In a previous post (here) I described how recommendations in an Institute for Public Policy Research report called Warm Words were adopted by the government as a template for all communications on climate change. Even the most charitable reading of this spine-chilling document reveals it as a cynical strategy for misleading the public about anthropogenic climate change for political purposes.

In February 2005, a consultancy called Futerra prepared some recommendations for the ClimateChange Communications Working Group which comprises DEFRA and five other government departments and agencies. This is how Futerra describe themselves on their website:

Futerra is a communications company. We do the things communications companies do; have bright ideas, captivate audiences, build energetic websites one day and grab opinion formers’ attention the next. We’re very good at it. But the real difference is that we’ve only ever worked on green issues, corporate responsibility and ethics. Here

Their brief seems to have been to develop a climate communications strategy that would convince the public about the undeniable existence of anthropogenic global warming even if the facts don’t quite bear this out. With the government already beginning to introduce measures to ‘win the battle against climate change’, this was a matter of some importance if they were to avoid accusations of alarmism.

Recommendation 1: Objective

We recommend that the objective for the strategy be:
To use effective communications to encourage attitude change and acceptance of policy change for climate change in the UK.

Recommendations

The reference to ‘attitude change’ looks innocent enough on its own. A campaign to change people’s attitudes to drink driving, food hygiene or child neglect would be perfectly reasonable for any government to undertake; it is beyond doubt that drunk drivers, contaminated food and negligent parents do harm. But the situation with climate change is very different. The government’s intention in this case is to persuade the electorate that a threat undoubtedly exists, although it was tacitly acknowledged in Warm Words that there are uncertainties. And they are doing this after they have introduced policies to avert this supposed threat, apparently to retrospectively justify their proposed remedies. This is to be achieved by pretending that no uncertainties exist, when they are aware that the existence of the risk has yet to be verified.

An interview that Sir David King, the government’s very influential chief scientific adviser, gave to Radio4’s Today programme on 20^th December 2007 throws some light on how policy was being formed at that time. Continue reading »