Describing 'climate change'

Who are you calling a climate crank, nut job?

Feb 17th 2011, 13:51 by C.W.H. | WASHINGTON

HOW do you describe a phenomenon that is global in its impacts, yet must be addressed locally? A phenomenon that is difficult, if not impossible, to detect clearly at a single place in time? That's the linguistic challenge that has confronted climate activists for decades. Forget the science and geopolitics of the issue. What name can communicators use to communicate the scope and severity of the challenge at hand?

Over the years, environmentalists have tried several different phrases, with varying degrees of scientific and political usefulness: “global warming”, which conservatives like to use when it’s snowing somewhere; “climate change”, which  Frank Luntz, a GOP spin doctor, prefers because it sounds “less frightening than 'global warming’”; “global weirding”, which is what Thomas Freidman supports and therefore possibly to be avoided, and many more. Al Gore gave perhaps the best description of the threat when he called it simply an “inconvenient truth” in his popular documentary by the same title.

The public is now aware of the issue. But the record global temperatures set last year make clear that naming a problem is quite different from solving it. The remaining challenge for “climate hawks”, as some environmentalists have taken to calling themselves, is to convince or confront politicians and businessmen, who still question whether the world has a climate problem. In that pursuit, the Guardian’s Leo Hickman worries that environmental activists have again gotten side-tracked in linguistic debates.

Just what the climate debate doesn't need: a new moniker for those who do not accept the mainstream scientific view of anthropogenic climate change. According to environmental activists planning a day of protests across the US [on February 15th], "climate crank" is set to be the latest name added to the growing list – self-appointed, or otherwise – which already includes sceptic, denier, contrarian, realist, dissenter, flat-earther, misinformer, and confusionist....I'm left wondering whether this new exercise in name-calling will only serve to distract from the important task at hand.

Mr Hickman is right to be wary of yet another label to add to the already crowded climate lexicon, but he underestimates the importance loaded terms can have in American politics.
Look at the nation’s exploding national debt. In an interview with NPR, David Stockman, a member of President Ronald Reagan's fiscal team, blamed the country’s debt woes in part on the success politicians have had in vilifying what were previously two necessary facts of American life: taxes and entitlement reform.

The parties have poisoned those terms, OK? As far back as when I was budget director in the early '80s the Democrats have mounted attack on any effort to look at Social Security, to maybe means test it or reform the program so the cost would grow at a lower rate. And that became the third rail of politics and Republicans have been kind of shuddering in their boots ever since about that.

And then the Republicans turned around and made revenue raising toxic. And have campaigned, you know, from one end of the land to the other on the evil of tax raising, even though anyone with common sense knows that you have to pay your bill sooner or later, and if you're not going to cut spending, which the Republicans have been unwilling to do to date.

One could even argue that this toxic tax taxonomy helped the GOP kill the cap-and-trade bill. They rebranded that market-based approach, first deployed by President George H. W. Bush to reduce acid rain, as a “cap-and-tax scheme”. Due in part to relentless conservative attacks on climate science and economics, Americans who expressed concern about climate change fell from 79 percent, in the days after "An Inconvenient Truth" was released, to 63 percent, when Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats used the cover of the “cap-and-tax” language to defeat the bill.

Environmentalists efforts to fight spin with spin seem to have spun out of control. The Twitter hashtag created to publicize Tuesday’s event, #climatecranks, was used in nearly equal measure by both Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for the Nation who coined the phrase and led the action, and an opponent of greenhouse-gas regulations, who co-opted it to heckle him. And America’s “fair and balanced” network was also quick to belittle the activists' efforts. “Global Warming Nuts Try to Ambush Sen. Inhofe...Fail”, jeered the Fox News headline.

Climate activists have the science on their side, but American conservatives are winning the war of words. And as the rhetoric heats up, so too does the planet.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/02/environmental_insults