The Guardian: Call it "climate emergency", not "climate change"

The word czars are at it again. The Guardian newspaper announced an update to its style guide Friday. Not content to use the term “climate change” anymore, the liberal-leaning publication will now label it “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”. Also, “global heating” is preferred over “global warming”. The current terms aren’t banned, they are just no longer the preferred language. You probably won’t be surprised to read that The Guardian is taking its cues from the United Nations.

Advertisement

We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

“Increasingly, climate scientists and organisations from the UN to the Met Office are changing their terminology, and using stronger language to describe the situation we’re in,” she said.

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, talked of the “climate crisis” in September, adding: “We face a direct existential threat.” The climate scientist Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a former adviser to Angela Merkel, the EU and the pope, also uses “climate crisis”.

In December, Prof Richard Betts, who leads the Met Office’s climate research, said “global heating” was a more accurate term than “global warming” to describe the changes taking place to the world’s climate. In the political world, UK MPs recently endorsed the Labour party’s declaration of a “climate emergency”.

This normalization of the hysteria presented by the left is to be expected, I suppose, as Democrats in the majority of the U.S. House of Representatives propose introducing taxation (a carbon tax) and increased regulations as remedies for saving Planet Earth. A few Republicans are even on board. Radical environmentalism is worldwide at this point.

Advertisement

In recent weeks, climate science experts like AOC and other Democrats signing on to the Green New Deal have explained that the earth only has 12 years left before we all die, or something. As a matter of fact, Beto regularly says the earth will only survive 10 more years. So, sure that would warrant language like the words ’emergency’ if we all believed such blather. But, we don’t. Honest skepticism is labeled as climate denial and the self-righteous scolding from the left kicks in.

Oh, wait. I will no longer be labeled as a skeptic but as “climate science denier” rather than “climate skeptic”. Skeptics don’t really deny that the earth’s climate changes, though. Speaking for myself, I understand climate change as Mother Nature’s cyclical changes. Some years the part of the country where I reside is hit with hurricanes while some years it is not. What I and other conservatives object to is the demand from liberals that calls for higher taxes and eliminating the fossil fuel industry.

The Guardian now adds the global carbon dioxide level to its daily weather pages.

The update to the Guardian’s style guide follows the addition of the global carbon dioxide level to the Guardian’s daily weather pages. “Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have risen so dramatically – including a measure of that in our daily weather report is symbolic of what human activity is doing to our climate,” said Viner in April. “People need reminding that the climate crisis is no longer a future problem – we need to tackle it now, and every day matters.”

Advertisement

While the newspaper notes a rise in global carbon dioxide, America’s CO2 emissions continue to drop. Some climate activists are even coming around to notice that higher taxes in the form of carbon taxation will hurt low income and middle-class Americans. Surprisingly, there is no mention of a carbon tax in the Green New Deal.

“Carbon tax is often treated as a magic bullet,” said Nicole Ghio, the fossil fuels program manager at the environmental group Friends of the Earth. “It’s unrealistic to expect a carbon tax on its own to solve the climate crisis.”

Other environmentalists have begun treating any pricing-carbon plan with outright hostility. More than two dozen far-left green groups, led by the Food & Water Watch, wrote a letter to House Democrats last year deriding a carbon tax as a “license to pollute.

Their worry is that the burden of paying such a tax would be borne by the poor not only through higher prices for food and fuel, but by proximity to polluters that tend to build refineries and other facilities near low-income and minority neighborhoods.

“Carbon pricing and other market mechanisms,” the left-wing groups write, “rely on market forces that have already delivered a substantial and disparate toxic burden faced by socially and economically disadvantaged communities.”

Advertisement

It’s only a matter of time before the new terminology appears in U.S. newspapers.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
Advertisement
Advertisement