Hair-splitting semantics can save the world.
In IWABC, there’s a section called “What’s a meta for?” (Great pun, right? Ahem.) that digs into what Naomi Klein would call, “the stories that got us into this mess.” And the alternate stories that could help get us out of the mess, or at least through it. There’s a short 3-paragraph bit where I do a lightning review of the various phrases — from“Climate Change” to “Climate Apocalypse” to “Climate Emergency” — we’ve used to name the predicament we’re in. (After all, what is a name but a story in concentrated form?) Well, those three paragraphs used to be a whole 3-page+ chapter unto itself. And here it is. In a time like ours, better nomenclature, far from being “just semantics,” can actually make the difference between human extinction and survival. How terrifying! But also: how thrilling to know that hair-splitting semantics might be able to save the world ;-)
“The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?”
—Neil DeGrasse Tyson
If a huge chunk of ice and rock were hurtling towards the Earth about to wipe us all out in one shuddering blow, it probably wouldn’t matter whether we called it an asteroid, a meteor, or a comet. If that asteroid (yes, that’s the correct term) was big enough and moving fast enough, it would still kill us all no matter what we called it. But the Big Threat we should really be worried about isn’t a huge chunk of ice and rock randomly headed our way; it’s a deeply-complex, highly-politicized, multi-pronged disruption of Earth’s ecosystems that we’re doing to ourselves whether we admit it or not.
So, it actually matters a whole hell of a lot what we call it. Because if we call it Climate Change — a neutral, almost innocuous, term (as one might expect coming from scientists) — well, that doesn’t sound nearly as killer-asteroid scary as it needs to. Furthermore, some of the more literal-minded folks among us might reasonably ask: “But hasn’t our climate always been changing…?” And our only honest answer has to be, “Well, ye-es, but—” And if the ensuing “debate” has a $65 million Exxon PR campaign behind it and takes a few decades to disentangle, well, that neutral, innocuous killer asteroid is gonna have plenty of time to kill us all.
So why not call it Global Warming? That sounds eerie and wrong; that sounds like something that shouldn’t be happening to the planet — which is exactly what you want it to sound like. (And exactly why Republican pollster Frank Luntz encouraged1 the George W. Bush administration not to use it.) But it also sounds, well, warm. And who doesn’t want to be warm? I mean, if New Yorkers could have San Diego’s weather and still jaywalk, most of us would be wildly in favor. And you don’t want people to be wildly in favor of extinction-level events. It also misses a big part of the story. Yes, the planet is warming, but the disruptions and impacts of that warming cut in all different directions, including, in some places, yep, you guessed it: colder weather and more extreme winters. Remember Boston’s record 110.6 inches of snowfall in the winter of 2015?2 A result of rising Arctic temperatures that are changing the jet stream, drawing cold air further south, and causing brutal cold snaps in parts of Asia and North America. All this complexity makes it hard to find one term to elegantly — and terrifyingly — name the problem. You can blame the oh so inconvenient laws of physics all you want (how could you, physics!), but when Global Warming actually makes some of us colder, you have another major PR problem on your hands.
So what do we do? We’ve chucked a slow-motion, civilization-destroying asteroid at ourselves but the two main terms we’ve been using to describe it have glaring weaknesses. In order to get us all on the right side of this fight, we’re gonna need to jettison the old terms (Change and Warming) that have misleadingly neutral or positive associations, and find a new term that is obviously, and indisputably negative. How bout Climate Hitler? Yeah, that’d work. Who drowned New Orleans? Climate Hitler! Who set California on fire? Climate Hitler did it! Who warmed the waters in the Gulf and super-charged Hurricane Harvey so full of moisture that it dumped a once-in-500-years storm on the good people of Houston? That treacherous, mustachio’ed vortex of all evil, Climate Hitler! Everyone hates Hitler and the Nazis. Everyone knows they were evil and dangerous and on the absolute wrong side of history. Everyone (except our 45th President and his tikki-torch-carrying thugs) knows Hitler is the worst of the worst. So, just imagine how helpful and clarifying it would’ve been if, during Hurricane Harvey, it was Climate Hitler, not Climate Change, that went about wrecking the city and murdering its inhabitants.
