Reframing climate change
Names carry meaning. Syntax and semantics go hand-in-hand.
If your house is on fire, you would run on the street and shout “MY HOUSE IS BURNING!”. You wouldn’t calmly describe the issue to your friends as “gosh, my home is heated today”.
Ambiguous names carry the great potential of misunderstanding and the threat of being overlooked. Describing the global environmental and biological challenge we’re facing as climate change or global warming is not only scientifically inaccurate, but — most importantly — doesn’t carry the concept of urgent action.
We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction
We’re in a car driving towards a not-so-distant wall increasing our speed every second, without changing direction. Our family, our dog and cat are in the car too. We’re aware we will crash and die, yet we’re still speeding and driving faster and faster.
We’re still calling it “going for a ride”.
We’re allowing misinformed people to play on the wrong assumption that climate means weather and that ‘warming’ is only happening to localised areas in seasonal events.
Some idiot with an orange face might say “It’s freezing in New York — where the hell is global warming?”.
Despite the major effort of climatologists, climate activists, journalists and science communicators such as Al Gore, Greta Thunberg or The Guardian to properly refer to this challenge as Climate Crisis or Climate Emergency and Biological Collapse, the terms media and society still prefer using are the more pillow-y ones.
There’s a lot we can do and we need to do to reverse the climate crisis, repair and regenerate our planet. We can change our daily habits, inspiring our community to do the same, we can vote for climate leaders and support their actions. We can drive a bottom-up, top-down revolutionary reversal and fix the problem.
Let’s start with something easy first: let’s talk about it and let’s give it a better name.
