politics

Climate Communication: Cheeky Climate.

49 Comments

Tom Nelson discussed his reaction to CheekyClimate’s graphics about climate change. I guess this is supposed to be some sort of effort to “communicate” the need to take action to reduce the effects of AGW. There moto seems to be “Climate Change memes – A fresh and fun take on our global climate change problem. Tweet your own to @CheekyClimate, send them to our facebook or email us at CheekyClimate@hotmail.com! ;)”

Here’s a graphic showing their fresh-fun take:

So, I googled ‘windmill on fire’ and found a daily mail story

Then solar panel fire

I doubt these fires involved the efforts of smiling little anti-fossil fuel activist committing arson. I wonder whether CheekyClimate thinks these images represent “fresh fun”?

49 thoughts on “Climate Communication: Cheeky Climate.”

  1. Maybe we can go back to whale oil. Er…just a thought.

    (But I do like the smile on the girl.)

  2. The picture you show of the burning building solar panels appears to actually be an interior fire.

  3. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ha Ha He He Ho Ha Ha.

    I haven’t laughed that hard since that 10:10:10 No Pressure video. Got to hand it to these guys, they’ve got quite the grasp of humor.

    /sarc

  4. That picture is just disgusting. Think they would consider it acceptable if the response was “Her parents contributed to overpopulation so we executed them all?”

    One step leads to the next and soon you wind up with the French Revolution’s “Terror”.

  5. BarryW,
    It’s difficult to imagine what message CheekyClimate thinks that sends. Is it “Climate nuts are such lunatics that they would teach a 5 year old to burn down houses of those who use fossil fuels?” or “It’s acceptable to burn down houses of those who use fossil fuels?” or “It’s funny to think about burning down the houses of people who disagree with us?” or what?

  6. Lucia,

    Given the pictures that are posted on their Facebook page it would require twisted rationalizations to believe that they think it’s anything but a yuck fest to have a little girl (think of the children!) pay back the evil adults by burning down their house.

    Regardless. It’s disgusting

  7. Wow! This reminds me of George Will’s observation that liberals want nothing less than the authority to boss everyone around on every subject. My corollary to Will’s observation is that liberals don’t like being told they can’t boss everyone around, and handle it rather badly when they are. The same seems to apply to global warming advocates; their behavior is comparable to that of a spoiled 6 year old, but a lot less forgivable.

  9. off topic. but Cook claiming Barack Obama tweeted about his paper.. (as we know not signed BO.)

    “The significance of this message is demonstrated by the fact that our paper was recently tweeted by President Obama and, fittingly, Al Gore. We need to clearly and persistently communicate the fact that the scientific community agrees on climate change. Closing the consensus gap is an essential and important step towards meaningful climate action.”

    http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/06/07/op-ed-climate-change-consensus

  10. Evidently, according to Richard Betts’ rules of “public engagement”, publicizing (via retweet and “SHOUT OUT”) this Facebook page of unknown authorship is acceptable.

    Whereas raising a question (based on past performances – or Gaia forbid daring to speculate, as I had at Bishop Hill [Jun 11, 2013 at 7:05 AM] – as to whether this “fresh and fun take” might have been the brainchild of anyone from the Met Office is not!

    But, that aside, what I find disturbing, is that Betts should have chosen to repeatedly describe this “fun and fresh” and creepy pic as a “joke”.

    Since Betts doesn’t seem to have any greater knowledge of the brains behind CheekyClimate than I do, I’m not entirely sure how he succeeded in divining the motive and/or intent of these unknown persons.

    To his credit, however, Betts did initially recognize that this pic was reminiscent of Franny Armstrong’s backfired 10:10 No Pressure folly. YMMV, but, I’m not prepared to give him any credit for falling back on Armstrong et al’s very lame after-the-fact excuse that it was a “joke”.

    Unless, of course, climate scientists (and/or IPCC-niks) have, uh … redefined “joke”; and (not unlike their attitude towards disclosure of data and code) they’re keeping this a secret!

  11. Armstrong et al’s very lame after-the-fact excuse that it was a “joke”.

    Well… if so, it’s the sort of “joke” that only people who find this sort of “joke” funny would consider a “good joke”. I mean… who does @cheekyclimate think they are they laughing at? Or with? (I’d really like to know.)

    I suspect it never occurred to Richard that @cheekyclimate would be this bad. He should take this as a lesson learned….. (I’d explain the lesson, but I suspect he is smart enough to have figured it out.)

  12. I think everyone needs to understand the context of the image of the girl smiling in front of the burning house which is a widely used image of the form … “So I burned down their house”

    Do a google images search for the words
    so i burned their house
    …and you’ll see what I mean.

  13. TimTheToolMan

    I did the search. I don’t see what you mean. Throw me a bone here.
    (Seriously, don’t assign people searches with the admonition that if they do them they will see what you mean. I honestly don’t see what the heck you mean, and I sort of resent having to waste my time when you could just have said what you mean.)

