But first, some data (go here for a lengthier discussion of these strategies):

• Sea levels
• Greenhouse effect
• temp and CO2
• CO2
• temp changes over space
• CO2 over time
• The effects of persuasion attempts

Pre-persuasion–framing the debate

• Carbon dioxide–greenhouse gas or best friend?
• Fox News, weather, and global warming
• Polar bears and NRDC
• Advertising’s important contributions
• Greg Craven, Oregon HS teacher, and risk

Source credibility

• Fox cherrypicking a scientist’s views (sourcewatch’s page on David Evans); more cherrypicking of quotes with a Senator as expert commentator
• Here’s a Congressman, a leading climate scientist, and a skeptic–should give a sense of who is a good communicator, who publishes in his field and knows the content, and who’s trying to stack the debate
• Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth
• Greg Craven’s ‘credibility spectrum‘
• Discrediting works, too (climategate, Al Gore)

Message control (language and imagery)

• Global warming vs climate change
• Each’side’ has language that it uses in public discourse
  • Climate deniers, global warming, climate disruption, front groups/astroturf/greenwash, fossil fuels, renewable energy
  • Global warming alarmists, climate change, theory, climategate (trying to tie a ‘scandal’ to Watergate–see above link), Medieval warming period (i.e., pre-industrial warming suggests humans aren’t involved), global cooling, clean coal, energy security, climate police
  • Sowing myth is quicker than debunking it (Mark Twain: ‘A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes’)
• Uncertainty
  • The tobacco industry used this technique for decades (to confuse cause-effect relationships of smoking and cancers)–as long as the public believes the science is unsettled, public opinions don’t shift dramatically. Some of the same scientists who defended the tobacco industry went to work for the oil and gas folks later, such as Fred Singer.
  • In the face of uncertainty, propaganda principles say appeal to the audiences values–helping them avoid the cognitive dissonance that would come with understanding the consequences of personal consumption in industrial society
  • from the Heartland Institute (italics are my comments):’Development of our “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective (appeal to emotion). To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick (source credibility) to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science (source credibility–not he is a consultant). His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain (pre-persuasion, message control) – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.‘
  • Heartland’s latest video production: ‘Unstoppable Solar Cycles‘ (featuring Drs. David Legates and Willie Soon)
  • Here’s a long list of various efforts to inject uncertainty into the ‘debate’

Appeal to emotion (mostly fear)

• Bedtime stories, two versions
• Anger–Glenn Beck climate scientist plugs a book, talks to a TV weatherman, and fires up his audience
• Using children (in the bath ; Dreams of tomorrow; children and polar bears
• Death and destruction

Some history, concepts affecting shifts (or lack thereof) in public opinion

• Credibility–co-opting scientists (Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, Patrick Michaels)
• Discredibility–discrediting spokespeople, scientists (vs the science …)–Roger Ravelle, James Hansen, Al Gore, Michael Mann
• Think Tanks (Marshall Institute & CATO & Heartland, etc.), Koch Brothers, American Petroleum Institute
• Use of media (they get to decide what and what not to cover, where to cover it, how to cover it, and how long to cover it)

Effects?