Trump May Burn Down Your House

Wildfires are devastating the American West as never before. That is the result of thirty years of climate denial. Four more years having a climate denier as President of the United States will make it much harder to mitigate the climate crisis. I am using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) in my personal efforts to do what I can to help. See Fear vs. Climate Disaster for my description of FUD. I am posting images on Twitter in which I present Trump as the devil. He is pointing at you. He may burn down your hose. But you can do something to stop him. You can vote against him.

Who am I? Why am I doing this? I am a novelist, writing a powerful global warming novel as part of my personal war against the climate crisis. I need a great publishing company to market the novel and print a lot of copies. Publishers look at an author's social media numbers as a sign of potential buyers. Please help. Friend me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, please share and comment on what I post. Consider it as doing a small part in saving humanity from the ravages of global warming. Thanks.

Shawn Oueinsteen      
www.shawnouinsteen.com
mourningdovenovel.blogspot.com 

Trump May Harm Your Grandchildren

The climate apocalypse might kill us all. Four more years having a climate denier as President of the United States will make it much harder to mitigate the climate crisis. I am using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (Fud) in my personal efforts to do what I can to help. See Fear vs. Climate Disaster for my description of FUD. I am posting images on Twitter in which I present Trump as the devil. He is pointing at you. He may harm your grandchildren. But you can do something to stop him. You can vote against him.

Who am I? Why am I doing this? I am a novelist, writing a powerful global warming novel as part of my personal war against the climate crisis. I need a great publishing company to market the novel and print a lot of copies. Publishers look at an author's social media numbers as a sign of potential buyers. Please help. Friend me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, please share and comment on what I post. Consider it as doing a small part in saving humanity from the ravages of global warming. Thanks.

Shawn Oueinsteen      
www.shawnouinsteen.com
mourningdovenovel.blogspot.com 

Freud's Double Nephew Can Help Mitigate the Climate Crisis

The undisputed father of public relations was Edward Bernays. His mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister; his father’s sister was Freud’s wife. He taught the world that facts and truth do not persuade the public. It is Freudian psychology that moves public opinion.

Freud believed sex and other deep-seated instincts controlled one’s mental state. Today those in favor of ignoring the climate crisis have successfully portrayed the Toyota Prius as a “wimpy” car. Big, gas-guzzling SUVs are manly, strong, and virile. Similarly, solar power and wind power can’t “get it up” when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. Coal-fired power plants are big, strong, and always up to the task. Of course, Bernays is the reason car commercials frequently show sexy women.

Climate scientists talk of two degrees Celsius, 450 ppm, and three meters sea-level rise. There is no Freudian psychology with that. Even when we talk of the millions who may become climate refugees, or even the thousands who have already died from global-warming-enhanced storms, there are few subconscious emotions. Facts do not persuade. People accept “alternative facts” as equal to scientific facts. Facts are not trusted. They do not draw large audiences. People trust and act upon hormone-driven feelings deeply embedded in our psyches.

So how do we persuade the world to mitigate climate change? How do we save the lives of our children, and perhaps even save the planet? We have to use what wins: reach for the hormones, not the brains. We also need large audiences to hear us.

The campaign staff of Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) knew the writings of Edward Bernays. Their Daisy commercial was largely responsible for LBJ’s 1964 election landslide. It showed a 3-year old girl picking daisies, with the strong implication that she is obliterated by a nuclear bomb. That hit the maternal (and paternal) hormonal instincts extremely hard.

Greta Thunberg’s Katowice, Poland, UN Climate Change Conference speech touched the same parental instincts. She was fifteen, nervous, with hair out of place, and showed symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome. That speech made her famous in the climate-activist community. She was and still is wonderful for the environmental-crisis cause, but today she is well-groomed and more angry than nervous. She is less convincing now than she was then when she more strongly touched upon parental instincts. She also now attracts nasty, and perhaps evil, ridicule.

Jane Fonda, at 80, gets arrested every Friday fighting the climate crisis. Because of her acting talent, fame, and history, her activism reaches a large audience, but it does not change public opinion. The sexy and beautiful Barbarella (a character she played when she was young) was a persuasive campaigner for the anti-Vietnam War cause because she appealed to our sex drives. Most men wanted her. Many women wanted to be her. Even then, though, she also attracted nasty ridicule: Hanoi Jane. Despite the ridicule, the climate fight needs activists who reach audience’s sexual desires.

