Breaking update: Obama went all climate hawk on America in his second inaugural, his longest remarks on the subject in any major national speech, I think. So Charlie and Chelsea — here I come. My post on his address is here.

Since the inaugural address is in the middle of the day, I propose the following drinking game:

1. The first time the President uses the phrase “climate change” or “global warming,” down the drink of your choice.
2. The second time, empty out the liquor cabinet.
3. The third time, it’s a weekend in Las Vegas with Charlie Sheen or Chelsea Handler.

This is best called a sobriety game, given the Administration’s obsession with climate silence (see “Team Obama Launched The Inane Strategy Of Downplaying Climate Change Back In March 2009“).

Given that Obama called for increasing fossil fuel production in his last State Of The Union address, and given that we don’t want you plastered before all the parties tonight, I’m adding this:

1. Every time Obama talks up domestic oil production, drink one cup of coffee.
2. Every time Obama talks up domestic natural gas production, drink one cup of non-herbal tea.

Finally, if Obama mentions “clean coal,” check yourself into the Betty Ford clinic just to be safe.

Related Post:

• Challenged By MTV, Obama Says He Is ‘Surprised’ By His Own Climate Silence*
• Brulle: “By failing to even rhetorically address climate change, Obama is mortgaging our future and further delaying the necessary work to build a political consensus for real action.” Obama has mentioned ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ or the ‘environment’ fewer times on average than his two predecessors, an article by the UK’s Guardian notes.

Many readers asked when Language Intelligence would be available as an audiobook. Turns out Podium Publishing liked it so much, they did the job with a terrific reader Drew Birdseye, who narrates lots of audiobooks.

You can download all 4 hours and 19 minutes of it on Amazon or iTunes.

Given that the whole point of the book is to explain the secrets of history’s greatest spoken-word communicators — and that it contains excerpts from the greatest speeches of all time – you may well get more out of listening to the audiobook than you do from reading the print edition or ebook.

In fact, I never would have published this book if it weren’t for the power of one terrific oral communicator in particular, Van Jones. I had always been a fan of his speechmaking and wondered how he became was so good at it. After he came to the Center for American Progress, I saw his New Yorker profile by Elizabeth Kolbert, which explained:

When Jones gives a talk, something he does at least two or three times a week, he likes to begin by checking out the crowd; if he can, he will sit in the audience beforehand, absorbing the mood. He spends a lot of time listening to speeches—the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he’s got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.

That was my ‘aha’ moment. Now I understood how he had become such a great speaker. I had been working on my book for two decades, and I thought Van would appreciate it.

After reading it, Van said to me “your book changed my life.” Turns out it was a life-changing moment for both of us, since that motivated me take one more crack at improving it.

It is on pace to be my best-selling book — and almost everyone who reads it gets a lot out of it. Below I’m going to reprint Van’s HuffPost review, ”The New ‘Must Read’: Joe Romm’s Language Intelligence“:

Read more

How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address Using An Extended metaphor

The terrific Spielburg movie on our 16th President provides a stunning contrast to the failure of Obama to be a rhetorically inspiring leader on climate. In my first post, I looked at how Lincoln had mastered the figures of speech, especially irony, with the help of the works of Shakespeare. This post looks at his mastery of metaphor and extended metaphor — two crucial inspirational figures that Obama virtually never uses.

This is material that comes from my recent book on rhetoric and politics — “Language Intelligence: Lessons On Persuasion From Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, And Lady Gaga,” which is available at Amazon.com [Kindle is here].

Metaphors are the Rolls Royce of figures. Or, to put it more aptly, metaphors are the Toyota Prius of figures because a metaphor is a hybrid, connecting two dissimilar things to achieve a unique turn of phrase.

Metaphor, like verbal irony discussed in the first post, is a trope, because it alters or enhances a word’s literal meaning. The headline quote is from Aristotle, who writes in Poetics, “To be a master of metaphor is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”

A 2005 study on “Presidential Leadership and Charisma: The Effects of Metaphor” examined the use of metaphors in the first-term inaugural addresses of three dozen presidents who had been independently rated for charisma. The remarkable conclusion:

Charismatic presidents used nearly twice as many metaphors (adjusted for speech length) than non-charismatic presidents.

Additionally, when students were asked to read a random group of inaugural addresses and highlight the passages they viewed as most inspiring, “even those presidents who did not appear to be charismatic were still perceived to be more inspiring when they used metaphors.”

