"But climate change is seductive to organizations that want to be taken seriously."

"Besides being a ready-made meme, it�s usefully imponderable: while peer-reviewed scientific estimates put the annual American death toll of birds from collisions and from outdoor cats at more than three billion, no individual bird death can be definitively attributed to climate change (since local and short-term weather patterns have nonlinear causes). Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing. Declaring climate change bad for birds is therefore the opposite of controversial. To demand a ban on lead ammunition (lead poisoning is the foremost cause of California condor deaths) would alienate hunters. To take an aggressive stand against the overharvesting of horseshoe crabs (the real reason that the red knot, a shorebird, had to be put on the list of threatened U.S. species this winter) might embarrass the Obama Administration, whose director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in announcing the listing, laid the blame for the red knot�s decline primarily on 'climate change,' a politically more palatable culprit. Climate change is everyone�s fault�in other words, no one�s. We can all feel good about deploring it."

Writes Jonathan Franzen in a New Yorker article titled "Carbon Capture/Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?"