Framing the climate change debate
Here’s a story on NPR that argues that the battle against global warming and climate change is being lost because, well, because we keep calling it “global warming” and “climate change.”
Professor GEORGE LAKOFF (Cognitive Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley): I think it has been very problematic. Global warming applies to climate, not weather, and most people don’t think of the difference, and so you shouldn’t be talking just about global warming. You should be talking about the climate crisis. That, I think, is very important and then you explain what a crisis is. But the people who are in the environmental movement are very bad at communication, and they haven’t done that.
<SNIP>
The idea of climate change, actually, was introduced by conservatives, by Frank Luntz in the 2004 campaign. He found that global warming alarmed people whereas climate change sounded fine. It was just change, as if it just happened, and people weren’t responsible. And climate is a nice word. It sort of gives an image of palm trees and nice climate, as opposed to hurricanes and, you know, and huge snowstorms and floods.RAZ: So climate change, in your view, as somebody who I have to presume does not agree with Frank Luntz, is not the best way to talk about this.
Prof.LAKOFF: Yeah, I think the climate crisis is a much better way to talk about. You want to say this is crisis. This is a crisis for civilization. It’s a crisis for life on Earth.
I’ve never been convinced that this type of rebranding makes much of a difference. Take the abortion debate. While it’s true that both sides have tried to come up with pejoratives for their opponents, people who favor reproductive rights are quite capable of packing a lot of venom into the phrase “right-to-life,” and those who consider it a crime to kill the unborn have no problem spitting the words “pro-choice” through clenched teeth. In the end, it’s the content, not the words, that have the power.
It’s a similar thing with climate change. Leave aside for a minute whether “the people who are in the environmental movement are very bad at communication” (they’ve somehow managed to turn far away things like Pandas, rainforests, and spotted owls into causes célèbres). The way to convince people they should act to offset the warming of the earth has nothing to with what phrase is being used. Whether you call it “climate change,” “global warming,” “climate crisis” or as Thomas Friedman would have it, “global weirding,” nobody’s going to want to act until they understand what the stakes are for them.
The environmental movement has, in some sense, been a victim of its own successes. Most campaigns have had a comparatively easy goal: to convince people to spend $25 or make a small change in lifestyle to help a photogenic cause. Pictures of polar bears and melting ice caps are enough to get people to make small contributions. What the proponents of action on climate change haven’t figured out yet is that with global warming, it’s got to be something more serious. The public is being asked to endorse a potentially jarring change to the economy, and opponents of action have been very good at spelling out the what the costs could be. Environmentalists won’t convince anybody that climate change is worth those risks until they respond in kind. They need to show that this isn’t about polar bears or ice caps, but about people. They need to demonstrate–concretely–that there’s also a cost to inaction.
It’s not how you frame the issue. It’s where you point the camera.
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Mr. Faris,
1) The term “Global Warming” is really misleading. It does suggest – innocently and unintentionally – that the world is literally getting warmer all of the time everywhere. No one of course has every said such a thing, other than political conservatives when they create a strawman argument against global warming to knock down. However inexact it is, we are stuck with it for the time being and trying to change it, while not futile, is at best secondary to the real issues.
2) Political conservatives are intentionally trying to create confusion on these very issues. So it is not like the terminology just on its own got really confused or misleading all by itself. There has been a careful effort to intentionally exacerbate the inherent confusion in the name “Global Warming”.
3) Having said all of that, the real issue that until recently, the theory of “Global Warming” was largely abstract to the general public. To the extent that anyone in the general public paid any attention at all, it was seen as in the realm of the “eggheads” and “geeks” who conducted arcane chemical analyses and opaque statistical studies in their ivory towers. It meant nothing to anyone’s day to day existence.
This has changed dramatically. It is now not a matter of intellectual debate but programmatic enactment. Laws and regulations are being written to take direct action against the emissions of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs). This would be have impacts everyday economic activities and interests, both on the individual level and, far more importantly, the large scale industrial level. Profits and jobs are on the line.
Endanger peoples livelihoods and you have created an entirely new truth that goes beyond the poor power of 200 years of science to overcome. Now there are people want to be confused, want pundits to mislead them, they do not want to face the ugly truths, not of “Global Warming”, but of the policy requirements that it entails. People who do not “believe in” Global Warming do so because they do not want to, not because they cannot or are innocently mislead by the terminology.
So I agree with you, “rebranding” Global Warming is not the solution.
I think both concepts are true. By adopting Global Warming or Climate Change as a meme, the reality has been somewhat filtered. Not by scientists, but by those paid to spin and obfuscate. I think Climate Crisis would go hand in hand with your assertion that the visuals and themes must focus on the impact this is having on people. Unfortunately, many Americans have to be treated like teenagers since their attention spans and habituation to manufactured drama mirrors that of an adolescent.
Why not have NOAA or the NWS
Compute and report a defined global temp index,
For example, the mean of average (high+low/2) temperature observations–
That wouldn’t seem to require any calculations, complex?
Do the same for major world climate regions
And report all the values each day
So folks would become accustomed to seeing indices
That something remotely familiar tend to convey.
The problem is that there will be very little change for most people during their lifetimes, and little change for their children even if we do nothing at all, and the consequences for global economic growth are, as you point out, huge.
I agree on leveling with people about the costs involved. I think pretending that, for example, everyone turning their lights off for an hour will do anything is counterproductive. Misleading the public on the scale of necessary change is short-sighted. However, claims that inaction will lead to disaster in the short term are vulnerable. They can be rightly attacked as uncertain, and they can lead to the embrace of halfway solutions that postpone but don’t prevent future disaster. The odds of the major greenhouse gas emitters being on the same page at any point in the future are very low.
I’ve basically no one in public make a basic point about the science here: once we emit greenhouse gasses, we can’t take them back. Whatever change in atmospheric GHG concentration we cause in the next 50 years will be with us for the subsequent 1,000 years. We fixed the ozone hole and NOx/SOx pollution within a few decades. CO2 doesn’t work that way. It can theoretically be scrubbed from the atmosphere, but the energetic cost to do so would be far greater than what we’d have to sacrifice now for prevention.
There’s a cost to inaction that really kicks into gear a century from now — you wouldn’t think getting people to be concerned about what’s basically the permanent future of the world would be a problem. As you point out, people are concerned about extinction and habitat destruction that are equally permanent and happen on the same timescales.
Sometimes even the best of terms can become toxic to a cause.
The problem with the term “global warming” is that something else got painted on it: the assumption that most of this warming is anthropogenic. The former is probably true. The latter has not been proven.
This is like trying to win a debate by word-smithing instead of using facts or reason. No conservative or liberal thinkers are deceived by such things.
Furthermore, there is a call to action among many environmental groups to follow their decidedly liberal ideas to save the Earth. Even if everyone agreed that global warming were anthropogenic, conservation alone is not going to fix this problem. We need better ideas, better data, and better leadership that can forge connections to both the right and the left.
Sometimes it is best to tackle a problem from both sides of the equation.
How can you tackle a problem from both sides of the equation when one side denies the other as either (a) a liberal construct, or (b)a natural occurence that implies there is not much we can do about it anyway? I think it is well past the time to drop the coy naivete about the origin of climate change. I have seen no scientific data that supports anything other than an increase in greenhouse gas as the current culprit.
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