Given their power, metaphors have naturally become a weapon wielded by all great political speechmakers. Lincoln, a devout student of the two great rhetoric texts, the Bible and Shakespeare, understood that power more than any other president.

In 1848, when he was a Whig in Congress, he responded to the claim that his party had “taken shelter under General Taylor’s military coat-tail,” referring to Zachary Taylor, the Whig Party Presidential nominee. He turned the metaphor against his opponents, saying they themselves had run under the coat-tail of General Jackson for five elections. Then, instructing them in rhetoric, Lincoln added “military coat-tails, or tails of any sort, are not figures of speech such as I would be the first to introduce into discussions here.”

Lincoln launched a metaphor of his own, wishing the “gentlemen on the other side to understand that the use of degrading figures is a game at which they may not find themselves able to take all the winnings.” At this point, some in the opposition cried, “We give it up!” But Lincoln was just warming up. His reply was a rhetorical cruise missile:

Aye, you give it up, and well you may; but for a very different reason from that which you would have us understand. The point–the power to hurt–of all figures consists in the truthfulness of their application; and, understanding this, you may well give it up. They are weapons which hit you, but miss us.

The opposition was hoist with their own metaphorical petard.

Lincoln offered his most poignant metaphor in a June 1858 speech to the Illinois Republican state convention after they had chosen him as their candidate to run against Democrat Stephen Douglas in the U.S. senate race: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He then amplified the metaphor by listing divisions, one after the another:

Read more

The bad news: CNN continues to treat basic climate science as a he-said/she-said debate. On Piers Morgan Tuesday night, CNN presented a false balance between well-established climate science and long-debunked disinformation.

The good news: The disinformer CNN ran with last night was Marc Morano aka the Swift-boat Smearer, who has emerged as one of the least effective advocates for unrestricted carbon pollution. Indeed, Morano was so bad last night that even the normally tame Piers Morgan felt obliged to basically call him a liar.

Here’s the video — head vise required:

Yes, Morano’s Gish Gallup was so transparently nonsensical that Morgan broke out of the moderator roll to put his finger on the scale:

I respect that you have views. I don’t think they’re facts. And there are many scientists who would take issue with you about the use of the word ‘facts’.

Given that even Morgan understood that Morano isn’t pushing facts but rather anti-scientific blather, this raises the serious question “Why did CNN put Morano on the air in the first place?”

On CNN’s website, where they give Morano’s BS more equal time, CNN said they invited “a pair of experts whose respective opinions place them on polar opposite ends of the spectrum” and then they write, “Marc Morano presented an alternate theory regarding the impact, and concern, associated with carbon dioxide.” Uhh, no and no.

Morano didn’t present an “alternate theory.” That would have actually required him to not merely rattle off a string of factors many of which were irrelevant to the recent accelerated warming (“tilt of the Earth’s axis” — seriously!) but also to explain what precisely is negating the well-known warming effect of CO2.

And Morano is no “expert,” except at getting paid big bucks to spread disinformation: As SourceWatch explains:

Morano was “previously known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Man in Washington,’ as reporter and producer for the Rush Limbaugh Television Show.”

He later joined the right-wing news service CNS:

CNS and Morano were the first source in May 2004 of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claims against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election and in January 2006 of similar smears against Vietnam war veteran John Murtha.

Expertise in smearing distinguished Americans was apparently just what Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL) was looking for, so he hired Morano as his denier-in-chief (see “Inhofe and Morano keep making stuff up“).

Finally, Morano launched a website notable both for having little original content and for promoting the harassment of scientists (see “UK Guardian slams Morano for cyber-bullying and for urging violence against climate scientists“). As Media Matters explains:

His website is sponsored by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, an organization that has received funding from oil companies…. His website often publishes the email addresses of scientists, leading to a barrage of hate mail, and he defended a billboard campaign comparing those who accept climate science to the Unabomber, saying it was “edgy.”

Nye was obviously unaware Morano was no expert but a paid disinformer, as evidenced from his attempt to reason with Morano: ”Let’s see if we can agree about a couple of things.” As if.

Fortunately Morano was mostly incoherent to CNN’s audience, so the “debate” merely turned into 10 lost minutes of primetime where science and anti-science were given equal billing.

In case you think this was just an off night for Morano, just listen to him on the BBC, appearing on the same show with climatologist Michael Mann. He continues to defend his cyber-bullying.

Bottom Line: The media really needs to stop the false balance, but if they insist on airing the falsehoods of the pro-pollution disinformers, at least we can hope they continue to use their most ineffective ones.

