Climate optimism has been a disaster. We need a new language – desperately

Elle Mae O'Hagan - "we desperately
need a new language".

In 1988, when the scientist James Hansen told a senate committee that it was “time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”, those who took him seriously assumed that if they just persisted with emphasising that this terrible fact would eventually destroy us, action would be taken. Instead, the opposite happened: when confronted with the awful reality of climate change, most people tended to retreat into a panglossian vision of the future, or simply didn’t want to hear about it.

A lot of work has been done since to understand why climate change is so uniquely paralysing, most prominently by George Marshall, author of the book Don’t Even Think About It. Marshall describes climate change as “a perfect and undetectable crime everyone contributes to but for which no one has a motive”. Climate change is both too near and too far for us to be able to internalise: too near because we make it worse with every minute act of our daily lives; too far because until now it has been something that affects foreign people in foreign countries, or future versions of ourselves that we can only conceive of ephemerally.

Read the comment by Ellie Mae O’Hagan on The Guardian - “Climate optimism has been a disaster. We need a new language – desperately.”