In order to get people to pay attention to you, you have to connect with their personal lives. You have to show them “what’s in it for me.” The best way to do this is to focus on people’s basic physical and emotional needs.

If you can show someone how they will be able to save/have more money, get more satisfying relationships, have more sex, etc, then they will listen to you. That’s why advertising works so well!

Nathan

Since I agree to some extent with Spank’s views on global warming, and already try to keep up with realclimate, may I suggest some reading for you?

climateaudit.org provides a thorough and well-reasoned critique of one of the more “iconic” global warming papers (that was co-authored by one of the realclimate originators), as well as raising serious issues with multi-proxy studies in general.

For some perspective on science and politics, please see http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/. The author(s) have some very good ideas on the role of science and scientists in politics.

There are many things that are certain besides mere “death & taxes”. There is a fixed value for the electronvolt (1 eV = 1.60217646 × 10^-19 joules), without which the Universe wouldn’t exist, since it could not give rise to us to allow us to interpret it; without something to interpret it, said thing may as well not exist because interpretation requires intelligence, much like the old analogy about “Is there a sound from a falling tree in a forest if no one is there to hear it?”

It was the wildest stroke of luck that conditions came into being to allow us to exist. Or was it?

If our Universe, for all its immense size, is but a pinprick in an unfathomably large tapesty of Universes side by side, then there is a certain inevitably that eventually we would come into existence in one of all those Universes.

It requires no gods or infinite beings or Intelligent Design; only that times passes. There could have been a googleplex (10^10^100) of iterations of Universes before, and more to follow, but in THIS Universe conditions were adequate for us to exist. And if Intelligence does in fact arise, it is duty bound to study the Universe and try to comprehend how it works, without recourse to shepherder’s tales passed from parent to child around the campfire in the hills as they watch their flocks by night.

Once you have a solid methodology, where results can be perfectly duplicated by anyone, at any time, with equivalent equipment and conditions, then you dispense with the superstition, and trudge stolidly towards new frontiers and discoveries. You SHARE your discoveries; others share their insights about your discoveries; together humanity advances.

If we let these antedeluvian prophets steer our course, humanity may as well lay down all its wonders and march straight off into the sea and drown themselves. These people will drag us, kicking and screaming, back into the Dark Ages, where we kill animals for fat to burn in our lamps; where we scratch and claw at the ground to grow inadequate crops and feed malnourished offspring; where we will pray on bended knee for some sort of divine intervention that will never come.

Don’t let these purveyors of myth destroy all that Humanity has accomplished; don’t let vapid, insipid theists vilify “Science”. The most aggravating thing about these people is that they are hypocrites, using all this technology and ability that Science has given us in an attempt to batter down the very doors OF Science!

DEFEND SCIENCE! DEFEND HUMANITY! Save us from those that would turn us into quivering cowardly creatures relying on invisible super-beings to intercede and protect us from things we are too ignorant to understand (like thunder & lightning). Let us not march backwards through time, but bravely towards the future.

Or as Robert A. Heinlein once put it:
The MEEK shall inherit the Earth; the REST of us are going to the STARS!

While I believe our society HAS some key problems it must address re: how we relate to the world and other life, the ideology of the Dark Ages won’t help us solve those problems. Only more knowledge can do that.