Climate Crisis

This term and the term climate emergency have been used to describe the threat of global warming to humanity and the planet, and to urge aggressive climate change mitigation and "transformational" adaptation. In the scientific journal BioScience, a January 2020 article, endorsed by over 11,000 scientists worldwide, stated that "the climate crisis has arrived" and that an "immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."

The term is applied by those who "believe it evokes the gravity of the threats the planet faces from continued greenhouse gas emissions and can help spur the kind of political willpower that has long been missing from climate advocacy". They believe that, much as global warming drew out more emotional engagement and support for action than climate change, calling climate change a crisis could have an even stronger impact.

A study has shown that the term invokes a strong emotional response in conveying a sense of urgency; some caution that this response may be counter-productive, and may cause a backlash effect due to perceptions of alarmist exaggeration.

 

Until the mid 2010s, the scientific community had been using quite neutral (constrained) language around climate change. Advocacy groups, politicians and the media have traditionally been using a more powerful language than climate scientists. A shift in the scientific language has reflected a greater sense of urgency, from around 2014.^: 2546 Use of the terms "urgency", "climate crisis" and "climate emergency" has grown in scientific publications as well as in mass media. Scientists have called for more extensive action, and "transformational" climate change adaptation which focuses on large-scale change in systems.^: 2546

In 2020 a group of over 11,000 scientists argued in a paper in BioScience that describing global warming as a climate emergency or climate crisis was appropriate. The scientists stated that an "immense increase of scale in endeavor" is needed to conserve the biosphere. They warned about "profoundly troubling signs" which can also have many indirect impacts such as large-scale human migration and food insecurity. These troubling signs include increases in dairy and meat production, fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and tree cover loss. These activities are all concurrent with upward trends in climate change impacts such as rising global temperatures, global ice melt, and extreme weather.

In 2019, scientists published an article in Nature in which they pointed out that evidence from climate tipping points alone suggests that "we are in a state of planetary emergency". They defined emergency as a product of risk and urgency, with both factors judged to be acute. Previous research had shown that individual tipping points could be exceeded with as little as 1–2 °C of global temperature increase (current warming already exceeds 1 °C). A global cascade of tipping points is possible with even greater warming.

In the context of climate change, the term crisis is used for "a crucial or decisive point or situation that could lead to a tipping point." It is a situation with an "unprecedented circumstance."

A similar definition states that crisis in this context means "a turning point or a condition of instability or danger," and implies that "action needs to be taken now or else the consequences will be disastrous."

Another definition talks more about the effects of climate change and defines climate crisis as "the various negative effects that unmitigated climate change is causing or threatening to cause on our planet, especially where these effects have a direct impact on humanity."

 

20th century

 

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has used crisis terminology since the 1980s, with the term being formalized by the Climate Crisis Coalition (formed in 2004).

A 1990 report from the American University International Law Review included legal texts that use the term crisis. For example, "The Cairo Compact: Toward a Concerted World-Wide Response to the Climate Crisis" from 1989 states that "All nations... will have to cooperate on an unprecedented scale. They will have to make difficult commitments without delay to address this crisis."

21st century

 

In the late 2010s, the phrase emerged "as a crucial piece of the climate hawk lexicon", being adopted by the Green New Deal, The Guardian, Greta Thunberg, and U.S. Democratic political candidates such as Kamala Harris. At the same time, it came into more popular use "after a spate of dire scientific warnings and revived energy in the advocacy world".

In the U.S., in late 2018, the United States House of Representatives established the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The name for this committee was regarded as "a reminder of how much energy politics have changed in the last decade". The original House climate committee had been called the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in 2007. It had been abolished when Republicans regained control of the House in 2011.

The advocacy group Public Citizen reported that in 2018, less than 10% of articles in top-50 U.S. newspapers used the terms crisis or emergency. In the same year, only 3.5% of national television news segments in the U.S. referred to climate change as a crisis or emergency (50 of 1400). In 2019, a "Call it a Climate Crisis" campaign was launched. It urged major media organizations to adopt the term climate crisis. In the first four months of 2019, that number of mentions tripled, to 150.