The Beatles persuaded young people everywhere to grow their hair long. How? By writing and performing romantic and sexy songs. Consider the lyrics to “She Was Just Seventeen.” One of the things that made Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changing” such a powerful song was his use of the human instinct to “join the herd.” 

So, what is needed to persuade the public to stop the climate crisis? Sexy scientists? No. The image of the beautiful Dr. Kim Cobb, throwing her fist in the air while speaking at a “Stand Up for Science” rally will stick with me for the rest of my life. But, unfortunately, sexy scientists giving speeches do not reach large audiences. I’m one of the few people who saw it.

To mitigate the upcoming climate disaster, we not only need to use Freudian urges, we also need people with the talent to attract large audiences. We need sexy, young Jane Fondas, romantic Beatles, Bob Dylans, poets, novelists, and even presidential candidates. But they all have to use techniques that reach the subconscious mind of the public. Facts, truth, and science cannot persuade the average person to save the planet. Using our deepest, darkest urges perhaps can.

The ideas of Bernays, involving Freudian psychology, can be just as persuasive today as the Daisy commercial was in 1964. We need such persuasive strength today.

I am finishing the writing of a powerful global warming novel as part of my personal war against the climate crisis. I am confident it shows enough artistic quality to draw a large audience. I believe I’ve made it persuasive, in a Bernaysian way. But my novel, Mourning Dove, needs your help. Friend me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn. Mourning Dove needs a great publishing company to market it and print a lot of copies. Publishers look at an author's social media numbers as a sign of potential buyers. So please friend me, follow me, and connect with me, and comment on what I post. Consider it as doing a small part in saving humanity from the ravages of global warming. Thanks.

Shawn Oueinsteen      
www.shawnouinsteen.com
mourningdovenovel.blogspot.com 

Scenario Planning and the Climate Crisis

In climate discussions, we usually use logic-based arguments. Today these may be dismissed as alternative facts. They do not seem to be working very well. Instead, we should use arguments based on scenario planning. A well-written scenario can enter the bones and even the hearts and stay there.

In modern times, scenario planning was described independently by Herman Kahn and Gaston Berger in the early 1960’s and expanded upon and used by the United States military ever since. Very briefly, scenario planning revolves around determining a limited number of assumptions, also known as drivers for change, and then figuring out how things will change if those assumptions occur. Computer modeling is a form of scenario planning. But scenario planning predates all of this. It has been used ever since one person told another a story. 

In the climate-change arena, a scenario might start with the assumption that sea levels are rising and South Florida bedrock is porous limestone so nothing can be done locally to stop flooding even in sunny weather. With those two drivers for change, consider a scenario tracking a typical family of four. They own a small business and a single-family home. With the occasional flooding, customers are moving north, and the business is hurting. Flooding damages both the business and the home. Insurance pays for repairs the first few times, but the insurance company finally drops the family and they can no longer find insurance at a price they can afford. They try to move north but millions of Floridians have moved north and there are no jobs, nor housing at a price they can afford. They end up in a refugee camp. But with too many refugees, the camp struggles to provide food, water, power, police, and medical care. People start dying of crime, disease, and eventually thirst and starvation. The city that hosts the refugee camp is affected by the disease, crime, and overuse of resources. That causes more crime and disease. The city government calls in Federal resources, but many other cities experience the same circumstances and the Federal government eventually can no longer help. Water and sewer services fail, power systems fail, and civilization is dying.

A similar scenario might follow a typical family in Texas experiencing severe drought. They too move north. As with the family from Florida, they find themselves in refugee camps with the same problems, and civilization starts to die there, too. Another scenario can be used for those who experience super storms that destroy cities. Residents flee to refugee camps, and civilization dies for them as well.

Scenario planning shows that long before global warming makes life outdoors too hot, or destroys factory farming, or even causes extreme flooding or dries up rivers, civilization will end. This is persuasive.

