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Reposting—

In Search of a New Lexicon

Global Heating, Atmosphere Cancer, Pollution Death. What’s in a Name?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN (New York Times) [print_link]  February 18, 2008

IMAGE, LEFT: International symbol for flammable material. (Source: cdc.gov)

[UPDATE, 5/2: John Broder has written a piece examining a new call for new terminology to describe the climate and energy problems confronting the country. What words, if any, do you think would be most apt to grab attention and propel change?]

[2/18/2008:] John P. Holdren, the head of Harvard’s center on science and technology policy, is sick and tired of “global warming” — not just the problem, but the phrase. As the respondent to a panel on climate and the press at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston (I was on the panel), he urged the media, and scientists who talk to the press, to substitute “global climate disruption” for that all-too-comfortable pair of words.

What are your suggestions for more effective ways to describe human-caused global warming?

“We’ve been almost anesthetized by this term,” Dr. Holdren lamented. The atmospheric buildup of long-lived greenhouse gases is setting in motion centuries of shifts in climate patterns, coastlines, water resources and ecosystems, he said — hardly a transformation one would describe with a gentle word like warming. (A couple of perspectives on the broader issues we explored in this session are on the blogs of Discover magazine and the journal Nature.)

[UPDATED 2/18: An early version of this post (written late at night, had Dr. Holdren saying “instability” instead of disruption.]

Dr. Holdren’s suggestion, which he has elaborated on here, reminded me of James Lovelock’s push for “global heating” as the most apt name for human-caused climate change.

James Lovelock: (left) One of the most eminent scientists of our time, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, says that global warming is irreversible, and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century, not to mention millions of species. All by the handiwork of man.

When I did an interview with Dr. Lovelock in 2006, after his book “The Revenge of Gaia” was published in the United States, he explained his word preference this way: “Warming is something that’s kind of cozy and comfortable. You think of a nice duvet on a cold winter’s day. Heating is something you want to get away from.”

After that interview, I did some Web sifting and found a site set up (but not yet built) by Simon Billinge, a physicist at Michigan State University, promoting the idea, suitably called globalheating.org. I hope he expands it.

In an email, Dr. Billinge said he’d been exploring ways to show people how the heat buildup from an increasing greenhouse effect can take time to produce significant consequences. In fact, the demonstration, described below by Dr. Billinge, may help answer the many critics of greenhouse theory on this blog who point to recent cool flutters of climate as evidence that global heating is a fantasy:

I had an undergrad non-physics major do a summer project. The basic idea was the following: educate people about the differen[ce] between heating (transfer of energy) and warming (raising the temperature) and how it pertains to global climate. The greenhouse effect affects the global energy budget (net heating of the earth), global warming and climate change [are] the response of the system to being in this non-steady-state condition and because the earth is a complicated system, we don’t completely know exactly how it is going to respond.

We did an experiment where we made a video of a Bunsen burner heating… a beaker of ice and water (that was being stirred) and we plotted the temperature as a function of time. Of course, the temperature stayed constant at 0 degrees C until all the ice melted, then it started going up up up. This showed that something can be “heated” without “warming”… in fact measuring temperature is not such a great way to determine if you are in that net-heating situation or not. Oh, and by the way, a beaker of ice and water isn’t such a bad model system for the earth….though there are differences.

There’s one more thought about “global warming” that’s worth adding here. In 2006, Seth Godin, a popular marketing expert, examined the climate communications challenge from from vantage point of a pitchman:

Is the lack of outrage because of the population’s decision that this is bad science or perhaps a thoughtful reading of the existing data?

Actually, the vast majority of the population hasn’t even thought about the issue. The muted reaction to our impending disaster comes down to two things:

1. the name.

Global is good.
Warm is good.
Even greenhouses are good places.

How can “global warming” be bad?

I’m not being facetious. If the problem were called “Atmosphere cancer” or “Pollution death” the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.

2. the pace and the images.

One degree every few years doesn’t make good TV. Because activists have been unable to tell their story with vivid images about immediate actions, it’s just human nature to avoid the issue. Why give up something we enjoy now to make an infintesimal change in something that is going to happen far in the future?

We’ve explored the limits of language in situations like this, but it’s worth pushing on this some more. What framing or phrasing do you see capturing peoples’ attention in a way that might stick?