I have just finished reading Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan (with Richard Littlemore). James runs a public relations company James Hoggan & Associates based in Vancouver where I once lived. He chairs the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental organization. The book catalogues in a readable manner some of the techniques used to hide the reality of global warming as a man-made threat to the current living world. The current common method is to suggest that there is uncertainty in the science and a lack of consensus among climate scientists. I see this in all the comments I read to articles explaining the CO2 problem.

One of my meta-complaints about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that having said that if the WMD were given up there would be no invasion. That an invasion happened and no WMD were discovered means that countries being told to give up WMD programs or face consequences know that they had better get the WMD as fast as they can because the threats are really going to become an excuse to try regime-change regardless. Diplomacy is devalued.

Hoggan makes a similar point towards the end of the book. That companies and politicians have worked with public relations companies to spin their way out of problems for which they should be culpable means that those groups are no longer trusted; credibility has been degraded. Hoggan commissioned polls of public opinion and found just that in Canada. One disjointed statistic in one of the polls is that 5% of people said that they were not concerned about the problems of climate change, but people thought that 50% of others were not concerned about climate change: people are unsure of each other. No individual want to take a lead and start to address something in their own lifestyle. This is what must change; we need to do things individually to reduce our carbon footprint and let others see that we are doing so. We have to join together to push politicians and industrialists to work for our common good.