Can Better Words Lead to Better Climate Action?

This is a cross-posting of the beginning of an article by Becca Warner for ATMOS magazine (thanks for the permission!). As this article contains some extracts from her interview with me, I thought it might make a good addition to the Making Science Public blog. To read Becca Warner’s article, please use this link!

Article by Becca Warner:

I grew up in the 1990s, when schools in the United Kingdom had just started teaching the basics of climate change. We copied down the definition of “global warming” and clumsily colored in diagrams depicting the “greenhouse effect.” This language must have spoken to me at the time. I grew up caring about what was happening to the world and ended up writing about it for work. 

But today, some of these words sound tired. They are neither urgent nor precise. They don’t capture what’s actually happening: the wildfires and floods, the earthquakes and hurricanes, the mass displacements and lives lost. 

How we talk about the climate crisis matters. Certain messages prompt more support for climate action than others. One study published as far back as 2011 found that framing the crisis as  “climate change” instead of “global warming” caused more people to believe in its existence. Meanwhile, a 2019 study measuring people’s brain patterns and sweaty palms found a 60% stronger reaction to “climate crisis” than “climate change.” Wordchoice and adoption—along with an increase in extreme weather events, more media coverage, and other factors—may have contributed to fast-rising rates of people believing in and worrying about human-caused climate change. 

The Guardian in 2019 adopted stronger climate language—including “climate crisis” and “global heating”—in an attempt to step away from vague, euphemistic language that had, for too long, softened the effects of ecological collapse. “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” shared Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner in a statement at the time. “The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

Dr Brigitte Nerlich, professor of science, language, and society at the University of Nottingham, has studied how people use language to frame climate change for nearly two decades. “The words that you use to talk about something make you act on that phenomenon in very different ways,” she said. Climate language often influences us through metaphors, she noted, because metaphors help scaffold our understanding of a concept, and act as a mirror that reflects our sense of responsibility. They are what she calls “the mind’s tools to create the world we live in.” In essence, “You pack two concepts into one word,” she said. Think ‘greenhouse effect’ or ‘carbon footprint.’ 

Image: PxHere

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