Do phrases like 'global boiling' help or hinder climate action?

• The era of global warming has ended, he declared dramatically, and the era of “global boiling” has arrived.
• Do phrases like this actually help drive us towards faster and more effective climate action?
• Or do they risk making us prone to climate doomism, and risk prompting a backlash?

Rhetoric and reality

• In many ways, it’s one of the only tools he has, given the UN has global influence but limited real power.
• It’s designed to sound the alarm and trigger more radical action to stave off the worst of climate change.
• At one level, “global boiling” is clearly an exaggeration, despite the extreme summer heat and fire during the northern summer.
• Fewer doubters are trying to discredit the fundamental science than during the long period of manufactured scepticism in Western nations.
• In this context, we can see “global boiling” as an expression of humanitarian concern backed by rigorous science showing the situation continues to worsen.

The hazards of theatrical language

• Or the warnings can add to climate anxiety and make people feel there’s no hope and therefore no point in acting.
• Catastrophic language often has moral overtones – and, as we all know, we don’t like being told what to do.
• Hot language can motivate us, just as quieter, process-heavy, technocratic language can.
• It can be folded into a discourse of hope and aspiration for the future, rather than of fear and trembling.

Rethinking calamity

• The poor and marginalised, both authors observe, are already living through crises, year-in and year-out.
• They suffer what Nixon dubs “slow violence”, punctuated by dramatic environmental events such as landslides and failed harvests.
• What he’s hoping is to make people listen – and act – now we can see what climate change looks like.
• Read more:
  The climate crisis is real – but overusing terms like 'crisis' and 'emergency' comes with risk