2019 appeared to be a shifting point for the linguistics of climate. Examples of the new linguistic situation include: The U.N. Secretary General's address at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit using a more emphatic language; petitioning of news organizations to alter their language by Al Gore's Climate Reality project, Greenpeace and the Sunrise Movement; and a May 2019 change in the style guide of The Guardian.

The Guardian formally updated its style guide in May 2019 to favor climate emergency, crisis or breakdown and global heating. Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner explained, "We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase 'climate change', for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity." The Guardian became a lead partner in Covering Climate Now, an initiative of news organizations founded in 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to address the need for stronger climate coverage.

In June 2019, Spanish news agency EFE announced its preferred phrase crisis climática (climate crisis). In November 2019, the Hindustan Times also adopted the term because climate change "does not correctly reflect the enormity of the existential threat". Similarly, the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza uses the term climate crisis instead of climate change. One of its editors described climate change as one of the most important topics the paper has ever covered.

On the other hand, in June 2019 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation updated its language guide to read "Climate crisis and climate emergency are OK in some cases as synonyms for 'climate change'. But they're not always the best choice... For example, 'climate crisis' could carry a whiff of advocacy in certain political coverage". Journalism professor Sean Holman does not agree with this and said in an interview: "It's about being accurate in terms of the scope of the problem that we are facing. And in the media we, generally speaking, don't have any hesitation about naming a crisis when it is a crisis. Look at the opioid epidemic, for example. We call it an epidemic because it is one. So why are we hesitant about saying the climate crisis is a crisis?"

In June 2019, climate activists demonstrated outside the offices of The New York Times. They were urging the newspaper's editors to adopt terms such as climate emergency or climate crisis. This kind of public pressure led the New York City Council to make New York the largest city in the world to formally adopt a climate emergency declaration.

In May 2019, Al Gore's Climate Reality Project promoted an open petition asking news organizations to use climate crisis instead of climate change or global warming. The NGO said "it's time to abandon both terms in culture". Likewise, the Sierra Club, the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace, and other environmental and progressive organizations joined in a June 6, 2019 Public Citizen letter to news organizations. They urged the news organizations to call climate change and human inaction "what it is–a crisis–and to cover it like one".

In November 2019, the Oxford Dictionaries declared climate crisis as the Word of the year for 2019. The term was chosen as it matches the "ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year".

In 2021, Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat created a free variable font called "Climate Crisis" having eight different weights that correlate with Arctic sea ice decline, visualizing how ice melt has changed over the decades. The newspaper's art director posited that the font both evokes the aesthetics of environmentalism and inherently constitutes a data visualization graphic.

In the updates to the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity of 2021 and 2022, scientists also used the terms climate crisis and climate emergency, with the title of the publications being "World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency". They demanded that "we need short, frequent, and easily accessible updates on the climate emergency".

In September 2019, Bloomberg journalist Emma Vickers said that crisis terminology may be "showing results", citing a 2019 poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation saying that 38% of U.S. adults termed climate change "a crisis" while an equal number called it "a major problem but not a crisis". Five years earlier, U.S. adults considering it a crisis numbered only 23%.

However, use of crisis terminology in various non-binding climate emergency declarations is regarded as ineffective (as of 2019) in making governments "shift into action".

Concerns about crisis terminology

Emergency framing may have several disadvantages. One disadvantage is that such framing may implicitly prioritize climate change over other important social issues. This could encourage competition among activists rather than cooperation. It could also sideline dissent within the climate change movement itself. It may suggest a need for solutions by government, which provides less reliable long-term commitment than does popular mobilization, and which may be perceived as being "imposed on a reluctant population". Finally, it may be counterproductive by causing disbelief (absent immediate dramatic effects), disempowerment (in the face of a problem that seems overwhelming), and withdrawal.

There could also be a crisis fatigue, in which urgency to respond to threats loses its appeal over time. Such language could lose audiences if time passes without meaningful policies to address the emergency.

