Want people to care about climate change? Skip the jargon

If you’re confused what the “circular economy” is, or what it means for a company to go “net-zero,” you’re far from alone. There’s a big mismatch between what scientists, journalists, and activists are saying and what the public understands. This is hardly a new problem, but it’s yet another obstacle to getting people to care about climate change: Obscure words in articles about rising sea levels and supercharged weather could discourage people from wanting to learn more about a planetary crisis.

The solution is to put jargon and buzzwords into simple language that anyone can understand. It takes some effort, of course. A good example is “Up Goer Five,” a diagram by Randall Monroe, the cartoonist behind the website xkcd. It explains how a rocket works using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. Simplifying lingo related to climate change requires a similar process. Take a cold, clinical word like “biodiversity” and turn it into the more evocative “wildlife.” A real head-scratcher like “climate mitigation” becomes “reducing emissions.”

Read the story from Grist by Kate Yoder - “Want people to care about climate change? Skip the jargon.”

Climate emergency is the real 'inconvenience'

Letter from today’s (October 12, 2019) Melbourne Age.

I’m confused, if an overwhelming majority of Australians understand that the first step in negotiating our way out of this human-caused climate mess, is to declare at climate emergency, why can’t our government also see the difficulty?

Continuing the confusion, why did Australians, who apparently are concerned about the damage we are doing to our atmosphere, re-elect a government that is peppered with climate deniers; a group of people, both men and women, who appear to care nought for the future wellbeing of their fellow Australians.

Interestingly it can be explained; well, not explained, but at least understood in some sense.

Sustainability Victoria’s Dianna McDonald recently presented the findings of as large survey two a Melbourne forum, illustrating that while about 70 percent of Victorians care about climate changed want either action on mitigation and adaptation, that concern, the survey found, fell away dramatically  when asked to prioritise state projects.

The projects, it seemed were about “now”, while climate change, in the view of most survey respondents, was still some way off in the future.

Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?

A thousand years from now, when some vaguely human-like machine digs through the ashes of the Twenty-First century and tries to figure out what happened to those once-thriving animals called Homo sapiens, it may be confused about why an intelligent species that could build rockets and write songs like “Imagine” couldn’t heed warnings of its own destruction. A key question for future historians of the universe: How stupid were those humans anyway?

 A firefighter watches the Canyon Fire as it burns near
 homes on September 25th, 2017 in Corona, California.

A new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the gold standard of climate science, outlines in frightfully stark terms what it would take to keep the earth’s temperature below 1.5 C of warming, which is the threshold for avoiding catastrophic climate change like the collapse of rain forests and coral reefs, rapid melting of the ice sheets that would swamp coastal cities around the world and heat extremes that could lead to millions of climate refugees.

Read the story from Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell - “Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?”