We Should Stop Calling It “Climate Change” — And Start Calling It Extinction

The Words “Climate Change” May End Up Being The Biggest Lie Ever Told

Image Credit: Henry Nicholls. Follow him here. 

1 in 3 people on Planet Earth are living through a record-breaking heatwave right now. Thailand has just recorded the hottest temperatures it’s ever had — 45ºC (113ºF) — and a record breaking heat index (“feels like” temperature) of 54ºC (130ºF). 

130 degrees? The summer’s barely begun. 

Meanwhile, the UN’s climate agency just released its State of Global Climate Report for last year, confirming the climate horror that was 2022. 

Killer floods, droughts and heat waves hit around the world, costing many billions of dollars. Global ocean heat and acidity levels hit record highs and Antarctic sea ice and European Alps glaciers reached record low amounts, according to the United Nations’ climate agency’s State of Global Climate 2022 report released Friday.

This is the brutal, startling reality of climate change.

Of..wait..what?

“Climate change”? The climate isn’t changing. It’s heating. Rapidly. Faster than at any point in hundreds of millions of years. It’s heating so fast that this is the stuff entire geotemporal boundaries are made of — “ages” in geological history. So fast that it’s shattering scientists’ worst predictions — and making reality look like a sci-fi movie, where scores of people die off in Canada because of sweltering heat.

It’s not “change” of some symmetrical, anodyne, innocuous kind. The planet isn’t getting cooler. It’s rapid, sudden, potentially runaway, already lethal, discontinuous transformation in one direction. It’s getting hotter, fast.

We should stop calling it “climate change.” Now, before you object, bear with me, and let’s investigate the history of the term.

We used to call it “global warming.” Not so long ago. The big we, as in, all of us, because that is what the norm was. That’s the term which dominated public discourse, and you’d read it in papers and books and articles. Not the seemingly anodyne “climate change.”

That was a far, far more accurate term. And that was the problem.

Here’s little factoid for you. Do you know who invented the term “climate change”? Frank Luntz. The Republican “strategist.” Why? 

Luntz played a role in turning the environment into a partisan battlefield. During President George W. Bush’s first term, his infamous memo warned Republican party leaders that they were losing “the environmental communications battle,” an issue on which Bush was “most vulnerable.” He advised them to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around climate change and drop “global warming” for the less scary-sounding “climate change.”

“Global warming” was dangerous. Because it was true. Too frightening. Too true. Too real. To self-explanatory, powerful, and strong. It had to be Orwellianized. It had to memory-holed. Doublespeak had to be crafted — to create the impression that there was some “debate” on this topic.

Debate like what? Debate like: maybe the planet wasn’t just warming. Maybe the temperature and climate were just “changing.” Naturally. Not as a result of human influences. Not as a result of unbridled production, consumption, pollution. Maybe this was just something that happened according to the planet’s natural cycles and rhythms. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Doubt had to be manufactured. That’s why Luntz invented the term “climate change.”

Luntz rebranded global warming as “climate change” because it sounds far, far less dangerous, problematic, severe, worrisome. The usual network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets immediately — as if by design — began to use it. And the rest is history. By now, all of us use a term that a Republican strategist came up with to make global warming sound less dangerous and wonder why we can’t fix the planet.

There we are, too many of us, still using it. It’s certainly all over the news today. We’re using terms designed by a Republican strategist who wanted to deny the truth of global warming to refer to it. What does that make us? Suckers, marks, rubes. Too many of us have fallen for a branding campaign. One designed to pull the wool over eyes about, oh, only the most urgent issue on earth, on which your life and prosperity very much depend, too. Just ask the 5 million people a year dying of climate cha — global warming. Oh wait, you can’t, because they’re dead.

Sorry to be harsh — but I feel we have to speak honestly about such matters. Because, of course, there is no doubt about what’s happening to the planet. It’s not cooling, it’s warming, it’s not natural, it’s profoundly unnatural, as in, human-made, and even at that, made by a certain lifestyle of rampant overconsumption, sprawl, greed, and materialism.

What does that make Luntz, by the way? Well, it’s not too hard to see that Luntz’s idea of rebranding global warming as climate change worked.