Bishop Hill The poetry of global warming
Jun 9, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Dame Julia Slingo has, like so many of her colleagues, been turning her mind to climate change communication, and reckons that talking about the science in dull technical reports may not be the way forward. Getting the message of impending disaster out requires a dose of funky, a dash of sexy, and a whole lot of poetry.
“We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us… We increasingly recognise that to reach the general public we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication,” Dame Julia told a recent gathering of leading climate change scientists at the University of Exeter.
“And it’s not through tables and graphs. Sometimes it is through art, through music, through poetry, and storytelling and that is increasingly something we have to think about – how we communicate in a more humanist way.
I can see it now - Andrew Motion doing atmospheric circulation, JK Rowling doing the temperature trends, and of course flood warnings from Peter Gabriel.
Reader Comments (78)
Woe woe and thrice woe chants the Dame Slingo
Its wet, its dry, its cold, its hot
Its hot, its cold, its dry, its wet
its cold, its wet, its hot, its dry
I cry
Which witch, Wich?
End of the day Julia, no matter how you dress it up, sweet honeyed words and whispered dulcet tones, a rhapsody of utterances, structured stanza varied all - man made climate catastrophe propaganda is just: man made propaganda.
@ Barry Woods Jun 9, 2014 at 11:44 AM
Meanwhile, Exeter University, the Met Office, the London College of Fashion and the Victoria & Albert Museum have collaborated on the “Climate Dress” – a project looking at how clothing can be used to communicate ideas about global warming,
It's already been illustrated:-
http://christopherengland.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/cb56a-cepants.jpg
If you can't blind them with science, baffle them with bullshit.
"The Met Office does not do propaganda."
Richard
Jun 9, 2014 at 2:16 PM | Registered CommenterMartin A
Forgot the "well"
“We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us…
Unfortunately, what Dame Julia sees as society is not us, because she looks down on us from the great height of leadership, and thus, lacking an underling to show her the practicals, sees hoi polloi through the wrong end of her telescope. (OK, so it doesn't rhyme, or scan:)
Jun 9, 2014 at 1:26 PM | Unregistered CommenterAllan M
I thought that was R Betts' job; He has nothing else useful to do.
No, Ms. Slingo,
What society requires of you as head of the UK Met. Office is quite simple.
Accurate weather forecasts.
There is plenty of work to be done here, please get on with it.
"You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the grants flow"
With apologies to Bob Dylan
I think I will wait for Prince's Purple Rain before I get worried
The great George Formby said it all:
"Springtime Summer Autumn Winter,
So the seasons go.
Sometimes we get them all at once
With a little rain or snow.
The sun for long it doesn't shine,
It's either wet or else it's fine.
Last night I said as I went to bed,
It's turned out nice again."
With apologies to Turned out nice again, who presumably has this in mind.
Everywhere she goes she always takes the weather with her. Everywhere she goes she always takes the weather...
Dame Julia thinks it is time
To replace good science with rhyme
So we watch the MO
Reach another new low
Still singing the alarmist line
On Robert Fripp's Exposure (1978), Water Music 1 samples his guru Bennet who claims there will soon be an ice age and floods. That is follow by Here Comes the Flood with Gabriel. http://crimson.wz.cz/data/t-exposure.php#14
I prefer Noel Coward's lines: Mad dogs and Englishmen....
The mental image of Dame Julia jumping this particular shark makes me smile; I hope everyone here dosn't mind mixed metaphors.
…. Summertime…an' the livin' is eevil
…..Fish are gaspin' an' the cotton just died……………………….
From this and other threads over the CAGW era I'd say that the sceptic side is well ahead on doing poetry.
There were a couple of good examples on "The Ice That Wasn't There"
How would one express a hurricane through the medium of mime?
Or a melting glacier?
Boggled.
We do indeed need different channel of communication in our search, as what society requires of you is an accurate medium and long term weather forecasts, because currently the Met Office's do not make the grade.
And tax-payers pay for this dross?
Surely the bard is to quoted -
"Climate Dress”, "Interpretive Dance". It's all been done before, you know. I remember watching a dancer interpret rising temperatures by slowly removing her clothes. It was very convincing.
Some people are only happy when it rains.
A "dose of funky"?
Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Does funky have a different meaning on England's side of the pond?
A "dash of sexy"?
