In less than 24 hours I've read 2 articles, one in the Times and one a book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, about people who do "stunts" in order to raise awareness or disseminate knowledge about climate change. It's a trend where various writers and activists and others do some symbolic act, like a Thoreau-esque thing such as living for a year without electricity, or an attention-getting feat like walking across the country, and hence get people to think about this stuff and pay attention in a different way.

Kolbert rightly points out that a lot of the motivation for this is that few people want to be clobbered with yet another doom-and-gloom scenario that makes them feel like they're bad people for driving or buying plastic bottles. As the New York Times article concludes of the folks Greta Browne meets on her cross-country climate walk,

In the end, Ms. Browne said, she thinks that most people are sympathetic and want to do something

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