Perhaps you have heard that we have only 12 years to get climate change under control, or else. Or else what? That is not exactly clear, but it will be expensive, deadly, and bad, though not, in any meaningful sense of the word, apocalyptic. The latest big summary from the U.N. body of scientists and researchers tasked with looking into the issue, the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is foreboding. In its Summary for Policymakers about what a world that has passed the (arbitrary) mark of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming looks like, it says things such as: “Trends in intensity and frequency of some climate and weather extremes have been detected over time spans during which about 0.5°C of global warming occurred (medium confidence). This assessment is based on several lines of evidence, including attribution studies for changes in extremes since 1950.”
Its careful scientific wording makes me believe climate change is real and that it’s anthropogenic, or human-caused.
Let’s just say that if greenhouse gas mitigation strategies prove prohibitively expensive, and they do, I think we should be exploring some technological alternatives. It does not make me want to get a sandwich board and go screaming on the nearest corner that the end is nigh.
In this way I seem to agree with the IPCC panelists, but I seem to disagree quite severely with the top editorship at the Guardian. On May 17, the Guardian’s environment editor wrote: “The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.
“Instead of ‘climate change’ the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming’, although the original terms are not banned.”
Editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner said, “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. … The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.” In a later article, the Guardian proudly reports being the tip of the spear, saying that at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation there has been a policy change. And referring to places including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, it notes that “journalists at several UK and US media outlets [are] reporting internal conversations about the language used around climate.”
If the old terms are somehow failing to take the full measure of what faces the planet, then the IPCC is too. Search the whole IPCC report for “climate emergency,” “climate crisis,” or “climate breakdown.” You will not find them. You will find the now-not-O.K. terms. And anyway, “global heating” is an odd choice. Roget’s Thesaurus lists heating and warming as direct synonyms.
Finally, the Guardian now instructs “stylish” writers to prefer “climate science denialist” over “climate skeptic.” Look, if the description isn’t factual or accurate in some case, by all means, it should be changed. But it just isn’t a matter of style or syntax. I try very hard in this space not to constantly invoke George Orwell, but the political idea behind newspeak in 1984 is that the totalitarian believes that if there is no available word for a concept, then the reality of the concept will cease to exist. Orwell’s view was that this is (A) wrong, and (B) in attempting it, the censors will try to destroy much of what is deep and bright and human about our world, in which language is all we have to communicate with one another. So for a word-lover, the increasingly common impulse the Guardian is exhibiting represents an urgent crisis. We need to tackle it now, and every day matters.
