Calling it the ‘climate crisis’ doesn’t spur more action

If you use the term 'climate change', you might be surprised to learn that it was coined in 2002 by an advisor to former US President Bush as a "less frightening" and "less emotional" alternative to 'global warming'. Other groups, though, have made different choices about the climate terms that they use. In 2019, for example, the style guide of the UK's Guardian newspaper changed to favour the use of 'climate emergency' or 'climate crisis' over 'climate change', which it felt to be "too passive and gentle", and also to favour 'global heating' over 'global warming'.

But does the specific terminology make any difference to public attitudes to the climate — or to our willingness to take action to reduce our own contribution to the climate crisis?

The evidence to date has been mixed. Some research has found that 'climate change' is perceived as being 'more scientific' than 'global warming', for example, while other studies have concluded that whether 'climate change', 'global warming', or 'climate crisis' is used, it makes no difference to people's beliefs in the reality of what's happening.

To explore this in more detail, and with a modern sample of people, Danielle Goldwert at New York University and colleagues ran two large experiments, published recently in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, that explored the impact of a total of 10 different terms.

In the first study, 6,132 people from 63 different countries read a definition of 'climate change'. Then, they were asked questions about their willingness to take action to combat it. However, the specific term that was used in this material varied between participants, and was selected from this list: climate change, the climate crisis, global warming, global heating, the climate emergency, carbon pollution, carbon emissions, and greenhouse gases.

The team found that about three quarters of the participants said they were willing to take action — but the specific terminology had no impact on this. They also found that this result held, whatever the participants' own political ideology, age, gender, socioeconomic status, or their level of education.

For the second study, which was very similar to the first, the researchers recruited a more homogenous group: 1,601 US adults. They also added the term 'global boiling' to the list of alternative terms. Again, they found that the specific terminology had no impact on the participants' willingness to take action. As in the first study, this finding held even when they took into account a variety of other factors, including political ideology. The researchers also found that specific terminology had no impact on the participants' responses to other questions about their level of support for policies designed to address climate change (such as adding carbon taxes to fossil fuels), or their level of concern about the climate.

It's possible that specific terms did have varying impacts on people's climate attitudes in the past, the team writes — but their findings suggest that this isn't the case now. And this has implications for efforts to encourage people to take action to climate change, they write. "Our findings suggest that focusing on subtle terminology in climate messaging is not an effective use of resources."

Another recent study, available in Climatic Change, on 5,137 adults in the US, also explored the impacts of variations in climate terminology on people's attitudes, and reached much the same conclusion. The differences in effects of specific terms on the participants' reported willingness to take action were "small at best, and Republications were often unresponsive," the team notes. Echoing Goldwert and her colleagues, they feel that changing climate terminology is "likely not the key solution for promoting climate action."

Read the paper in full:
Goldwert, D., Doell, K. C., Van Bavel, J. J., & Vlasceanu, M. (2024). Climate change terminology does not influence willingness to take climate action. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102482. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102482

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