Member-only story
Language Is the Latest Weapon Against the Climate Emergency
A former ‘Guardian’ journalist on how revisions to the British paper’s style guide can alter our view of the climate crisis
The language of our impending environmental disaster is changing. In a note to staff, the Guardian on Friday announced it was responding to increasing concern about climate change by calling it the “climate emergency” instead.
The email, as tweeted by BuzzFeed reporter Mark Di Stefano, reads: “Use climate emergency, crisis, or breakdown instead of climate change. Use global heating instead of global warming… Use climate science denier or climate denier instead of climate skeptic.” The memo states that the aim is to “accurately reflect the phenomena they describe,” and points out that the term climate change “sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”
It’s a good point — the word “change” hardly captures the self-imposed extinction of humankind, akin to calling an airstrike a “land-changer.” But not everyone agrees. One person on Twitter replied sarcastically: “THIS is what will finally convince people. Lol.” If by “people” they’re referring to those actively promoting denial, then fair enough. But when it comes to non-dogmatic skeptics, the change in language might actually help. And believe me, newspapers like the Guardian take language very seriously.
I was a staffer at the Guardian for about a year, and (full disclosure) still freelance for them occasionally. The first part of my training involved spending a few weeks as a sub-editor. I expected to finish with an intricate knowledge of semicolons and a sense that I would fight with anyone over proper comma placement. (I did, and I will.) But much of it had more to do with understanding the tacit messages we send by the language we use. To say someone “admits” to being gay, for example, suggests that being gay is wrong or shameful, so in order to avoid both offense and moral bankruptcy, sub-editors stopped letting the word by, and journalists stopped using it. And since the media is essentially society’s journal, perhaps removing that micro-aggression actually helped turn down the volume on the notion itself.