  14. lucia, its not an exact match, you’ll need to scroll through several pages of the images to see lots of other examples but when I did it there were several examples on the first page.

  15. TimTheToomMan,
    So, I’m supposed to scrolls through several pages and your point will be revealed?! Do me a favor and just tell me: what point do you think will be made when I spend time scrolling through these images? Because I’ve wasted my time looking at the images and I have no idea what point you think you are trying to make.

    Either you can tell me in words– spending your time to do so…. or you can try to assign me the homework of spending 5 minutes scrolling and trying to make wild guesses about what point you are trying to make.

  16. Re: lucia (Jun 12 18:12),

    It’s memegenerator.net They have a whole raft of images that you can customize with your own captions or pick one someone else has done. The image in question is called Disaster Girl.

  17. lucia, DeWitt seems to have better knowledge of this than me but with that images search you should have seen a bunch of examples of that same picture with different captions. Perhaps google images search is returning different results for you than it does for me.

  18. DeWitt–
    Ok. I visited. It appears that if I wanted to create a “meme” with the solar panels I
    1) Download the image of the solar panel to my mac.
    2) Upload the meme generator.
    3) Decorate as I prefer.

    Somewhere in 1&2 I would probably be violating someone’s copyright. . . Maybe they care. Maybe they don’t. But anyway, that’s the process.

  20. TTM–
    BTW: I’m not trying to be a butthead here. But am I supposed to infer that you meant
    a) a whole bunch of people have made jokes based on that image.
    b) @cheekyclimate was trying to communicate “X” with that joke. (In which case, what is ‘X’.)
    c) Something else?

    I mean.. yeah. sure. Cheeky climate didn’t invest many brain cells in making the image — they just made one the way (a) did. But that still doesn’t tell me what @cheekclimate thought the joke communicated. And — though people who say ‘it’s just a joke like to pretend otherwise– jokes are meant to communicate something. The fact that @cheekyclimate might not be able to state what the joke means– even remotely– and no one else can– doesn’t make the joke good. It makes it rather lame. I mean.. what is the joke?

  21. lucia wonders “What did you mean?”

    IMO the fact someone called “cheekyclimate” produced one of these images seems pretty meaningless. I’m sure you could find 100 of them using that same image on the internet that would offend you regarding all sorts of issues. If it’d been Al Gore who produced that particular one then perhaps that would be different.

  22. I’m guessing that what TTTM is trying to say is that close to zero thought or effort went into producing this clone of an offensive meme, as is demonstrated by how often it has been used for really trivial purposes, and so it isn’t worth the effort of being offended by it.

    Which still leaves the question of why Richard Betts considered it worth publicizing.

  23. SteveTa

    Which still leaves the question of why Richard Betts considered it worth publicizing.

    It was on twitter. He said he was teasing Hilary Ostrov . Twitter being twitter, and interactions happening in lots of places, one would have to put together a lot of connections to try to guess what he was thinking.

  24. Let me go ahead and throw this out there, are things like this a crude effort at intimidation? (I don’t know). Maybe the idea is that this sort of thing will be put forward under the cover excuse of being a joke, but the real purpose is to give people the impression that the world we are moving towards is one where people who burn fossil fuels can expect … what? (working on it) That people will view them as inhuman, undeserving of the same basic rights and protections that others enjoy? (I don’t know).

  29. Boris

    Nah, mate, your ‘avin a laugh intcha? Which Cartoons by Josh has more threatening jokes, all of them, some of them, one in particular that you find threatening? What exactly IS a threatening joke?

    Do you send your laundry out?

  30. There’s one I’m thinking of that’s worse than this by far. I doubt I’ve seen all of them so there may be more.

  31. Boris,
    Humm.. I haven’t seen anything from Josh that is remotely angry/hostile/threatening like the above “I burned their house” image. Can you be a little more specific about what you found offensive in Josh’s work?

  32. Boris,

    I know it’s hard to explain humor to someone who doesn’t get a joke. I’m not sure I could explain all jokes I find funny. Can you in broad terms tell me why this is supposed to be funny? I think I could explain most of the Josh cartoons I find amusing. It wouldn’t mean somebody else would necessarily think the joke is funny, but I think I could explain it well enough that they’d see why I think it’s funny.

    Lets see.
    Josh’s Diesel ‘Green Deal’ – I don’t get it because I don’t know the backstory. Same with Tim Yeo, I haven’t been following that.
    ‘Doug Keenan is Wrong’ is mildly amusing to me because I had to read the Met response several times and refer back to other material to figure out what in the heck they were talking about in some places. It was confusing. Some of it was even… I don’t know, disjointed?
    Take this part:

    3) Mr Keenan then goes on to argue that you can only use a statistical model to determine whether the warming we have seen is statistically significant. He argues that the Met Office has used the wrong statistical model and, therefore, our science is flawed.

