The Words “Climate Change” May End Up Being The Biggest Lie Ever Told
1 in 3 people on Planet Earth are living through a record-breaking heatwave right now. Thailand has just recorded the hottest temperatures it’s ever had — 45ºC (113ºF) — and a record breaking heat index (“feels like” temperature) of 54ºC (130ºF).
130 degrees? The summer’s barely begun.
Meanwhile, the UN’s climate agency just released its State of Global Climate Report for last year, confirming the climate horror that was 2022.
Killer floods, droughts and heat waves hit around the world, costing many billions of dollars. Global ocean heat and acidity levels hit record highs and Antarctic sea ice and European Alps glaciers reached record low amounts, according to the United Nations’ climate agency’s State of Global Climate 2022 report released Friday.
This is the brutal, startling reality of climate change.
Of..wait..what?
“Climate change”? The climate isn’t changing. It’s heating. Rapidly. Faster than at any point in hundreds of millions of years. It’s heating so fast that this is the stuff entire geotemporal boundaries are made of — “ages” in geological history. So fast that it’s shattering scientists’ worst predictions — and making reality look like a sci-fi movie, where scores of people die off in Canada because of sweltering heat.
It’s not “change” of some symmetrical, anodyne, innocuous kind. The planet isn’t getting cooler. It’s rapid, sudden, potentially runaway, already lethal, discontinuous transformation in one direction. It’s getting hotter, fast.
We should stop calling it “climate change.” Now, before you object, bear with me, and let’s investigate the history of the term.
We used to call it “global warming.” Not so long ago. The big we, as in, all of us, because that is what the norm was. That’s the term which dominated public discourse, and you’d read it in papers and books and articles. Not the seemingly anodyne “climate change.”
That was a far, far more accurate term. And that was the problem.
Here’s little factoid for you. Do you know who invented the term “climate change”? Frank Luntz. The Republican “strategist.” Why?
Luntz played a role in turning the environment into a partisan battlefield. During President George W. Bush’s first term, his infamous memo warned Republican party leaders that they were losing “the environmental communications battle,” an issue on which Bush was “most vulnerable.” He advised them to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around climate change and drop “global warming” for the less scary-sounding “climate change.”
“Global warming” was dangerous. Because it was true. Too frightening. Too true. Too real. To self-explanatory, powerful, and strong. It had to be Orwellianized. It had to memory-holed. Doublespeak had to be crafted — to create the impression that there was some “debate” on this topic.
Debate like what? Debate like: maybe the planet wasn’t just warming. Maybe the temperature and climate were just “changing.” Naturally. Not as a result of human influences. Not as a result of unbridled production, consumption, pollution. Maybe this was just something that happened according to the planet’s natural cycles and rhythms. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Doubt had to be manufactured. That’s why Luntz invented the term “climate change.”
Luntz rebranded global warming as “climate change” because it sounds far, far less dangerous, problematic, severe, worrisome. The usual network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets immediately — as if by design — began to use it. And the rest is history. By now, all of us use a term that a Republican strategist came up with to make global warming sound less dangerous and wonder why we can’t fix the planet.
There we are, too many of us, still using it. It’s certainly all over the news today. We’re using terms designed by a Republican strategist who wanted to deny the truth of global warming to refer to it. What does that make us? Suckers, marks, rubes. Too many of us have fallen for a branding campaign. One designed to pull the wool over eyes about, oh, only the most urgent issue on earth, on which your life and prosperity very much depend, too. Just ask the 5 million people a year dying of climate cha — global warming. Oh wait, you can’t, because they’re dead.
Sorry to be harsh — but I feel we have to speak honestly about such matters. Because, of course, there is no doubt about what’s happening to the planet. It’s not cooling, it’s warming, it’s not natural, it’s profoundly unnatural, as in, human-made, and even at that, made by a certain lifestyle of rampant overconsumption, sprawl, greed, and materialism.
What does that make Luntz, by the way? Well, it’s not too hard to see that Luntz’s idea of rebranding global warming as climate change worked.
