I grew up in the 1990s, when schools in the United Kingdom had just started teaching the basics of climate change. We copied down the definition of “global warming” and clumsily colored in diagrams depicting the “greenhouse effect.” This language must have spoken to me at the time. I grew up caring about what was happening to the world and ended up writing about it for work.
But today, some of these words sound tired. They are neither urgent nor precise. They don’t capture what’s actually happening: the wildfires and floods, the earthquakes and hurricanes, the mass displacements and lives lost.
How we talk about the climate crisis matters. Certain messages prompt more support for climate action than others. One study published as far back as 2011 found that framing the crisis as “climate change” instead of “global warming” caused more people to believe in its existence. Meanwhile, a 2019 study measuring people’s brain patterns and sweaty palms found a 60% stronger reaction to “climate crisis” than “climate change.” Wordchoice and adoption—along with an increase in extreme weather events, more media coverage, and other factors—may have contributed to fast-rising rates of people believing in and worrying about human-caused climate change.
The Guardian in 2019 adopted stronger climate language—including “climate crisis” and “global heating”—in an attempt to step away from vague, euphemistic language that had, for too long, softened the effects of ecological collapse. “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” shared Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner in a statement at the time. “The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”
Dr Brigitte Nerlich, professor of science, language, and society at the University of Nottingham, has studied how people use language to frame climate change for nearly two decades. “The words that you use to talk about something make you act on that phenomenon in very different ways,” she said. Climate language often influences us through metaphors, she noted, because metaphors help scaffold our understanding of a concept, and act as a mirror that reflects our sense of responsibility. They are what she calls “the mind’s tools to create the world we live in.” In essence, “You pack two concepts into one word,” she said. Think ‘greenhouse effect’ or ‘carbon footprint.’
When it comes to talking about climate change, familiarity is important: Research shows that people’s strongest reactions are to phrases they know best. But as the world changes, we inevitably reach for new ways to express what we’re living through. And if metaphors shape our reality, it has become clear just how urgently we might need new ones—big enough, strange enough, urgent enough—to meet this moment.
“I’ve witnessed people’s joy and elation as they free themselves from constraints about what is possible in terms of expressing their genuine feelings and experiences.”
Heidi Quante
interdisciplinary artist, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
Consider “climate whiplash,” the phenomenon of weather flipping from one extreme to another that now affects up to 15% of cities. The term captures the unpredictability of life in a climate-altered world: droughts turning to floods; heat waves to frosty spells. “It’s not just the change itself,” said Nerlich. “It’s the suddenness with which the change happens, which people don’t think about.”
Or take “global weirding.” Coined back in 2007, the phrase reframes climate change as chaotic, strange, and unprecedented. “Global weirding” has only recently come into its own as food prices rise, dogs bites become more frequent, frogs shrink, and wildflowers flee north. “[Global weirding] captures the whole issue,” Nerlich said. “This chaoticity is what makes climate change dangerous.”
There is something bracing about the specificity of “global weirding,” just as there is withthe growing use of “unnatural disaster” to describe floods, fires, and storms that science shows us are increasingly driven by human activity. “You can’t just deflect it by saying nature has overwhelmed us,” said Nerlich. “It’s us that created these unnatural monsters.”
To keep up with a changing planet, words are compounded in a bid to describe the crisis more clearly. We now use “weatherbombs” to reference sudden storms; “heat dome” to describe high temperatures trapped in one area; and “thirstwaves” to highlight how the atmosphere is soaking up water and causing droughts. These linguistic mashups more efficiently communicate the growing scale and impact of the crisis. We create these combinations, Nerlich noted, “because there are new things to express.” And like any new language, these terms need airtime, repetition, and emotional weight before they can carry the urgency we want them to.
It’s not only the physical impacts that need new names, but the emotional ones, too.
“Solastalgia,” for example, blends “solace” with “nostalgia” to describe the distress and grief of watching a familiar environment degrade in real time: a homesickness for a home that still exists, but is changing before a person’s eyes. Having language for our internal experiences—however messy, subtle, or painful—is powerful in its own right. Research shows that articulating our distress can help us better cope with and process it.
Heidi Quante, an interdisciplinary artist, knows this firsthand. For the past decade, she has worked with communities to create new words for emotions, experiences, and even new phenomena related to the climate crisis. Through her project The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, co-founded with Alicia Escott, Quante has run countless workshops that give people space to name what they’re feeling, a process she says is healing in itself. “I’ve witnessed people’s joy and elation as they free themselves from constraints about what is possible in terms of expressing their genuine feelings and experiences,” she said.
“Language holds your cosmology. It holds your worldview.”
Heidi Quante
interdisciplinary artist, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
The Bureau’s collective wordsmithing has produced a lexicon of poignantly precise words. “Casaperdida,” for example, draws on Spanish and Portuguese to describe the anxiety that one’s house (casa) could be lost (perdido) to extreme weather. And “koyaanisqatsi”borrows from Hopi words to describe a state of existence (qatsi) out of balance (koyaanis). Quante, who grew up speaking three languages, encourages people to draw on their native tongues. “The fact that we’re using English as the dominant language—and with it, a dominant worldview—shows how anaemic it is for addressing the complexity and diversity of experiences,” she said.
And it’s that worldview that has helped drive the very crisis we are now struggling to articulate. “[Language] holds your cosmology,” she said. “It holds your worldview.” Indigenous languages often contain words that reflect ways of relating to the world that have been lost in the West. An example is “sila,” an Inuit word with a complex, layered meaning: it refers to the weather as a manifestation of nature that should be respected, and with whom the human experience is intimately entangled.
The dominant English-language framing of climate change is, in contrast, one of conflict: We “fight” it; wage a “battle against” it. And the rise of climate “doomerism” suggests that many believe it’s a war we are destined to lose. This outlook can be crushing. Research shows that fear alone is not the most efficient motivator for action. And yet, we lack words that embody a vision for change. “[Our] language hasn’t been able to express the hopeful, optimistic sides of things,” Nerlich said. “The motivational aspects of climate action have not had the influx of words that are probably needed.”
This is where the Bureau can play a role. Quante points to one co-created word: “Serenteletonic,” the idea that a remarkable chain of events created the present moment and that many possible futures remain, each one dependent on the decisions we make today. “When I get really upset, I find myself going, ‘The future’s plural,’” she said. “It allows me to take a breath.”
Language like “serenteletonic” can help move people past the fear and overwhelm toward a sense of possibility. “People first want to talk about how sad and depressed they are, they want to name that,” Quante said. “But then they want to talk about the world they want to live in.”
This kind of word-making is personally reassuring and culturally resonant. Finding the right words, Quante argues, can bring people together and potentially push them to act. And like any language shift, this takes time. “People will say, I’m not a politician, I don’t protest in the street, I’m not an activist,” she said. “So, we remind them that they can create new words. It’s beautiful to help expand what it means to be a culture shifter. Social change is in their grasp.”
Biome
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