{"id":26117,"date":"2023-04-23T22:39:33","date_gmt":"2023-04-24T05:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26117"},"modified":"2023-04-23T22:39:34","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T05:39:34","slug":"we-should-stop-calling-it-climate-change-and-start-calling-it-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/04\/23\/we-should-stop-calling-it-climate-change-and-start-calling-it-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"WE SHOULD STOP CALLING IT \u201cCLIMATE CHANGE\u201d \u2014 AND START CALLING IT EXTINCTION"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

umair haque<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apr 22, 2023 (Medium.com)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Words \u201cClimate Change\u201d May End Up Being The Biggest Lie Ever Told<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/
Image Credit: Henry Nicholls<\/a>. Follow him here<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

1 in 3 people on Planet Earth are living through a record-breaking<\/a> heatwave right now. Thailand has just recorded the hottest temperatures it\u2019s ever <\/em>had \u2014 45\u00baC (113\u00baF) \u2014 and a record breaking heat index (\u201cfeels like\u201d temperature) of 54\u00baC (130\u00baF).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

130 degrees? The summer\u2019s barely begun<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the UN\u2019s climate agency just released its State of Global Climate Report for last year, confirming the climate horror that was 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

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\u2019 climate agency\u2019s State of Global Climate 2022 report<\/a> released Friday.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is the brutal, startling reality of climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of..wait..what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cClimate change\u201d? The climate isn\u2019t changing. It\u2019s heating<\/em>. Rapidly.<\/strong> Faster than at any point in hundreds of millions of years. It\u2019s heating so fast that this is the stuff entire geotemporal boundaries are made of \u2014 \u201cages\u201d in geological history. So fast that it\u2019s shattering scientists\u2019 worst predictions \u2014 and making reality look like a sci-fi movie, where scores of people die off in Canada because of sweltering heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not \u201cchange\u201d of some symmetrical, anodyne, innocuous kind. The planet isn\u2019t getting cooler. It\u2019s rapid, sudden, potentially runaway, already lethal, discontinuous transformation in one direction<\/em>. It\u2019s getting hotter, fast<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We should stop calling it \u201cclimate change.\u201d <\/em>Now, before you object, bear with me, and let\u2019s investigate the history of the term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We used to call it \u201cglobal warming.\u201d <\/strong>Not so long ago. The big we, as in, all of us, because that is what the norm was. That\u2019s the term which dominated public discourse, and you\u2019d read it in papers and books and articles. Not the seemingly anodyne \u201cclimate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was a far, far more accurate term. And that was the problem<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s little factoid for you. Do you know who invented the term \u201cclimate change\u201d? <\/strong>Frank Luntz<\/strong><\/a>. The Republican \u201cstrategist.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Luntz played a role in turning the environment into a partisan battlefield. During President George W. Bush\u2019s first term, his infamous memo<\/a> warned Republican party leaders that they were losing \u201cthe environmental communications battle,\u201d an issue on which Bush was \u201cmost vulnerable.\u201d He advised them to emphasize a lack of scientific certainty around climate change and drop \u201cglobal warming\u201d for the less scary-sounding \u201cclimate change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGlobal warming\u201d was dangerous. Because it was true<\/em>. 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 \u2014 to create the impression that there was some \u201cdebate\u201d on this topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Debate like what? Debate like: maybe the planet wasn\u2019t just warming. Maybe the temperature and climate were just \u201cchanging<\/em>.\u201d 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\u2019s natural cycles and rhythms. Maybe, maybe, maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doubt had to be manufactured. That\u2019s<\/em> why Luntz invented the term \u201cclimate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luntz rebranded global warming as \u201cclimate change\u201d because it sounds far, far less dangerous, problematic, severe, worrisome. The usual network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets immediately \u2014 as if by design \u2014 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\u2019t fix the planet<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There we are, too many of us, still using it<\/em>. It\u2019s certainly all over the news today. We\u2019re using terms designed by a Republican strategist who wanted to deny the truth of global warming to refer to it<\/em>. 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<\/a>, too. Just ask the 5 million people a year dying of climate cha \u2014 global warming. Oh wait, you can\u2019t, because they\u2019re dead<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorry to be harsh \u2014 but I feel we have to speak honestly about such matters. Because, of course, there is no doubt about what\u2019s happening to the planet<\/em>. <\/strong>It\u2019s not cooling, it\u2019s warming, it\u2019s not natural, it\u2019s profoundly unnatural, as in, human-made, and even at that, made by a certain lifestyle of rampant overconsumption, sprawl, greed, and materialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does that make Luntz, by the way? Well, it\u2019s not too hard to see that Luntz\u2019s idea of rebranding global warming as climate change worked<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, nobody much cared.