But, maybe it’s not hatred we should be stirring up as much as, well, fear. Yes, fear! Elemental, gut-punching, lizard-brain fear. Fear of the havoc and chaos that is unraveling all that we count on to sustain life. So, let’s call it Climate Chaos! Nobody, except maybe the anarchists, likes chaos. (In fact, it’s probably the one thing they actually do like.) Also, Climate Chaos has the added advantage — unlike Global Warming — of encompassing extremes of both heat and cold. In fact, Chaos covers the full range of mayhem — from tropical diseases moving north, to hurricanes in the Philippines, droughts in Africa, wildfires in California, reef-bleaching in Australia, and climate refugees teeming across the Mediterranean — that our carbon-poisoning of the atmosphere has unleashed upon the planet. What’s more, it has a catchy alliteration. It rolls right off the tongue and is easy to remember. (And you generally want to remember the name of the thing that’s trying to kill you and everyone you love.)
Given these promising qualities, I did a focus-group to make sure we’d found the right term. The results were dismaying. “It sounds like the experts decided to punt,” the one person in the focus-group, who also happened to be my girlfriend, reported. “It’s as if a guy in a lab coat was saying, there’s a whole lotta shit going wrong and we’re just going to tag it all with this big umbrella term, ‘Chaos,’ because, like, whoa, it’s just cray cray out there!” I admit the sample size was small, but the sub-par test-metrics this term received gave me enough pause to consider two alternative terms with equally good alliteration: Climate Crisis and Climate Catastrophe.
”Crisis” is the traditional name for Act III of an Elizabethan drama, in which “the decisive moment” occurs and sets the course of all events to follow. Whereas, “Catastrophe” is the name generally given to Act V, when the action culminates (if a tragedy, in death; if a comedy, in marriage — which tells you a lot about Elizabethans’ views on marriage.) So, what Act do we think we’re in? The Crisis of Act III, in the thick of the drama, at the moment of maximum confrontation, when all roads are still possible? (Even if, according to Merriam-Webster’s entry on “crisis,” there’s a “distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome”?) Or, the Catastrophe of Act V where the decisive moment has long passed, the die has already been cast, and all that’s left for us players is to act out the final scenes?
The Guardian, who officially changed their style guide in 20193, replacing “climate change” with “climate crisis,” and nixing “global warming” for “global heating,” locates us squarely amidst the Crisis of Act III. Jamey Hecht, true to his roots in Aristotelian tragedy, places us woefully in the unfolding Catastrophe of Act V. But, hell, if we’re going to consider Catastrophe, then why not go the full monty and call it an Apocalypse. For years, author and environmental activist Derrick Jenson hesitated to use the word to describe what he saw civilization doing to Nature. Eventually, a friend asked him “What will it take for you to finally call it an apocalypse? The death of the salmon? Global warming? The ozone hole? The reduction of krill populations off Antarctica by 90 percent, the turning of the sea off San Diego into a dead zone, the same for the Gulf of Mexico? How about the end of the great coral reefs? The extirpation of two hundred species per day? Four hundred? Six hundred? Give me a specific threshold, Derrick, a specific point at which you’ll finally use that word.” He now uses the word.
And if you want to terrify people, if you want to convey the full scale, gravity, and killer-asteroid-ness of the disaster we’ve brought down upon ourselves and our planet, Apocalypse probably does the trick. But then what? Where do you go from there? When we call it a Climate Apocalypse, the story we’re inviting ourselves to live in is basically: just sit here and witness the cosmic death show. Which might be helpfully terrifying, but it’s also inhuman and demobilizing and very possibly wrong.
Pulling an apocalypse-is-half-full kind of move, some note that hidden in its etymology (“apocalypse” is derived4 from the Ancient Greek, apokálypsis, which literally means "an uncovering”) is a surprisingly positive shade of meaning that allows us to reframe the crisis as a kind of revelation: a grand unveiling of how out of balance our civilization is. Yet, even with this positive spin, I’m not sure Climate Apocalypse will ever feel like a happy welcome mat for the existential challenge of our time.
