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Scientists are running low on words to adequately describe the world’s climate chaos. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could already say earlier this month that there was more than a 99 percent chance that 2023 was the hottest year on record. That followed September’s sky-high temperatures—an average of 0.5 degrees Celsius above the previous record—which one climate scientist called “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” When one of this summer’s rapidly intensifying hurricanes, fueled by extraordinarily high ocean temperatures, leapt from a 60-knot tropical storm to a 140-knot Category 5, one scientist simply tweeted: “Wait, what???”
For many climate scientists, words are failing—or at least getting as extreme as the weather. It’s part of the conundrum they face in delivering ever more shocking statistics to a public that may be overwhelmed by yet more dismal climate news. They need to say something urgent … but not so urgent that people feel disempowered. They need to be shocking … but not so shocking that their statements can be dismissed as hyperbole. But what can they do when the evidence itself is actually extreme?
“We’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate the urgency of climate change for decades,” says Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “You have to find this balance of being both scientifically accurate—because that is your credibility and your trust and your personal comfort and self-esteem as a scientist. But you also have to be communicating in really powerful ways.”
There’s another problem: Pick your superlative, and it’s probably growing increasingly deficient for characterizing a given disaster. Take the phrase “mega,” for describing supercharged climate-related catastrophes from megafires to megafloods. “We tack ‘mega’ on everything,” says Heather Goldstone, chief communications officer of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “It’s a megaheatwave, a megadrought, and a megastorm. And it just kind of loses its punch after a while. It still fails to convey the true enormity of what we’re facing.”
And scientists are also just people. “It’s a really tricky balance to navigate, in between being a scientist and being a thinking, feeling human being,” says Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown, which advocates for climate action. “Because we are all conflicted. We’re not neutral observers—we live here.”
Scientists walk a fine line, and a constantly shifting one. They are objective measurers of our world and its climate, gathering temperature data and building models of how Antarctica’s and Greenland’s ice are rapidly deteriorating, or how wildfires like the one that destroyed Lahaina in August are getting more ferocious, or droughts getting more intense. “Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” is not a phrase you’d ever find in a scientific paper, but it’s a reflection of how even objective measurers of the world are getting floored by those objective measurements.
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For the past 10,000 years of human civilization, the climate has been fairly stable. People built coastal cities not expecting sea levels to rapidly rise, or in water-rich regions that are now running dry, or near floodplains that are now filling with ever-bigger floods. In regions where high humidity combines with high temperatures, people are already reaching the thermal limits of their biology. Think of that civilizational fabric as a tablecloth. “We’ve set the whole table for 10,000 years, assuming the tablecloth was going to stay the same. And what we’ve done is pulled the tablecloth out from underneath all of that,” says Goldstone. “The ‘new normal’ is not what we’re seeing right now. The new normal is constant change.”
And constant change is hard to communicate. But what’s essential is to keep people out of harm’s way and to keep them from complacency. If the public gets the idea that climate change is too big and too inevitable, they won’t fight against it. “There’s fear that if you make people hopeless, then they’ll be less likely to take action or to think about climate change when they’re voting,” says Dahl. Hopelessness also leaves people more vulnerable to greenwashing campaigns by fossil fuel companies. “They’ve tried to position themselves as leaders in this transition to a safer, healthier future,” Dahl continues. “If you’re already feeling like your individual actions don’t make a difference, then having the company that provides the gas that fuels your car say, ‘We’re doing our best to reduce carbon emissions,’ it’s easy to go along with that.”
Scientists are finding that the most effective way to communicate news about climate change is to make it more local and personal. Tell a story, and emphasize that all is not lost. When there’s good news, be sure to talk about that, too. This counteracts what’s known as climate change fatalism. “At a certain point, even people who believe that climate change is happening—it’s human caused, it’s important—they simply can no longer engage with the topic, because they just feel so overwhelmed by the idea of it,” says Stony Brook University’s Christine Gilbert, who researches climate communication. “I am of the opinion that there is space for talking about the wins and the successes as a way to kind of continue to ground yourself.”
Just as we can apply any number of dramatic descriptors to the dramatic effects of climate change, so too can we apply them to progress. Scientists and environmentalists have roundly celebrated the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which allocates hundreds of billions of dollars toward climate action. That includes tax breaks for electric appliances and home efficiency upgrades, and will work to juice the domestic green energy economy. And this September, the Biden Administration launched the American Climate Corps, an army of workers who will prepare the country for the climatic challenges to come.
At the same time, the costs of clean energy have cratered: Just in the 2010s, the price of solar dropped more than 80 percent. Wind power is getting cheaper and so are the batteries required to store all that electricity. In California, a quarter of new cars sold are now plug-ins.
“I feel like we also need a new set of superlatives to talk about climate action,” says Marvel. “If you told me even 10 years ago that this is going to be a really big, politically salient issue, and there are going to be multiple governments on multiple levels taking action, I would be pretty stunned. But that’s not to say that it’s going fast enough, because it’s not. I don’t mean to be like a Pollyanna optimist here. But it really is stunning to me how far we’ve come.”
