One of the toughest battles is not convincing the hard core deniers of global warming or peak oil that We Have A Problem, but reaching the indifferent among us. You know them, and I’m willing to bet a good portion of you reading this once fell into that category. They’re the people so consumed by real-world issues of jobs and family and hobbies that they don’t have the time or mental bandwidth left over to dissect all the arguments about global warming or peak oil and make an informed decision. These are the people who implicitly find comfort in the “debate” and the cowardly faux balance we’re fed constantly by TV news–if they see experts on both sides of the issue, then surely they can’t be faulted for just doing what they’ve always done and not getting involved until the matter is settled, right?

There is no real debate about these issues. Global warming is real and largely caused by man’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and peak oil is real and imminent. But how do you reach out to the mass numbers of people in the indifferent middle of the bell curve, those in between the believers and the deniers?

One way is to talk directly to them, and treat them like the adults they are (or believe themselves to be, when talking to early teens). Don’t sugar coat the issue, don’t lie, just give it to them straight, and provide them with references to guide them in their own research once you spark their interest. This seems to be the approach of James Hansen in Tipping Point: Perspective of a Climatologist (PDF), a 12-page, painless (except for its implications) introduction to our global warming mess.

I can’t do this entire work justice with quotations, so let me cheat and resort to quoting just a couple of paragraphs from the last page:

It is worth imagining how our grandchildren will look back on us. The picture that I fear has the polluters, the utilities, and automakers standing in court demanding the right to continue to emit carbon dioxide for the sake of short-term profits. The disturbing part is that we, through our national government, are standing alongside the polluters, officially as a hulking amicus curiae (friend of the court), arguing against limitations on emissions. Is this the picture of our generation that we want to be remembered by?

We live in a democracy, and policies represent our collective will. If we allow the planet to pass tipping points, it will be hard to defend our role. The state of the wild is in our hands, and we can still preserve creation and serve humanity worldwide. A drive for energy efficiency and clean energy sources will produce high-tech jobs. Restoration of clean air will be universally beneficial. Rural life and the planet can benefit from intelligent development of biofuels and renewable energy.

As I often say, it’s time we act as compassionately as we like to think we are, and recognize that all the children of the world are ours, whether they share our DNA or not.

So what’s the point of blogging about this, you ask? If you read this site you don’t need convincing that global warming is a very serious threat. But you probably need a little help here and there with relatives, friends, and co-workers who wish they knew more about global warming but can’t find the time to read an entire book or do research on their own. They’re the people to whom you should send this; think of it as building them a mental on-ramp to the topic and encouraging them (gently, please) to join the conversation. Once they educate themselves, as we all had to do on these topics, then they’ll make that critical transition to being an informed consumer and voter. And each activated citizen brings us one step closer to taking the steps needed to deal with these looming challenges.

See also Joe Romm’s take on this