<\/strong> Luntz\u2019s rebranding took place in the early 2000s \u2014 when the window to stop the planet hitting severe warming was closing. And the window did<\/em> close. Now, 2.3 degrees of warming<\/a> is more or less locked in. We\u2019re only at about one so far \u2014 and we\u2019ve got killer heat domes in Canada. Want to venture a guess about what happens as the temperature goes on rising?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luntz\u2019s campaign worked brilliantly. Elites around the planet began using this new term \u2014 \u201cclimate change\u201d \u2014 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 \u2014 did such a thing even exist<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Orwell\u2019s great lesson writ large. If you can disappear a thing in language, you can make people stop thinking it, and it simply\u2026vanishes.<\/strong> 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 \u201cclimate change.\u201d And who really worries about that? It makes you think you might be sitting on a tropical beach sipping a Mai Tai \u2014 not boiled alive by a killer heat wave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t even going<\/em> to be much of a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bang. And here we are, just a few short decades later. The planet has heated dramatically. <\/strong>People are dying<\/a> from killer heat. We need a whole new vocabulary to describe how rapidly and badly the temperature\u2019s rising. \u201cSummer\u201d doesn\u2019t quite mean what it used to. It\u2019s now a time of mortal danger for people, whether from \u201cheat domes\u201d or \u201cmegafires\u201d or \u201cmegafloods\u201d or \u201cmegafires\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet we\u2019re still using the vocabulary of global-warming deniers to describe all this: \u201cclimate change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve been made fools of, in such a deep and lasting way.<\/strong> It\u2019s taken away our power \u2014 using the Orwellian language which was chosen for us \u2014 to fight the biggest and most urgent problem human civilisation has ever faced.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if using the term \u201cclimate change\u201d makes us apathetic, spineless, useful idiots, to elites who\u2019d happily watch the world literally burn \u2014 what does that make Frank Luntz? Well, Luntz will \u2014 or perhaps should \u2014 probably go down as one of history\u2019s great monsters. 5 million deaths a year linked to \u201cclimate change\u201d? 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody can really say how much of that death and despair can be ascribed to Luntz alone. But would you<\/em> like have to played a hand in hundreds of millions of deaths?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that\u2019s why Luntz himself is apologetic<\/a> about his malign, Orwellian creation. Of course, apologies aren\u2019t nearly enough. It\u2019s like watching an abuser hit you and say \u201csorry.\u201d Redress means a whole lot more, and it starts the true process of reparations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You should care intensely about all this. Because, like I said, you\u2019ve been made a fool of<\/em>. <\/strong>You\u2019re using the language global warming deniers invented to try, futilely, to describe what\u2019s happening to a dying planet. Of course, it doesn\u2019t work very well, because they invented the very term \u201cclimate change\u201d to stop any reality from entering the discussion, minds, societies, public spheres. Their goal was to kill the truth, and they succeeded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cClimate change\u201d might well prove the Biggest Lie ever told.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Luntz is now offering his messaging services to the cause of climate action. \u201cI\u2019m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,\u201d Luntz told the Senate committee. \u201cJust stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago, because it\u2019s not accurate today.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t listen to me \u2014 listen to the strategist who invented the Lie. <\/em>You should stop telling it, too<\/strong>. Even he regrets it, and he\u2019s a Republican strategist. <\/em>LOL.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not \u201cclimate change.\u201d It never was. It\u2019s \u201cglobal warming,\u201d yes. But even more than that, it\u2019s Extinction.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extinction doesn\u2019t mean \u201call the life on planet Earth dies,\u201d it means that mass extinction happens on a scale we have yet to comprehend \u2014 across the planet, to all life, millions of species, in every biome and ecology. It means ecosystems collapse, and with them, everything<\/em> 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 \u2014 economy, society, democracy, culture \u2014 is hardly likely to survive an event like that intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, it sounds dire. That\u2019s because it contains power, resonance, urgency, forces a confrontation with reality. It has deep, serious, profound meaning<\/a>. Yes, it\u2019s frightening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It should be. <\/em><\/mark>Because it\u2019s <\/mark>true.<\/em><\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Umair
April 2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

umair haque Apr 22, 2023 (Medium.com) The Words \u201cClimate Change\u201d 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\u2019s ever had \u2014 45\u00baC (113\u00baF) \u2014 and a record breaking heat index… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[467,468],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26117"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26117"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26118,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26117\/revisions\/26118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}