that shock tactics are necessary since there is a need to engender behaviour change now, but this brings with it the question of how far you can safely go? The War on Terror is a well known soundbite, so why not admit that we're doing more damage than Al Qaeda could do in their wildest dreams simply because we have declared a daily War On Weather? If accompanied by visual representations of the doomsday scenarios, namely images of famous locations under water, then there is a good chance of stimulating awareness. But converting that awareness into changed behaviour seems unlikely to me, especially as the benefit will be greater for future generations

No, you have to communicate on your audience's current passion plane. Engage their worldview in a way that actually causes inertia to be against their interest. One provocative answer would be to appeal to people's moral conscience in order to instil guilt and promote action. How do you do that in middle America? Just ask people "Who Said You Could Play God?"