Pirate's Cove

Sometimes, I have to wonder if the Warmists, most of whom are bat guano insane, are just trolling Skeptics with this kinda of nutbaggery. Then I remember that Liberals really have no sense of humor (unless it’s about assassinating Bush, Republicans, and people who do not agree with them), and Warmists are serious

Maybe climate change needs a great pop song
Pop music helped transform the way the West viewed the Cold War. The environment could really use an earworm, too.

As leaders from around the world gather at the United Nations this week for a global summit on climate change, the outlook is gloomy. The U.S, historically the world’s worst polluter, can’t even decide if man-made climate change exists. Meanwhile, China, the current king of greenhouse gas emissions, is reluctant to sign on to any climate change pact that would hinder its growth.

All of which got me thinking about Sting.

The 1980s were pretty dark days in geopolitics, but also the apex of do-good populism in the music industry. Before the rebirth of the music festival in the 1990s, A-list rock and pop musicians collaborated on topics ranging from helping family farms in the Midwest to helping starving children in drought-plagued East Africa.

Of course, those interests were primarily real. Live Aid was an attempt to help people starving. Bob Geldoff put his life on the line to pull Live Aid off. He didn’t try to “spread awarness”. He got down and dirty. The article then goes on about the anti-war music and musicians, ones who tried to “humanize” the Soviet bloc, and were against nukes and stuff. Of course, we can’t blame them for being punked by Reagan’s rhetoric and military buildup: the Soviet Union was punked, too. What it was all about was destroying the Soviet Union economically.

Giant marches are great, but they only last for a few hours and rely on the news media for coverage. If a song’s a hit, you can’t get rid of it. You can’t argue with it. And if the melody gets stuck in your head, the words will eventually catch up and sink in.

The right song might help create a generation committed to fighting for and thinking up smarter ways of generating electricity and responsibly managing the Earth’s resources (WT-hey, will the right song get Warmists to practice what they preach?). Or at least a generation that overwhelmingly believes human-influenced climate change is a real thing and a real threat. The politics are tricky, but not much more fraught than Soviet relations in the time of Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev.