Thunder on Climate Change!

Denying the links between greenhouse gas emissions and man-made climate change is akin to denying the links between HIV/Aids and unprotected sex, smoking and lung cancer, or alcohol consumption and liver disease. In each of these cases, well-funded deniers have had to be exposed and confronted before appropriate health-promoting legislation was put in place.

It is interesting that an advocate for policy change regarding Climate Change should use the examples of unprotected sex, smoking, and drunkenness as comparative standards for assessing Global Warming. In these three examples, the relationship between the stimulus and the response, the cause and the effect was at minimum, Large, a Windowpane of at least 25/75. The relationship was relatively direct from smoking to lung cancer or addiction, from unprotected sex to AIDS transmission, from alcohol abuse to liver disease or addiction. Nothing in the Climate Change research contains data to support such a simple, clear, and strong pattern.

No one in the Climate Change Chorus can point to any evidence of a link between human energy use and harmful climate change at the strength of the cited examples of unprotected sex, smoking, and drinking. There is no evidence of such clarity and power in the research literature. None. At best when researchers strain with sophistical statistics they can find evidence of a trend for something like warming temperatures, but they cannot provide any direct, clear, and unambiguous link between human energy consumption and harms from climate change. We are building the science of climate change, but nothing in that science to date is like the science of tobacco, sexual behavior, and alcohol abuse.

Note the mark of the muggle here, particularly with smoking. When you hear Change Agents compare their cause to tobacco, you can be certain you are listening to advocates, persuasion muggles, people who loves themselves more than they love Changing Other Guys.

Read the Count in the NYTimes.

A map, on the other hand, turns the mathematical rigor into a simple chart. Goldsberry showed off a map that plotted every spot on the floor where Bryant had shot from, color-coded by shooting percentage, so that it was clear where the defense would do best to send him. Virtually anybody can understand a well-designed chart,” Goldsberry said.

Goldsberry is a visiting scholar at . . . can you be surprised . . . Harvard. He’s done these colorful charts for public health that have Counted Everything with Color and Shape thereby Changing the World of epidemiologists and public health. Now, he’s bringing his talents to sports.

All those Relative Ratios in Living Color!

This is the curse of Billy Beane and a misreading of Michael Lewis’s great book on Beane, Moneyball. Beane got a bean-counter to solve a specific problem: building a winning baseball team on a small budget. That’s why it is called Moneyball, not because the technique was Money in that Swingers argot of You’re So Money. It saved money. Since then everyone thinks they can Count their way to sports titles which was not the aim of BillyBall.

Not to say that Counting is not important, but you have to know what you are Changing.

And see the FauxItAll ‘Pataphysicians eating the menu. Take the Ruler of Moneyball and make it a Metaphor of Change.

It occurs to me that men in committed relationships with women need to use the Jeopardy Persuasion Play®. Phrase your answers in the form of a question.

Are we shopping today, Alex?

Is this diamond large enough, Alex?

Am I getting lucky tonight, Alex?

Just a thought.

Since the Occupy movement began, they have offered the choice between the 99% and the 1% as a metaphoric dividing line. Removing all consideration of Real Percentage, the point is clear: Most aren’t while only a few are. I’m just now asking that question about persuasion. Is persuasion for the 99% or the 1%?

If I’m selling ice to the Aleuts or sand to the Sauds, then, yes, persuasion is for the 99%. Hear the band strike up strains of the Music Man in the background as I explain why the 99% needs these instruments, these uniforms for the big parade to take back the streets of America. With 76 trombones we can make this country ours again.

Just sign here on this contract for the instruments and uniforms, and hey, I’ll throw in the lessons for free.

But, then, that’s not really persuasion for the 99%, is it? That’s what persuasion for the 1% would do to everyone else.

Persuasion should wrap itself in the 99% flag, but any thoughtful analysis reveals, the 99% don’t want or understand persuasion because they in all their incarnations never change the Other Guy; they just want a parade. Persuasion is a 1% activity. People who define the TACTs then run the Box and Play until they get the Change are always the 1%, the ones who see, want, and do more than the 99%. The 99% is always about themselves and keeping what they want; the 1% is always about the Other Guy and making a Change.

P.S. The Music Man is a sweet and charming musical about a persuasion maven, Professor Harold Hill. The show romanticizes the ruthlessness of Changing Other Guys and reverses to a happy ending where the Professor switches sides from the 1% to the shiny, happy 99%. In between, however, is nothing but persuasion.