Pirate's Cove

Rather serendipitous, we had Excitable Juan Cole calling it carbon farting earlier, now we have this, via Watts Up With That? (graphic from same)

‘Call it atmosphere cancer’ – How the world’s best-known marketer would tackle global warming

Much of Seth Godin’s work – his famous blog; his books and TED talks – convey the following: No product or idea will spread just because of a brilliant technology or rock solid facts. In essence, people will respond to stories that stand out, which creates culture, changes behaviors, and leads to change.

This applies to the big societal changes too, Godin told Business Insider Nordic at the Nordic Business Forum in Oslo, when asked about the role of storytelling in solving societal problems, like climate change: “[Storytelling] is the only thing that’s going to solve it,” he said.

“Just look at what happened with gay marriage in the US in the last 10 years. It went from being safe and respectable to be against, to something that no one speaks up against anymore.”

“Did everybody change their mind? Of course not.”

“What changed was the culture, and the culture was changed because of the story,” Godin says. “People like us do things like this. That’s it, that’s all we got.”

Um, that’s because of the use of force: this was forced upon people by the courts, and many people dare not speak up lest they be charged with hate crimes, get fined and lose their business for not baking a cake, get fired from a job, etc.

The solution to global warming then, in Godin’s playbook, comes down to simple storytelling. Instead of “letting scientists poorly tell a story with lots of qualifiers in it”, Godin says, storytellers should craft a message that resonates on a personal level:

“For starters, global is a good thing and warming is a good thing. If [the scientists] had called it ‘Atmosphere Cancer’, they probably would have started on a better footing: because atmosphere is scientific and cancer is a bad thing. There are no cancer deniers. Everyone knows that cancer is a chronic and degenerative disease, and you need to stop it soon. ”

And Godin would like it to be unacceptable to dare to have the Wrongthink that climatic changes are mostly/solely caused by nature.