    The study of climate variability and change is broader than the domain of statistics, most notably due to the importance of the underpinning science of the climate system. Our judgment that changes in temperature since 1850 are driven by human activity is based on information not just from the global temperature trend, or statistics, but also our knowledge of the way that the climate system works, how it responds to global fossil fuel emissions and observations of a wide range of other indicators, such as sea ice, glacier mass, sea level rise, etc.

    They seem to be saying that the statistics don’t matter because they ‘know’ how the climate systems works. What?

    Anyways. I don’t think Josh’s cartoon is the absolute pinnacle of wit, but it’s at least mildly funny. It’s funny because it simplifies and highlights the seemingly absurd elements in the MET office response. Note that I actually disagree with Keenan in this kerfluffle.

    So, what’s funny about the cheeky climate pic?

    (p.s. – I’m not ‘dissin’ Josh, not like I could do better or even as well…)

  33. SteveF–
    I also can’t think of any Josh cartoons I’d call threatening. But maybe Boris can describe one or point to it. Then we can find it and have a look.

  34. This is the one I was thinking of:

    http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/8/30/down-on-the-farm-with-yo-n-dave-josh-181.html

    “Can you in broad terms tell me why this is supposed to be funny?”

    The meme is funny because of the juxtaposition of the girl with her mischievous smile and cute innocence with the burning house. The implication that she might be responsible for the burning is suggested by the picture and then reinforced by whatever text is used. The text in this example is not very funny, but isn’t the least funny I’ve seen.

    Of course, I think that anyone offended by this meme or Josh’s cartoon is being a bit ridiculous.

  35. Boris,

    Okay. I see what you’re saying, sort of.

    Guess I’ve just been desensitized. It doesn’t occur to me that there’s anything absurd or ironic about a cute innocent looking kid performing an awful criminal act, but I guess that’s my problem.

    Thanks.

  36. Some people found 10:10 hilarious. What’s not to like? Cute kids being blown into a gooy mess. What could be funnier than that?
    /sarcasm off if really needed

  37. Boris,

    Did you want me to explain that Josh cartoon, or were you posting it as an example of something threatening?

  38. Mark,

    I started to write to Boris re Trougher Tim, then gave up, a) British attitude to politicians, especially like Yeo, would require an essay;
    b) it’s Friday night and My fireside calleth on this rainy (again), below average temps (again) evening and, c) life is too too short….

  40. I get the Josh cartoon. If this picture advocates arson, that cartoon advocates murder.

  41. Boris,

    ~sigh~

    No, it doesn’t. Let’s not play dumb.

    There’s a layer of abstraction, called a ‘metaphor’ present in Josh’s cartoon. See, obviously Yao is not literally a pig feeding in a trough of dollars. It’s a symbolic sort of thing. Similarly, Cameron isn’t literally a butcher come to kill Yao.

    Please accept my assurance that a cartoon of Cameron literally holding a butcher to Yao would evoke nothing but outrage and horror in most readers.

    On the other hand, this charming pic of CheekyClimate’s has no such abstraction layer…

  42. Boris,
    I agree that some people could consider that cartoon in poor taste, although it strains credulity to suggest anybody really thinks Cameron ought to butcher a fellow British politician.
    .
    I’m not so sure those behind the house burning picture wouldn’t enjoy burning some people’s houses down (you know, those bad people who object to draconian fossil fuel restrictions), especially after others have very seriously suggested those same folks are ‘criminals’ who commit ‘crimes against humanity’, and who should be either killed or imprisoned. They are not at all comparable.

  43. “On the other hand, this charming pic of CheekyClimate’s has no such abstraction layer…”

    I don’t buy this for a second.

    “I’m not so sure those behind the house burning picture wouldn’t enjoy burning some people’s houses down”

    Your personal bias here doesn’t mean anything when comparing the two.

  45. My daughter tells me that this pic is a ‘meme’, not a joke.
    I have no real idea what she’s talking about.
    ~shrug~ Just thought I’d mention it.

  46. Mark writes “My daughter tells me that this pic is a ‘meme’, not a joke. I have no real idea what she’s talking about.”

    Perhaps she means that the picture is more than the joke. Its a basis for many jokes and that makes it more like a tiny piece of (internet) culture.

    Probably in the same sense the Hitler videos are more than any one video. As I shouldn’t assume people know about these internet sensations, here’s an example

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY

  48. I think the problem with the Cheeky Climate image is that it is deeply distasteful here in the UK where a recent high profile case of arson killed six children. I can see it is part of a genre of photos + captions.

    My ‘We live in hope’ cartoon is about Tim Yeo ‘getting the chop’ – does that translate to the US? In the UK it colloquially means losing your job. Yeo has since had to step aside from being the Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee as he was caught in a Sunday Times sting, seemingly willing to take cash to influence government policy. As it happens he also makes £200k plus a year in ‘green’ companies – talk about conflict of interests.

  49. In the US, government spending for unnecessary projects to help politicians get votes is “pork”. So, cutting pork is a fairly common allusion. But usually, the politicians themselves are not seen as the pork– it’s the project that got funded.

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