Last night I went to a screening of Ice Age: The Meltdown. To be honest, I went more in fan-of-goofy-animated-movies mode than environmental-editor mode. But one of the first lines was: “This global warming thing is killing me.” The rest of the movie centered on an escape from the flood that was going to doom the movie’s cuddly creatures.
It turned out to be good fun, of course, and had the requisite happy ending (oops, sorry). But I started wondering, as I listened to the kids around me gasp and laugh, what it would be like to grow up in a world where all you hear — even in cartoons! — is that the whole planet is doomed. I guess this ties in with Dave’s beef with the new global-warming ads.
How does all that fear possibly help, and how can the so-called grown-ups among us change the message? Should we?