Part II: Use irony, the twist we can’t resist

What with a masterful must-see-movie on our 16th President and the general failure of Obama to be the rhetorically inspiring leader that climate hawks had hoped for on global warming, I’m going to repost my multi-part series on Lincoln.

This is material that comes from my recent book on rhetoric and politics — “Language Intelligence: Lessons On Persuasion From Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, And Lady Gaga,” which is available at Amazon.com [Kindle is here].  I must say the Spielburg movie — screenplay by Tony Kushner based in part on a Doris Kearns Goodwin book — creates a very plausible version of our most rhetorically gifted president. I like the fact that Lincoln constantly quotes Shakespeare in the movie (as he did in real life) but doesn’t tell you that he is. Also, I like the way he lets people get annoyed with his constant homespun stories — that is, as we’ll see, the very definition of irony, something Lincoln had mastered.

I think science has mostly told us what it can about the urgent need to act swiftly and strongly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid destroying the planet’s livability for the next several hundred years (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Yes, more observations and more analysis are valuable — which is why I keep reporting on the ever-worsening climate outlook — but right now we need much more persuasiveness (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1).   As James Hansen says, we are still waiting for our climate Churchill.

One of Churchill’s defining characteristics was his mastery of rhetoric.  Indeed, at the age of 22 he wrote a brilliant, unpublished essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric so.”  But this is the day we remember Lincoln, so I’m going to rerun my series on Lincoln’s mastery of rhetoric, the 25-century-old art of influencing both the hearts and minds of listeners with the figures of speech. If you have any doubt about the importance of the figures to Lincoln, consider this:

In a famous 1858 speech, Lincoln paraphrased Jesus, saying “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and he extended the house metaphor throughout the speech. His law partner, William Herndon, later wrote that Lincoln had told him he wanted to use “some universally known figure [of speech] expressed in simple language “ … that may strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times.”

Part 1 will look briefly at how Lincoln taught himself the figures. I’ll also include here his use of irony. Part 2 will look at his use of two other key figures: metaphor and extended metaphor. The best textbook on the figures of speech in the English language, other than the King James Bible, is the complete works of Shakespeare.

The Bard and his audience knew and used over two hundred figures of speech. The figures-the catalog of the different, effective ways that we talk-turn out to “constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world,” as one psychologist put it.

Elizabethans like Shakespeare learned the figures the hard way. William likely attended the town grammar school from age seven to at least age thirteen. Grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar-Latin grammar. The schooling was intensive: ten hours a day, six days a week, thirty-six weeks a year.

Read more

By Jeff Masters via Wunderblog

With a name like “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga”, a book with a title like that compels one to pick it up and see what the heck the author is talking about. And Joe Romm’s new book on how to communicate doesn’t disappoint–it’s a thoughtful and compelling look at the techniques used by some of history’s great communicators to help persuade.

Joe Romm is author of the climateprogress.org blog, the most visited climate change blog on the Internet, and the main blog that I use to stay current on climate change and energy news. Romm defines Language Intelligence as “the ability to convince people of something both intellectually and emotionally, at both a conscious and unconscious level.” He goes on to say, “If facts were sufficient to persuade people, then experts in science would rule the world. But facts are not, and scientists do not. We filter out all the facts that do not match our views.”

At the heart of great communication lies great story telling, and Romm give us these tips on how to tell a story people will want to read:

• Write a great headline: Newspaper readers read 56% of the headlines, but only 13% of the stories are at least half-read. Headlines are even more important on-line, since they are what show up on Google searches and tweets. An example of one the most re-tweeted headlines Romm used in 2011: “Mother Nature is Just Getting Warmed Up: June 2011 Heat Records Crushing Cold Records by 13 to 1” (Romm uses a pun and personification to help create an eye-catching headline.)
• Short words are the best words.
• Slogans sell.
• If you don’t repeat, you can’t compete. Repetition and rhyming help people remember your message.
• The golden rule of speech-making is: “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.”
• Repeated distortions and smears are as effective as repeated truths, so beware of these sorts of attacks.
• If you want to de-bunk a myth, you need to focus on stating the truth, not repeating the myth.
• If you want to be more noticed and remembered, use more figures of speech (metaphors.) Examples of metaphors I’ve used include comparing our melting Arctic to the attic of a house that is on fire (Earth’s attic is on fire: Arctic sea ice bottoms out at a new record low) and comparing the impact of global warming on extreme weather to the impact steroids have on a baseball slugger (Extreme events of 2011: climate change a major factor in some, but not all).
• Create an extended metaphor when you have a big task at hand. Countless books and articles underscore that extended metaphors are at the core of human thinking.