If we add names and faces to our scenarios, especially those of innocent children, grandparents, kind nurses, and even puppies, using scenario-based arguments can change hearts of climate fence-sitters. If enough hearts are changed to affect voting and energy use, perhaps scenario planning can help to prevent the worst of these scenarios from actually coming to pass.

I am writing a powerful global warming novel as part of my personal war against the climate crisis. Please help. Friend me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn.  I need a great publishing company to market the novel and print a lot of copies. Publishers look at an author's social media numbers as a sign of potential buyers. So please Friend me, Follow me, and Connect with me, and comment on what I post. Consider it as doing a small part in saving humanity from the ravages of global warming. Thanks.

Shawn Oueinsteen       
www.shawnouinsteen.com
mourningdovenovel.blogspot.com 

Fix Farming MistakesTo Prevent the Climate Crisis

This is a fictional scenario, based on reading of scientific literature.

The first farmer, Al (for Farmer Alpha) hated being a nomadic hunter-gatherer. Having just reached puberty, he now had to join his father and the other men chasing after large grazing animals, killing them with spears, and dragging them home. Anyone not dragging fresh meat needed to pick and bring home fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

Al did not like red meat. He preferred poultry. It was tastier and birds flew nearby and killing them did not require a team of men. He also liked berries, vegetables, and grains that grew near his latest home. But he could never settle down. He lived in the Fertile Crescent and the grazing animals migrated. So his people moved as well. They were about to move once more and he wondered if he would ever eat these same fruits and berries again.

Then he noticed that tiny new plants seemed to grow just where berries, vegetables, or small kernels fell from the mature plants. He dug up some of the earliest-sprouting baby plants and figured out that plants grew from seeds that had been the grains or had been embedded in the berries and vegetables. He collected as many seeds as he could and took them with him to his next short-term home. He put them on the ground where plants grew well and, sure enough, some baby vegetable and berry bushes and grain plants sprouted. His family moved again, though, before these plants grew anything edible. Each time he moved, he collected more seeds of things he liked to eat.

When Al started his own family, he tested his ideas of not migrating with hunted animals. Instead, he cleared away the healthiest prairie grasses from the flattest ground he could find and put down his seeds. He noticed birds and other small animals eating the seeds or his young plants, so he killed and ate the birds and small animals. Many of the seeds survived and grew up to bear edible food. Over the years, Al grew his farm. He flattened land that was hilly and plowed that land. He built fences to keep animals from eating his plants and seeds. He noticed that rain that previously had settled in and around the uneven ground, now flowed away, so he dug canals and wells to provide his plants with the water he learned they needed. He even fenced in some grazing animals so they could not migrate and he could kill and eat them without much effort. Other people saw how successful Al was, and they copied his methods. Over the next century or two, much of the Fertile Crescent became farmland. Where before there had been prairie grasses that fed bovines, horses, and other large animals, now there were crops, and many of the large animals were fenced in. But food was plentiful and took much less work to obtain. One person could provide enough food many others. People finally had the time to create civilization.

But many of Al’s brilliant innovations had serious flaws. Land with prairie grasses, such as once existed in the Fertile Crescent, can have moist, healthy topsoil as much as ten-feet deep. This topsoil includes enormous numbers of microbes, as well as other living things like worms and insects. It retains much water, and includes a great amount of carbon.  The first farmer’s ideas of flattening land, burning brush, tilling, fencing, controlling water, and other tools of agriculture can cause topsoil to die, dry out, become dust that blows away or gets washed away, or form crusts that no life can penetrate. The topsoil releases its carbon into the atmosphere. What once was ten feet of topsoil becomes ten feet of sand. This is desertification, and to a large extent it is the result of the mistakes of the first farmers.

Can Farmer Al’s mistakes be fixed? Yes. Can we again have topsoil that goes down ten feet with carbon-rich topsoil? Yes. Will this remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and help fix global warming? Yes. Can it be done quickly enough to help prevent global warming disasters? Yes. Is it easy? No! 

