Climate Change vs Climate Crisis: Which Term Sparks More Emotion?
It’s time to stop using the term ‘climate change’
“What if our language does not simply mirror or picture the world but instead profoundly shapes our view of it in the first place?”
- Frank Fischer and John Forester
Language matters. And it especially matters when it comes to climate change.
If the hypothesis of Fischer and Forester is right, and the language we use does play a role in shaping how we perceive issues, then the terms that we use could be the difference between someone engaging, or switching off.
Because of the history of controversy around climate change, we need words that are scientifically accurate and reflect what we know. But we also need words which instill some sense of urgency: this is a problem we need to be working on right now. And we also need to convey the emotional side of climate change: it’s a human-caused problem which will have devastating human impacts.
The terms which are most commonly used are ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. They’ve both been on the scene for a while, picking up momentum during the mid 1900s as scientific research was well underway into the greenhouse effect and the role of human activity within that. As terms for use within scientific journals, they’re fairly well suited, ticking that first box of accurately describing what is happening — changes in climate caused by the warming of the earth’s surface.
Both terms, though, are missing those other elements of urgency, emotion, and humanity. They’ve now become so common that they’re unlikely to illicit much of an emotional response in the majority of people. They’re too neutral, and that leaves them open to criticism. It’s too easy for people to hear the term ‘climate change’ and argue that the climate has always changed and that it isn’t a negative thing. Even worse, it isn’t uncommon for people to respond to the term ‘global warming’ as a good thing — it just means we’ll be guaranteed warm , sunny summers, right?
If we’re trying to engage people with the problem and prompt action, these are obviously not the desired responses.
New York neuroanalytics company SPARK Neuro wanted to see which other terms might be more impactful than climate change, so they conducted a study to do just that.
They gathered a group of participants with a deliberate spread of political views, and hooked them up to electroencephalography (EEG) devices, allowing the researchers to measure electrical activity in their brains. They also had webcams tracking their facial expressions, and straps on their fingers which measured whether they had sweaty palms — a factor which accompanies heightened emotion.
They then played an audio recording of six different phrases:
- Climate change
- Global warming
- Climate crisis
- Environmental destruction
- Weather destabilization
- Environmental collapse
They found that the two phrases that caused the strongest emotional reaction overall were ‘climate crisis’ and ‘environmental destruction’, with participants having over three times the emotional response than when they heard the term ‘climate change’.
Interestingly, the analysts at SPARK Neuro felt that ‘environmental destruction’ had actually had too much of an emotional response.
For them, ‘climate crisis’ had the right balance of creating an emotional response without going too far:
“That spike in emotion would likely have a ‘backfiring effect’. They’d get so riled up that they’d likely experience cognitive dissonance — that uncomfortable feeling when something you learn conflicts with your values — and come up with counterarguments to get out of that mental pain.I think they’re right.”
— Spencer Gerroll, CEO of Spark Neuro, in Grist
Although it’s important to convey the urgency and importance of climate change as an issue, it’s also important that it doesn’t feel that we’re already in the midst of a disaster that we can’t do anything about. I’ve written before about the importance of hope as an element of how we talk about climate change: to take action we need to feel that we can have an impact, and change the trajectory in a positive way.
And so, it seems that ‘climate crisis’ is the term of the moment; the right way to talk about climate change and global warming.
It’s promising that the Guardian newspaper recently changed their ‘preferred terms’ for these topics, moving away from ‘climate change’ and towards ‘climate emergency’, ‘climate crisis’ or ‘climate breakdown’. We need more of that — so I for one am adopting the term ‘climate crisis’ from now on.