Surely Dame Slingo jests? Or is there a blueblood meaning to sexy we colonists do not understand? Is there any supporting video or audio where Dame Slingo applies a 'dash' of sexy as she means sexy?
And here I was thinking that things will get better in the future as the alarmists don't seem to understand procreation and all fun stuff surrounding procreation.
Perhaps Dame Slingo means dash in the literal form?
Again; Merriam-Webster:
Where Dame Slingo's version of 'dash of sexy' is both fleeting and violent.
And a "whole lot of poetry"?
I don't believe I have heard anything like poetry from anyone in the alarmist crowd. Perhaps Dame Slingo is referring to the alarmist bafflegab? As Dame Slingo has demonstrated so clumsily when answering official questions about Met Office prognostications and MetO scientific basis for climate flimflams?
Now giving in to English very intemperate,
telling stories speechifying inveterate,
and her very soul is fettered to a computer spool
always artfully guided by the warming rule,
that climate is weather you cannot see,
and getting hotter is all you ever want it to be!
I find this thread truly inspiring. What about organising a skeptic meeting in the Scottish Highlands where we can spend days reciting poetry and doing climate karaoke in honour of the Dame.
I suggest November as it'll be the warmest in centuries for the usual Gore effect.
I love the Peter Gabriel song. Here's a link to the lyrics.
http://www.metrolyrics.com/here-comes-the-flood-lyrics-peter-gabriel.html
The song is not about literal floods, of course. Gabriel wrote this as a dreamy but somewhat distopian metaphor for a future in which he imagined humans could not longer lie to one another because they could read each others minds, with an implication that eventually, this would change all human society in ways that would be positive, although to his credit, it seems he doesn't imagine the change would be anything less than cataclysmic.
To me, the song makes a wonderful metaphor for the British resistance to the German/Nazi onslaught during WWII and the sacrifice made by all those who endured, who resisted and fought and died. That was what I though of when I first heard it. The verse "If again the seas are silent, in any still alive, it'll be those who gave their island to survive. Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry." evokes in me the notion of risking or sacrificing one's life, of laying aside one's own personal existence on the British Isles, in the respect that, although generally "no man is an island," at the point of our deaths we are truly alone, we are islands unto ourselves. The dreamers running dry phrase speaks to me of the futility of appeasement and pacifism as a reasoned political position. It speaks to me of the truth of Plato's famous quote "only the dead have seen the end of war." I imagine that Gabriel wouldn't fully approve of my interpretation of his lyrics. But then, art is like that. The artists leaves us with something that we interpret for ourselves. Asking them what they meant by it is idiotic.
Now imagine if people like Slingo, Ward and Bryony Worthington commissioned or created art that they intended to poignantly speak to the masses of the truth of the risks and realities of climate change catastrophe. Does anyone image it would be any less heavy handed and oppressive and silly than was the impulse to create it? Ridiculous. A single photo of a decapitated eagle lying under a wind turbine could undo all their careful machinations and expose their lack of "robust" thinking.
"Pollution, all around. Sometimes up, sometimes down. But always around. Pollution are you coming to my town? Or am I coming to yours? Ha! We're on different buses, pollution, but we're both using petrol... bombs." Rick, the people's poet.
Sleepalot
Reversed on this occasion.
There - vindicated. Glad my header warns you of the tortured prose that follows and saves you the trouble of reading it.
You don't post much here. Where do you usually lurk and what are your views on the questions that normally concern bloggers here?
Now ... normal service.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
I should add to my previous post that Josh's cartoons endorse Ms Slingo's views that art has a place in the climate wars. Maybe with the changing climate on such matters, the MSM might be persuaded to give them an airing. Here's hoping.
Whether weather is climate or whether it's not,
depends on whether it's cold or it's hot.
If it's cold it's just weather, whether or not
it's cold all the time and never gets hot.
If it's hot it's the climate, whether or not
it was cold yesterday and just now it got hot.
So, weather is climate whenever it's hot,
but climate is weather whenever it's not.
Climate science was well summed up in the 1970s by the Dutch band Focus.
All the alarmists' arguments are included in a single 4-minute segment. For example:
Dab-a-hey-dab-a-hey-dab-a-hey-dab-a-hey-dab-a-hey-dab-a-hey-dab-a-hey-pom-pom. Aaaaaaaaaaah! Riki-tiki-raka-taka-aaaah
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4ouPGGLI6Q