Regenerating soil has been studied by the Savory Institute, the Rodale Foundation, the Regenerative Soil Foundation, and major agricultural institutions around the world. We know how to do it, but it is very complex. Soil conditions differ, everywhere on Earth. Rainfall varies by region. There are innumerable factors: desired crops, land topology, temperature, farming workforce numbers and skillsets, regional ecology, and on and on. Big agricultural companies such as Bayer, International Harvester, John Deere, Caterpillar, and many others for years have made fortunes helping mankind farm using Farmer Al’s mistakes. Greater fortunes can be made now by fixing those mistakes. We need to convince Big Ag to modify its business models to study how to regenerate soil. We also should support startup agricultural companies to outmaneuver Big Ag, and make fortunes regenerating our soil, reversing Farmer Al’s mistakes, and making agriculture thrive while fixing the world. It can be done. We need the will, the  drive, and money to do it.

Author’s Note:

I am a novelist, not a climate scientist, nor an agricultural expert. I am not saying that what I wrote here actually happened. It almost certainly did not occur in the manner I describe. But the ideas in this scenario need to be discussed, and I wrote this as a way to open discussion.

Please help me in my personal war against global warming. Friend me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn. I am writing a powerful global warming novel. I need a great publishing company to market it and print a lot of copies. Publishers look at an author's social media numbers as a sign of potential buyers. So please Friend me, Follow me, and Connect with me. Consider it as doing a small part in saving humanity from the ravages of global warming. Thanks.

Shawn Oueinsteen      

http://www.shawnoueinsteen.com 

https://mourningdovenovel.blogspot.com

A Great Novel Can Change the World

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln met Harriette Beecher Stowe. He is said to have told her, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Lincoln’s words may be apocryphal, but there is no doubt that Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to persuade Northerners to fight to abolish slavery.

John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath persuaded Americans to improve the plight of migrant farm workers. George Orwell’s 1984 changed how the Western World looked at Communism. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle brought about laws regulating the meat industry of the United States. These are just a few of the thousands of books that made a difference.

Not my genre. Most Americans who love books today read thrillers, epic fantasy, or romances (often preceded by the word supernatural, teen, historical, etc.). But if a novel is good enough, it will attract readers from all genres. Most of us who love reading novels fondly remember when a friend raved about a book, telling us we must read it, even if it is not our genre. They said, “It’s a great book. You’ll love it.” We read it, we loved it, and it is something we will remember with joy for the rest of our lives. Those are the books that have the power to improve the world.

Not tonight, honey. This book is too good. A writer succeeds when the readers can't stop reading, giving up food, sleep, and sex, because they can't put the book down. The greatest compliment I ever received was when an MIT student complained that my novel gave him a bad grade on an exam. Readers fall in love with great characters and identify with those characters. If you are reading about Jean Valjean running from the police through the sewers of Paris, you feel as if you are in the sewers of Paris. When you read of young King Rob murdered as he is married at The Red Wedding, you are in shock, thinking, “No, he can’t die.” And when a character is singing in the rain after a kiss from a girl, you feel like singing in the rain. The reader experiences the emotions of the character, feeling them in the heart.

Facts, numbers, so what? Feelings of the heart persuade forever. Harriette Beecher Stowe knew the numbers: the percentage of slaves who died after being sold “down the river;” the number of little children separated from their mothers. Instead of numbers, Stowe describes Eliza grabbing her little son, who was just sold to a slaver, and carrying him in her arms on floating blocks of ice to cross a river. The reader knows the only way that could happen is if it is the will of God. As a reader, you know that God does not approve of little boys sold away from their mothers.

Two degrees Celsius, 400 parts per million? Climate change needs a novel. Mourning Dove, the novel I am currently finishing, has characters the reader falls in love with. When the characters suffer due to climate change, the readers feel their suffering.  I expect readers to cry. Mourning Dove is a very romantic novel. I expect readers will cry tears of sadness, but they also will cry tears of joy. Instead of singing in the rain, at the end of the novel, readers will be singing the song of the mourning dove, koo kurikoo koo koo. And their thoughts about global warming will be changed forever.

Please help me in my personal war against global warming. Friend me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn. I am writing a powerful global warming novel. I need a great publishing company to market it and print a lot of copies. Publishers look at an author's social media numbers as a sign of potential buyers. So please Friend me, Follow me, and Connect with me. Consider it as doing a small part in the great war against global warming. Thanks.

Shawn Oueinsteen      

http://www.shawnoueinsteen.com 

https://mourningdovenovel.blogspot.com