thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

Following some very frightening revelations from the world’s leading climate scientists this week, George Monbiot has used his Guardian blog to suggest the term ‘climate change’ needs updating.

The expression ‘climate change’ was first advanced in a memo from the Republican political strategist Frank Luntz, who found that those attending his focus groups thought it sounded less scary than ‘global warming’.

This is apparently widely known and has been well covered on various blogs that I’ve accessed through Google, including:

• Exusian on Huffington post
• Lightbucket, who even has a picture of the memo
• And it is recorded in the New York Times

Then I discovered this fascinating site, which gives the lowdown on the Bush administration’s communication tactics for environmental issues. It gives advice on how to use language, such as:

“assure your audience that you are committed to ‘preserving and protecting’ the environment, but that “it can be done more wisely and effectively.”

And:

“Your plan must be put in terms of future, not the past or present.”

And in an overview it suggests:

“The environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general – and President Bush in particular – are most vulnerable.”

I think ‘vulnerable’ is an interesting word choice here and another case of where an alternative might be more appropriate. ‘Idiotic’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘infuriating’ all spring to mind.

But you have to scroll down the page before you get to the bit about global warming and climate change. This will scream out at you in capital letters:

“WINNING THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE — AN OVERVIEW”

It talks about “language that works”, that Bush’s cohorts should use when reassuring America’s loggers and truckers that they have nothing to fear from ‘extremist’ ‘environmentalists’.

And of course, there is the famous line that using ‘climate change’ sounds less scary than the phrase ‘global warming’.

I’ll be honest, at the end of one of the coldest winters on record in the UK, ‘global warming’ doesn’t sound so bad to me. Warmth is pleasant, comfortable.

I thought about leaving a comment on Monbiot’s Guardian blog with some of my suggestions for alternatives. But wading through the comments was almost as frightening as reading the news about the future of the planet. The deniers were all over it – and I mean the angry deniers, the sort that make Frank Luntz and George Bush look mild. And I knew that my relatively moderate contribution would have been lost in a rising sea of vitriol, probably on page 12 or something.

So here they are:

‘global heating’ instead of ‘warming’ because overheating makes me feel itchy and bad tempered, and makes my eczema flare up

‘global roasting’ might work – feels like being a chicken in an oven

or what about ‘earth scorching’.

According to the (ever-reliable) Wikipedia, the expression ‘scorched earth’ is:

“a military strategy or operational method which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy”.

I think there’s a case for talking about ‘the earth’ instead of ‘the climate’. It feels closer to home, like the stuff we dig in our gardens.

And it resonates quite nicely with what Nicholas Stern said about climate change deniers this week.