Can Leaders Act as Public Climate Runs Hot or Cool?

I have an article running in The Times on recent vagaries in planetary temperature, which almost all scientific experts on global warming describe as a brief and normal hiatus from the long-term warming driven by greenhouse gases.

But the article goes beyond that basic conclusion and examines how this climate wiggle, with temperatures now little different than they were in 1998 (a year made hot by an El Nino warmup of the Pacific), is playing out in the realm of policy and public opinion. Moreover, it asks what could happen to diplomatic or legislative efforts on climate change if conditions in the next decade meet the prediction of some scientists that more years of flat or cooling temperatures lie ahead before things heat up in a big way again?

At the United Nations summit meeting on Tuesday, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon exhorted world leaders to act as if their constituency were all of the planet’s residents. This year’s batch of youth representatives reminded the gray-suited leaders that their constituency should also include future generations (a tough sell in most political systems).

Will they be heeded? Many seasoned observers of climate science and policy feel it’s hard to see how they will, given the pressures on political figures to focus on the here and now, and the variegated interests arrayed at the ranks of tables — from shrinking island states to oil monarchies to established and emerging powers sitting on mountains of coal — and the tough time our species has recognizing slow but consequential changes.

Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University who focuses on environmental movements and environmental change, is quoted in my article. Here is a more extended comment from him on the challenges presented when an environmental problem is evolving at a pace inconsistent with what normally gets our attention:

I think this is pretty endemic to the global warming issue. It is the slow incremental changes that are most important. If you follow the scientific literature, it has been very alarming all this year, starting with Dr. Field’s presentation back in February. But that is abstract knowledge, and it does not have the direct visual or emotive impact of seeing seabirds covered in oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It is going to be very hard to have an unambiguously global warming event that can lead to the type of citizen concern we saw over the Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc.

It also doesn’t help that there are almost no grass roots mobilization efforts being carried out by national environmental groups over the issue of global warming other than 350.org. Insider political advocacy or advertising campaigns are not sufficient in themselves to increase issue salience. They need to be complemented by public demonstrations of concern.

As I’ve asked here before, do you see a way for humans to avoid a “blah, blah, blah, bang” policy on global warming?

These kids below — the representatives from “Generation E” at the climate summit — would like to know: