“Is it time to stop making the hottest part of the year seem cool?” asks an article in the climate-focused publication Grist, the self-described “only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice.” Per Grist’s headline, “Summer has transformed into ‘danger season,’ scientists warn.” Summer may be just beginning in reality, but in Grist’s world, it’s canceled: “Around the year 900, Old English speakers were already using the word sumor for the warmer months. […] But summer isn’t what it used to be. The season is getting so hot that it might be time for a new name: ‘danger season.’”
Six-dollar gas seems to have convinced the Biden administration to stop nixing pipelines and start begging oil companies and Saudi princes to produce more fuel, but the underlying idea in organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, where the “danger season” idea originated, remains that we just need more people to make better choices. That’s the point of this absurd, dead-on-arrival attempt to toy with the word for one of the four seasons. As Grist explains, “Part of the thinking behind using the phrase ‘danger season’ is to make it harder for people to sugar-coat the climate crisis.” It goes on to quote someone who runs George Mason University’s “Center for Climate Change Communication,” an institute that focuses on the language of the science, not the science itself.
There is some serious stuff included in what the Union offers, including practical heat wave preparedness plans. But it’s hard to be generous when the framing is “danger season,” isn’t it? I mean, rebranding the word “summer” is a simply ludicrous way of trying to achieve those goals! And this type of thing suffuses the climate space, sadly. There are many smart climate activists in the world who are working on problems such as how to fix the regulatory system that prevents new renewable energy plants from finding a site or how to make sure poor countries industrialize more cleanly and quickly than Europe and the United States did. But most climate activist groups are like the people proposing changing “summer” to “danger season,” in that they believe fixing climate change is not a technological and economic problem, but a political one. They think a zero-emissions world in 2023 is only impossible because of intransigent and ignorant people who disagree with them.
The trouble with all this is that these concerned scientists and “intersectional climate justice” newsroom staffers are neurotic outliers with a professional and dispositional obsession with safety that ordinary adults move past as they learn that danger and death are parts of life to be avoided at some costs, but not all. So they can’t hear how damned cool “danger season” sounds. As a rebrand, it makes me even more excited for the period between allergy season and jacket weather. I mean, I want to get on the highway to the danger season.
Replace summer with danger season? Don’t mind if I do! It’s hot girl danger season. Time to have a danger season fling at danger season camp. School’s out — and it’s danger season break. We should listen to the song of the danger season. It’ll be just like the danger season of ‘69, the famous danger season of love. OK, I’m done. But you see what I mean: Even if everyone adopted this new phrase, something with an exactly zero chance of happening, it would accomplish nothing. Maybe instead of trying to rebrand a quarter of the year, we should talk about next-generation nuclear energy and other practical solutions.
