Climate change is transforming the way we speak. And that’s a good thing

On a recent Tuesday morning, people in Acapulco got their first indications that an approaching tropical storm might become something more serious. By that night, the most powerful hurricane to ever hit Mexico’s Pacific coast was making landfall.

The storm’s nightmarishly-fast intensification inspired one major news publication to insert a new-ish term into the vernacular: “surprise hurricane.”

Yes, apparently. So get used to it.

Otis was followed by Ciarán, a storm that blew roofs off houses and claimed ten lives in Europe earlier this month, more firmly embedding the term “bomb cyclone” into an expanding lexicon of disaster. “Atmospheric river,” or a current that carves a path of extreme rainfall and flooding, is also now more common parlance. And don’t even get started on “frost quakes.”

Meanwhile formerly familiar terms are being reconsidered. “Natural” disasters are increasingly not that, after all. And is a fire really “wild” if its size and intensity largely result from man-made emissions?

As the language of climate-fueled catastrophe evolves, it could help. The more clearly we can identify strange new varieties of destruction as evidence of active neglect, the more we might be able to muster the collective will to limit the damage.

In a sense, this is part of a linguistic progression that began in 1755, when a massive earthquake leveled Lisbon. The official postmortem once the dust settled in the Portuguese capital omitted some particularly conspicuous words; in a uniquely modern twist, there was no mention of God.

(Old habits die hard: an allegorical painting of the earthquake completed afterward depicted a sword-wielding angel symbolizing divine judgement).

The Lisbon quake is considered a major turning point. Establishing nature as the source of calamity, not the supernatural, ushered in a new era of engineering to account for that. Dams to suppress floods, for example, or flexible skyscrapers to ride out seismic activity.

Now, we seem to be at yet another turning point. First it was deities at the root of our misfortune. Then it was nature. Now it’s us.

One thing that hasn’t changed – even when we speak the same language, we often don’t. Sometimes it’s good to recognize that, even if it requires scientific research.

A few years ago, academics in the US published a study concluding that we really need to get better at communicating about climate change if we want to build the support necessary to do something about it. That could be as simple as choosing some words and not others.

The US study delivered a healthy dose of reality through survey responses. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may call it “irreversible change in the climate system,” but one respondent suggested it would be more helpful to just say “too late to fix anything.”

“Scientists need to replace jargon with everyday language,” the study’s authors concluded.

The need to connect with a broader population is likely to only become more urgent. Hurricane Otis was a taste of things to come, experts say, due to a warming ocean and more conducive atmosphere. The storm foiled traditional modelling, which might be understandable considering it registered in the top 0.01% of all 12-hour intensity changes on record.

Dozens of people were killed, and weeks after it struck dozens more were still missing. As scientists try to prevent similar catastrophes with more accurate forecasting, words will follow suit.

Bomb cyclones may also become more common. One of the scientists who named the phenomenon said in an interview that he’s “definitely expecting” climate change to impact their frequency. The attention-grabbing moniker was chosen to raise awareness of something that seemed to be most prevalent in winter, he said, which is a time when people “let their guard down” following the traditional hurricane season.

Anyone who directly experienced the lethal bomb cyclone that hit California this past March may have felt a powerlessness and awe similar to what people endured in Lisbon more than two-and-a-half centuries earlier – when tremors abruptly rang all the bells in the city, seconds before the first buildings started to collapse. A tsunami and conflagration followed.

In both cases, something previously inconceivable demanded new syntax. More dramatic in the case of “bomb cyclones,” to help people comprehend and prepare. Less supernatural in the case of the earthquake (in line with the Enlightenment era then in full swing), for that same purpose.

Organizations that traffic in words may have a particular responsibility to help fashion more situation-appropriate language. In 2019, the Guardian newspaper in the UK published a glossary of changes it was making to its style guide, including the use of climate “emergency” or “crisis” instead of “change,” and “climate science denier” rather than “climate sceptic.”

“People need reminding that the climate crisis is no longer a future problem,” the publication’s editor-in-chief said.

Those with a direct financial stake in the matter haven’t needed much reminding lately. Some insurers have simply stopped writing new policies for homeowners in places particularly vulnerable to “natural” disasters, for example.

Now, it’s a matter of effectively conveying the message to everyone else.

For more context, here are links to further reading from the World Economic Forum’s Strategic Intelligence platform:

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