Researchers have written that "appeals to fear" usually do not generate "sustained and constructive engagement", noting how psychologists consider humans' responses to danger (fight, flight, or freeze) can be maladaptive if they do not reduce the danger. Agreeing that fear is a "paralyzing emotion", Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, favors climate crisis over other terms because it conveys a sense of both urgency and optimism, and not a sense of doom. Van der Linden said that "people know that crises can be avoided and that they can be resolved".

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe warned in early 2019 that crisis framing is only "effective for those already concerned about climate change, but complacent regarding solutions". She added that it "is not yet effective" for those who perceive climate activists "to be alarmist Chicken Littles", positing that "it would further reinforce their pre-conceived—and incorrect—notions".

Journalists in Germany have warned that crisis may be wrongly understood to suggest that climate change is "inherently episodic" (crises being "either solved or they pass") or as a temporary state before a return to normalcy that is in fact not possible.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, organizer of the Austrian World Summit for climate action, found that people are not motivated by the term climate change. He thinks that focusing on pollution as a term might evoke be a more direct and negative connotation.

Psychological and neuroscientific studies

An advertising consulting agency's 2019 neuroscientific study (120 U.S. people, divided equally among supporters of the Republican Party, Democratic Party and independents) involved electroencephalography (EEG) and galvanic skin response (GSR) measurements. The study measured responses to the terms climate crisis, environmental destruction, environmental collapse, weather destabilization, global warming and climate change. It found that Democrats had a 60% greater emotional response to climate crisis than to climate change. For Republicans the difference in emotional response was even more pronounced: it was three times stronger for climate crisis than for climate change. Climate crisis is said to have "performed well in terms of responses across the political spectrum and elicited the greatest emotional response among independents". The study concluded that the term climate crisis elicited stronger emotional responses than "neutral" and "worn out" terms like global warming and climate change. The term was found to encourage a sense of urgency—though not so strong a response as to cause cognitive dissonance that would cause people to generate counterarguments.

 

 

Research has shown that what a phenomenon is called, or how it is framed, "has a tremendous effect on how audiences come to perceive that phenomenon" and "can have a profound impact on the audience's reaction".

Climate change and its actual and hypothetical effects are usually described in terms of climate risks in scientific and practitioner literature. When it comes to 'dangerous' risks, there are many related terms other than climate crisis. (Following dates aren't necessarily the first use of such terms.)

• climate catastrophe (used with reference to a 2019 David Attenborough documentary, the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, and the 2022 Pakistan floods)
• threats that impact the earth (World Wildlife Fund, 2012—)
• climate breakdown (climate scientist Peter Kalmus, 2018)
• climate chaos (The New York Times article title, 2019; U.S. Democratic candidates, 2019; and an Ad Age marketing team, 2019)
• climate ruin (U.S. Democratic candidates, 2019)
• global heating (Richard A. Betts, Met Office U.K., 2018)
• climate emergency (11,000 scientists' warning letter in BioScience, and in The Guardian, both 2019),
• ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency (all set forth by climate activist Greta Thunberg, 2019)
• global meltdown, Scorched Earth, The Great Collapse, and Earthshattering (an Ad Age marketing team, 2019)
• climate disaster (The Guardian, 2019)
• environmental Armageddon (Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama)
• climate calamity (Los Angeles Times, 2022)
• climate havoc (The New York Times, 2022)
• climate pollution, carbon pollution (Grist, 2022)
• global boiling (U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres speech, July, 2023)
• climate breaking point (Stuart P.M. Mackintosh, The Hill, August 2023)
• (Has humanity) broken the climate (The Guardian, August 2023)

In addition to climate crisis, various other terms have been investigated for their effects on audiences, including global warming, climate change, and climatic disruption, as well as environmental destruction, weather destabilization, and environmental collapse.

In 2022, New York Times journalist Amanda Hess noted how "end of the world" characterizations of the future, such as climate apocalypse, were often used to refer to the current climate crisis, the characterization spreading from "the ironized hellscape of the internet" to books and film.