Spread the word
Without public support for both top-down climate laws and bottom-up social change, we're toast. We all need to start talking about climate change all the time: remember, today's party bore is tomorrow's visionary. Start a blog, hold a debate at school, write letters to the papers, mount a photo exhibition, sing songs, paint paintings, organise a screening of a climate film starring Pete Postlethwaite...
The Age of Stupid is the most powerful mass-media tool available for getting people up to speed and motivating them to take action. Team Stupid made it because we need it, so use it.
The most helpful thing you can possibly do for Team Stupid's mission at this juncture is to organise your own screening of The Age of Stupid, and get as many people along to see it as possible. Organise an Indie Screening here, any time from 22nd May onwards.
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
Once you start working towards climate safety, you will almost certainly encounter a lot of resistance from people who do not want to believe that man-made global warming is a reality (in the UK 60% of us still believe that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change” - which is simply not true, and hasn't been for some time now).
Usually these people style themselves 'skeptics' but really they are just in denial - like people who refuse to believe in evolution, except a lot more dangerous. It's like refusing to believe your house is on fire because you can't bothered to do anything about it: really, really stupid. There is a lot of persuasive-sounding guff that climate deniers use to support their ideological position, and it can be really helpful to prepare for these kinds of conversations in advance. Most committed deniers will not be swayed by facts or logical argument, but it is still important to make sure they don't manage to convince anyone else to become a denier, so Team Stupid recommends boning up in at least one of the following ways:
- You can find a pretty comprehensive briefing on how to manage these exchanges at Grist, here.
- If you want to do some even more thorough preparation, you could book yourself onto one of the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN) speaker training courses like 'How to Win the Climate Change Argument in a 15 minute Tea-Break'.
- See George Marshall's blog on Climate Change Denial for a nuanced exploration of the psychology of denial.
Stupid all over the web
Franny now has her own facebook profile (gasp!) if you'd like to sign up to be her friend there, although she's a bit ham-fisted and suspicious of the technology (even though she has a crackberry, oddly) so it's best to become a fan of the film instead:
Facebook fan page: you can publicise your Indie screening from here, and meet other fans etc
(remember if you're not on facebook already those links won't go anywhere useful)
You can now follow The Age of Stupid on Twitter AND the Not Stupid campaign too. Tweet!
We're all over the Spanner Films Youtube channel with about a zillion different Stupid-related videos (need to get that trailer going viral on there..)
But for sexy high-res glossiness and a much more appealing user experience, see our Stupid Vimeo channel. Mmmmmm. Tasty.
If you're more of a Myspacer then yep, we've just got a film profile on Myspace too. Please be our friend. We promise to play nice.
You can also find and join our group on One Climate, hook up with us on Do The Green Thing, and for all the youth out there, Franny wants to be your friend on Bebo too.
Promote Stupid on the web with our fancy-pants Widget
If you'd rather do a bit of good old-fashioned real-world publicity, then you can now download an A4 printable version of the cinema poster at the bottom of this page.