National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist Dr. Jerry Meehl uses a metaphor to explain how climate change’s impact on extreme weather is similar to how steroids affect a baseball slugger’s ability to hit a ball out of the park.

At 183 pages, the book only took me about two hours to read, and I was very glad I did. It was very entertaining and informative, and anyone involved in public communication can learn from this book.

I give it my highest rating: four stars out of four. Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga is $9.67 from Amazon.com [Kindle is here].

Last week the UK Guardian published a bombshell piece on the origins of the fatefully dreadful decision to try to sell the climate bill without talking about the climate

The story describes a March 2009 meeting at the Old Executive Office Building, the White House informed the leading environmental groups that it had decided climate change was not a winning message. The blunt headline:

Revealed: the day Obama chose a strategy of silence on climate change

Betsy Taylor, president of Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions, was at the meeting:

“What was communicated in the presentation was: ‘This is what you talk about, and don’t talk about climate change’.” Taylor said. “I took away an absolutely clear understanding that we should focus on clean energy jobs and the potential of a clean energy economy rather than the threat of climate change.”

The message stuck. Subsequent campaigns from the Obama administration and some environmental groups relegated climate change to a second-tier concern.

Most (but not all) environmental groups either agreed with the conclusion or felt they were not in a position to do go against the White House strategy:

“When the White House invites you to a meeting and says: ‘here is how we are going to talk about these things’, it sends a very clear message,” said Erich Pica, president of the US Friends of the Earth Action, who was also at the meeting.

Now with Obama fighting for re-election, and the climate agenda stalled and under constant attack from Republicans and industry, environmental groups acknowledge the go-softly strategy was a mistake.

I have confirmed with Taylor and Pica the accuracy of this story, one more sad chapter in the textbook the Obama administration is writing on how not to do communications.

In 2010 I discussed Eric Pooley’s reporting that former White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod and former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel were the driving force behind the decision to downplay climate change — see “The unbearable lameness of being (Rahm and Axelrod).” I learned independently that the White House communications team (whom Axelrod helped set direction for) shot down a late-2009 effort by the Office of Science and Technology Policy to push back against the phoney attack on climate science the followed the theft of the University of East Anglia e-mails.

It bears repeating that this White House “strategy” was a bad idea from the beginning and based on faulty polling analysis (see, for instance,”Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?” and links below).

Support for climate action and aggressive clean energy policies actually rose slightly in 2010 climate action even during the depths of the recession, even in the face of an unprecedented fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign during the climate bill debate — even without the White House using its bully pulpit to tip the scales further (see “Memo to policymakers: Public STILL favors the transition to clean energy“).

The fact is climate action and clean energy have both consistently been shown to be winning “wedge issues” that split the most conservative elements of the Republican party from moderates and independents, who are closer to Democrats on both issues (see Krosnick: Candidates “May Actually Enhance Turnout As Well As Attract Voters Over To Their Side By Discussing Climate Change“).

The Guardian story asserts, “The White House, after studying polling and focus groups, concluded it was best to frame climate change as an economic opportunity, a chance for job creation and economic growth, rather than an urgent environmental problem.”

But even back then Mark Mellman, a leading pollster for progressives since 1982, explained just how wrong-headed this conclusion was in a May 2009 op-ed headlined, “Voters: Act on global warming“:

Read more

A key point of my book, Language Intelligence, is that the figures of speech are powerful because they are so memorable. The great Bards like Homer developed tricks to remember epic poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks codified these memory tricks — metaphor, irony, various forms of repetition, and so on — into rhetoric.

On the PBS News Hour last week, I pointed out that many people had warned climate change would inevitably lead to a storm surge that flooded Manhattan. Ray Suarez then asked if people could hear that message and act on it before seeing the devastation with their own eyes. I used a favorite metaphor:

People warned [before] Katrina that New Orleans needed to be able to withstand a Category 5. They didn’t design the levees to withstand it and we see what happened. Now we see the same thing with Sandy. I think the hope has to be that Sandy isn’t short for Cassandra and that it’s another warning that we ignore.

People now have seen that you can in fact have the worst-case scenario, which was a flooding of Lower Manhattan.

And I think any city along the Eastern Seaboard has to ask themselves, what would happen if Hurricane Sandy hit us?

Cassandra famously had the gift of prophecy together with the curse of not being believed, with archetypally tragic results:

While Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy (she warned the Trojans about the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon, and her own demise), she was unable to do anything to forestall these tragedies since they did not believe her.

