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.”

The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis

(This is part three of a work in progress. The series begins with The Last Decade and You, and continues with On Climate, Speed is Everything.

In the last two pieces, I pointed out how getting on the right emissions reduction curve for this era means taking bold action, now. We must peak global emissions by 2020. Then we must cut them in half by 2030 — and then cut them in half again by 2040, and then again, by 2050 — while restoring the natural world and spreading sustainable prosperity. 

Because the planetary crisis is steepening — the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to solve the problems we face — failing to get on the right curve will mean that we end up, very quickly, on an even steeper curve. Wait too long and the curves we face become essentially impossible to meet.

We can fail catastrophically on climate. We’ll know that failure when we have delayed action so long that we find ourselves confronting an insurmountable emissions reduction challenge coupled with rising and untenable losses — a crisis where all humanity’s choices are bad ones. We will have then reached a point where a even drastic program of global carbon austerity — even when combined with our wildest gambles on trying to pull CO2 out of the air and engineer the planet’s temperature — will simply not be enough to avoid tragic, essentially permanent losses for all humanity.

Read the story by Alex Steffen - “The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis.”