Maori TV (New Zealand’s alternative public TV station) played the fantastic ABC documentary Crude last week. I was in New Zealand when it first aired in 2007 and didn’t see it. The previews all make it out to be a crash course in geology – an explanation of how oil is laid down in the earth’s crust. It’s not really. It’s actually a hard hitting, mildly scary lesson about the carbon cycle – and the environmental changes that occur when it’s disrupted.

My biggest problem with the current climate change controversy is that I do understand – in a funny intuitive way – the scientific explanation about how a greenhouse traps warmth, which in turn increases ocean evaporation, which leads to draught in some places and heavy rainfall and violent storms in others. Damned, though, if I can explain it to my neighbor. He’s a climate change skeptic – who’s a lot more skeptical since some naughty climate scientists got caught fudging numbers.

Framing Climate Change as a Conspiracy Theory

This, I believe, is the whole basis for the controversy: climate change is way too complicated to be reduced to a sound bite. Just like the JFK assassination. The cast of characters and their interrelationships is too complex to be explained in two sentences. And that all people want to know really – who did it? And whenever revolutionary reform concepts are too complicated to be reduced to bite-sized morsels, the far right waltzes in and declares it’s merely a new conspiracy theory (which is exactly what they’ve done with Climate Gate). And people who lack the scientific background to figure out which side is right simply throw up their hands and shift their focus to more pressing personal concerns.

Enter Obama

Obama’s “official” stance on climate change doesn’t help much, either. When Obama sets 2050 as the target for an 80% reduction in emissions – while scientists predict the ice cap at the North Pole will be gone in five to ten years – this also creates the kind of cognitive short circuit that makes the public tune out in droves. Moreover the Emissions Trading Scheme Obama is proposing to join is as big a scam as derivates trading. Any reduction in European emissions has occurred despite the Emissions Trading Scheme that was enacted in 2005. Not only does it give the EU’s largest corporate polluters free carbon credits, but it also awards credits for all manner of dodgy, carbon emitting projects in the third world.

Use an Image When a Sound Bite Won’t Do

Marketing specialists say that when sound bites don’t work in putting across complex concepts, the next best too is visual imagery. Clearly the filmmakers who produced Crude understand exactly how to incorporate the repeated use of striking, somewhat scary images to get their ideas across. The repeated shots of the thick pea soup of ocean dead zones (which are increasing) is what did it for me. Coupled with the repeated message that the majority of the earth’s surface was covered with these dead zones during the Jurassic period when the world’s oil was created. And that the vast majority of the earth’s carbon was present in the form of atmospheric carbon dioxide during this period. And that, as a consequence, the entire earth – including both poles, which were ice free year round – was a massive greenhouse.

To be continued (as I now feel fully qualified to explain the carbon cycle and why climate scientists make such a big issue of the “tipping point” and the Ocean Conveyor Belt)

Crude can be downloaded free (to show your climate skeptic neighbors) at http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/

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