In a blog entry this summer, the international correspondent Christiane Amanpour said that the climate?change denial club ?is actually now shrinking faster than the polar ice caps.?
Opinion surveys suggest she?s right. Two factors that may contribute to the changing attitude about the changing climate ? and the melting away of many skeptics ? are the extreme weather events that have affected the United States recently and the legions of climate activists who make it their business to convince and motivate an increasingly receptive public.
?More and more people are connecting the dots about extreme weather,? said Bill Rigler of the Climate Reality Project. His Dirty Weather Report, a live round-the-world webcast featuring conversations with scientists, business leaders and activists ran for 24 hours from 8 p.m. E.S.T. on November 14th to 8 p.m. on November 15th and attracted more than 16 million viewers.
A trailer for the event featured a foul-tongued weatherman forecasting the extreme?temperatures?brought on by climate change.?
In addition to referring to the weatherman?s language, ?dirty? also replies to the fossil-fuel-based energy according to the organizers and Mr. Gore, as well as the ?misinformation? that says climate change isn?t happening.
This year?s webcast focused on the link between extreme weather and climate change and?featured over 100 panelists from New York and 23 other locations and took nine month to prepare, according to organizers.
For the organizers of the Dirty Weather Report, Hurricane Sandy presented both an opportunity to reach a wider audience in explaining how global climate change affects normal weather patterns. ?We threw out half of the script to make it more relevant,? said Mr. Rigler.
But Hurricane Sandy also presented a challenge. ?If we came on too strong, we could be seen as taking advantage of the tragedy,? he said.
It was the second 24-hour live Internet event put on by Mr. Gore?s Climate Reality Project. Last year?s webcast, simply called?24 Hours of Reality, was far less extensive and included many pre-produced segments. Held in September 2011, it did not focus on extreme weather events?specifically.
?This dramatically exceeded our expectations,? said Mr. Rigler of the large numbers of viewers who tuned in to the show this year.
Last week?s Dirty Weather Report had more viewers than any other event hosted by the online video streaming service uStream, Mr. Rigler said. The previous record was parachute jump from the edge of space with roughly 13 million viewers.
Al Gore introduced this year?s webcast event:
Mr. Gore was also featured in the closing segment that brought the broadcast back to New York, where it had kicked off 24 hours earlier.
Mr. Gore, who founded the Climate Reality Project, is perhaps best known for his documentary movie An Inconvenient Truth, which in many ways did in 2006 exactly what the 24-hour web events in 2011 and 2012: to educate a mass audience on the reality of global climate change. The film grossed close to $24 million and won an Oscar for best documentary feature in 2007.
Many other organizations try to educate and activate an increasingly attentive public. In many cases the Internet is a valuable tool for organization and dissemination. For example, on the 10th of October 2010 ? or 10/10/10 ? activists world-wide participated in community projects coordinated and connected via the Internet (here is our Q & A with Bill McKibben of 350.org, one of the organizers of that event).
Though the number of twitter mentions of the events also grew from last year?s event ? from 120 million to roughly 135 million this year ? the increase was far less significant than the increase in viewership overall, possibly giving a clue to the kind of new audience the event is attracting.
The Climate Reality project will now sift through viewer data and social media interactions to better understand who was watching the Internet event. Part of the analysis is understanding which parts of the global broadcast resonated with viewers, who mostly came from addresses in the United States (more specific statistics are not yet available.)
?More and more people are open to thinking about the reality of climate change,? said Mr. Rigler. ?It is now on the national collective mind frame.?
Did you watch the Dirty Weather Report? Do you think such events will change climate politics?
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