But wait a sec, if even the pro-Apocalypse folks are trying to bring out the positive, shouldn’t we be, too? Shouldn’t we set aside all this depressing talk of chaos, crisis, and catastrophe, and instead take a more solution-oriented, up-with-people approach to our very difficult circumstances? Like what, though? Let’s go on a “Climate Adventure” sounds too much like a mass-starvation theme-park. Take the “Climate Challenge” gives folks the impression that one more office donation drive is going to get us out of this mess. We’re in a “Climate Predicament,” while true, helps how exactly? OK, so what about: We have a “Climate Opportunity”? For some folks, yeah, it’s an opportunity — to put solar on the roof or get a job at the Green Capitalism Chamber of Commerce — but for others it’s just an “opportunity” to watch their children drown.
Okay, so how ‘bout: Protect our “Climate Stability!”? Can’t everyone get behind that? Every New Yorker wants it to snow on Christmas. Every Midwestern farmer wants it to rain in April at planting time? Every Seattle resident would shoot themselves in the face if the sun didn’t finally make an appearance in August. And the last 12,000 years of relative climate stability is one of the key factors that made civilization possible in the first place, so we have tradition on our side, too. But when you compare Protect our Climate Stability! to rallying cries of yore — Live Free or Die! No Pasaran! We Shall Overcome! — it just doesn’t cut it. We need something that puts more fire in our belly.
How about: We demand “Climate Justice!” Yes. It’s fierce and moral and is already in use by activists all over the world. But to your average Joe it can come across a bit oxymoronic, like a surreal episode of Judge Judy where the aggrieved cloud-wife of some dead-beat mountain is demanding an alimony of extra rainfall. Sigh.
Okay, hold on, I think I’ve got it: Climate Emergency. Minus the obvious problem5 that an emergency is supposed to end, and it’s unclear whether a climate emergency would ever do so, it’s got the right mix of negative and positive, of alarm and taking action. And haven’t many climate leaders, from Bill McKibbon to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Margaret Klein Salamon6, described our situation as a “planetary emergency” requiring a WWII-level mobilization of our whole economy and society? I know it’s not quite as visceral and mustachioed as Climate Hitler; and not quite as etymologically elegant or, um, apocalyptic, as Climate Apocalypse; and even though it doesn’t bring out the thicket of complexity we’re mired in the way Climate Predicament does; nor highlight the asymmetry of impacts or deftly center social, economic and racial justice the way Climate Justice does; it has one thing going for it that none of them do: firemen.
Who do you call in an emergency? A fireman. Who heroically rushes into a burning building to carry you out? A fireman. And if that building is civilization itself? And that emergency is a Climate Emergency? Who’re you gonna call, then? That’d be an existential fireman (twice as sexy as the already sexy fireman fireman). We’ve all met a bad cop or two, but have you ever met a bad fireman? Nope. Not only is every one of ‘em good, most are volunteers. Which is quite convenient, because to save the world, we’re all going to have to volunteer to be sexy existential firemen for each other. Are you feeling it now? — The alarm? The urgency? The heroic possibilities? You see, hair-splitting semantics can save the world!
The phrase “climate change” has long been mired in labeling warfare. As highlighted in the movie Vice, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz encouraged the George W Bush administration to use the phrase “climate change” rather than “global warming”.
Yale researchers recount a secret memo in which Luntz pointed out that a focus group participant felt “climate change ‘sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale’,” whereas “global warming has catastrophic connotations”.
For a short glossary of the changes the Guardian made to their style guide, for use by their journalists and editors when writing about the environment, see:
“’It's a crisis, not a change': the six Guardian language changes on climate matters.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/16/guardian-language-changes-climate-environment
and
An emergency, by definition, ends. When does climate emergency end? For more on the problems with this term, it's worth reading Dougald Hine's piece, Emergency Democracy, here: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/12/05/notes-from-underground-4-emergency-democracy/