Five years ago, when young people started skipping school on Fridays to protest rising carbon emissions, some climate advocates sensed a disconnect. The words commonly used to describe how fossil fuels were heating the planet — climate change, global warming — felt bland and understated. They didn’t capture the stakes. The young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg summarized the sentiment in a viral tweet: “Can we all now please stop saying ‘climate change’ and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis, and ecological emergency?”
This kind of evocative language had already crept into news articles and political discussions as people fretted over whether “warming” sounded too pleasant, or whether “change” was too vague. In 2018, “climate crisis” became part of the name of a House committee; the next year, The Guardian adopted “global heating” in its newly spiced-up vocabulary for climate coverage, and Telemundo announced it would start using “climate emergency.”
The intuition was that using... Read more