For decades, nobody much cared. Luntz’s rebranding took place in the early 2000s — when the window to stop the planet hitting severe warming was closing. And the window did close. Now, 2.3 degrees of warming is more or less locked in. We’re only at about one so far — and we’ve got killer heat domes in Canada. Want to venture a guess about what happens as the temperature goes on rising?
Luntz’s campaign worked brilliantly. Elites around the planet began using this new term — “climate change” — to sound smart. To please America, the most powerful nation on earth. To align their interests with it. And as elites changed their language, their attitudes and sentiments changed, too. No longer was anyone interested in really stopping runaway global warming. Why — did such a thing even exist?
It was Orwell’s great lesson writ large. If you can disappear a thing in language, you can make people stop thinking it, and it simply…vanishes. The point of Orwellian doublespeak is to veil the truth with doubt, to filigree it with the shadows of complacency, to make the lie seem real. And the truth is that thanks to Luntz, the GOP, American media, and elites around the world following their lead, the dire threat of global warming soon enough became the anodyne sounding “climate change.” And who really worries about that? It makes you think you might be sitting on a tropical beach sipping a Mai Tai — not boiled alive by a killer heat wave.
All the urgency and danger and severity went out of the issue, and the world simply dilly-dallied as if there was plenty of time to waste about a problem that probably wasn’t even going to be much of a problem.
Bang. And here we are, just a few short decades later. The planet has heated dramatically. People are dying from killer heat. We need a whole new vocabulary to describe how rapidly and badly the temperature’s rising. “Summer” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. It’s now a time of mortal danger for people, whether from “heat domes” or “megafires” or “megafloods” or “megafires” and so on.
And yet we’re still using the vocabulary of global-warming deniers to describe all this: “climate change.”
We’ve been made fools of, in such a deep and lasting way. It’s taken away our power — using the Orwellian language which was chosen for us — to fight the biggest and most urgent problem human civilisation has ever faced.
So if using the term “climate change” makes us apathetic, spineless, useful idiots, to elites who’d happily watch the world literally burn — what does that make Frank Luntz? Well, Luntz will — or perhaps should — probably go down as one of history’s great monsters. 5 million deaths a year linked to “climate change”? Climate change is going to claim tens, probably hundreds of millions of lives. As nations burn, cities sink, societies go up like tinderboxes, and the desperate and impoverished try to flee it all.
Nobody can really say how much of that death and despair can be ascribed to Luntz alone. But would you like have to played a hand in hundreds of millions of deaths?
Maybe that’s why Luntz himself is apologetic about his malign, Orwellian creation. Of course, apologies aren’t nearly enough. It’s like watching an abuser hit you and say “sorry.” Redress means a whole lot more, and it starts the true process of reparations.
You should care intensely about all this. Because, like I said, you’ve been made a fool of. You’re using the language global warming deniers invented to try, futilely, to describe what’s happening to a dying planet. Of course, it doesn’t work very well, because they invented the very term “climate change” to stop any reality from entering the discussion, minds, societies, public spheres. Their goal was to kill the truth, and they succeeded.
“Climate change” might well prove the Biggest Lie ever told.
Luntz is now offering his messaging services to the cause of climate action. “I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz told the Senate committee. “Just stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago, because it’s not accurate today.”
Don’t listen to me — listen to the strategist who invented the Lie. You should stop telling it, too. Even he regrets it, and he’s a Republican strategist. LOL.
It’s not “climate change.” It never was. It’s “global warming,” yes. But even more than that, it’s Extinction.
Extinction doesn’t mean “all the life on planet Earth dies,” it means that mass extinction happens on a scale we have yet to comprehend — across the planet, to all life, millions of species, in every biome and ecology. It means ecosystems collapse, and with them, everything we rely on, from the bees that pollinate the plants that provide us with the resources we need and the air we breathe, to our supply chains being destroyed by mega-weather. It means millions and millions of people die from the resulting chaos and collapse that ensues. And our civilization, and everything it entails — economy, society, democracy, culture — is hardly likely to survive an event like that intact.
Yes, it sounds dire. That’s because it contains power, resonance, urgency, forces a confrontation with reality. It has deep, serious, profound meaning. Yes, it’s frightening.
It should be. Because it’s true.
Umair
April 2023