It has become a classic metaphor in the climate arena (though sometimes misused — see “Memo to WashPost, George Will: Cassandra was right“). Indeed, to extend the metaphor, carbon dioxide is the army of destruction hiding in the “gift” of fossil fuels.

Sandy/Cassandra utilizes multiple figures — a metaphor, an allusion, and repetition — which is no doubt why PBS picked it up for its own headline on the story:

Is Sandy a ‘Cassandra’? How Cities Should Prepare for Future Natural Disasters

Watch the segment:

Read more

Climate change remained the threat-that-must-not-be-named in the final presidential debate. Even the center-right Politico mocked the candidates for ignoring “a global climate crisis that could result in unprecedented sea-level rise, drought and food shortages.”

So, I’m launching a new occasional feature — “quasi-climate quotes” — words an opinion maker says on some subject that far better apply to climate change.

At the debate, Romney explained why he thinks we need to increase military spending:

And our military — we’ve got to strengthen our military long- term. We don’t know what the world is going to throw at us down the road. We — we make decisions today in a military that — that will confront challenges we can’t imagine.

In the 2000 debates there was no mention of terrorism, for instance. And a year later, 9/11 happened. So we have to make decisions based upon uncertainty. And that means a strong military.

This quote makes little sense as stated, since U.S. military spending “is bigger than that of the next 17 countries combined,” as The Economist noted last year — a point Obama alluded to in the debate himself.

But if one were to apply it to the dangers posed by climate change and to spending on clean energy, then it would require a complete reversal of our current do-little climate policy.

The key point is that there is uncertainty in every major challenge we face. Arguably, reducing risk and avoiding worst-case scenarios are the major drivers of much national spending, from the military to health care. I’ll have more to say on that in a later post.

Uncertainty as it applies to the climate threat has been overstated by both scientists and anti-scientists. As demonstrated in the “Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts” — an analysis of more than 60 recent scientific studies along with numerous review pieces that each cover dozens of studies — we have an unusually high degree of certainty around future climate impacts if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.

The main “uncertainty” we face on our current emissions path is whether climate change will be the worst catastrophe ever to befall humanity (at a warming of, say 5°F to 7°F) or whether it will mean multiple catastrophes (from warming >7°F) that leave Earth with a carrying capacity far below current population levels. Climate change, much more than military threats, will likely force us to “confront challenges we can’t imagine” — fearsome “unknown unknowns” or unexpected negative synergies such as the bark beetle devastation that wasn’t foreseen even a dozen years ago.

Warming beyond 7F is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level,” as climate expert Kevin Anderson explains here. Tragically, that appears to be the likely outcome of business as usual.

And that means moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News asked the quintessential quasi-climate question at the end:

What do you believe is the greatest future threat to the national security of this country?

Sadly the President whiffed on this, continuing his indefensible climate silence throughout these debates. And it isn’t like Obama spent most of his response answering the question. As Politico noted, “the moderators’ questions certainly didn’t stop the candidates from diverting the conversation to their talking points of choice.”

In this case, Obama quickly pivoted to a long digression on education. Yes, those focus-grouped-to-death suburban moms that both candidates are fighting for just love to hear about investments in education — but suburban moms and indeed the majority of independents, Democrats, and moderate Republicans support climate action and clean energy as poll after poll after poll shows.

Someday a Churchill will emerge who won’t duck the issue, who understands that discussing climate change “may actually enhance turnout as well as attract voters over to their side.” Let’s just hope he or she emerges in 2016, since time is the one resource we are running out of the fastest.

I’m doing a “Progressivism on Tap“ book event this Wednesday evening (the 24th) in DC — details here.

If you can’t make it, you can catch a 52-minute interview of me on Miami Public Radio’s ”Topical Currents” show (audio here).

I really loved the fact that MPR played four snippets of songs and speeches for me to discuss as I do in the book. They started with Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” then Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” then Laurence Olivier doing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”  soliloquy, and finally Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech.  Not coincidentally, I think, they all feature metaphors, perhaps the single most important figure of speech.

The “Progressivism on Tap” event on the 24th is a double feature. I’ll be talking about Language Intelligence. Bill Ivey — former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under Bill Clinton and a trustee of the Center for American Progress – will be talking about his new book, Handmaking America.

Join us at 6 pm at Busboys and Poets for some food and a discussion. Books will be on sale.

Or you can buy the Kindle here and the paperback here.