Figures of speech and the use of language have changed, as climate change has become a global and generally acknowledged environmental problem requiring political measures. Still in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, “greenhouse effect” and “enhanced greenhouse effect” were generally used terms. Their connotation was notably positive as without greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect that follows, the Earth would not be inhabitable. During the mid-1990s, these terms were replaced by a more specific term “climate change”, which soon became
25 In an interview with The Economist in 2010 ( http://www.economist.com/node/15473066 ) Rajendra Pachauri was asked: “Isn’t it rather remarkable that you should have this organisation that does not have any procedure for dealing with conflict of interest, regardless of whether there is conflict of interest.” In his response he explained that he never has accepted any money from the IPPC: ”Why would I raise something, unless there is a reason for me to raise it? (...) So I’ve never felt the need for it. If somebody else feels the need for it go ahead. My behaviour is above reproach…”
26 For instance the EU has funded Pachauri’s own organisation’s, TERI’s (The Energy and Resource Institute) Himalayas research: the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) funds the “Highnoon” project with three million euro.
a superordinate concept of “global warming” inspired by global change research.
While the term “climate change” was still regarded as relatively neutral (a change can always go both ways), global warming was a term clearly describing a one-way change.
At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century the entire conceptual apparatus and vocabulary concerning climate change started shifting in a direction that clearly uses language more forcefully and as a means of effect. Al Gore launched the term “climate crisis” and the British environmental movement began to talk of a “climate chaos” and “climate catastrophe”. The latter was first mentioned in the context of climate change in the German-language magazine Der Spiegel in April 1986 (Hulme 2009a:63). It is likely that the word “crisis” was considered too local a phenomenon, whereas “catastrophe” clearly referred to a vast process: at least a regional or even global series of events. The terms also soon became frequently used in the media, blogosphere, politics and in general discussions. Actually, ‘climate chaos’ is a sort of conceptual tautology. As meteorologist Edward Lorenz observed already in the 1960s, the functioning of the atmosphere is a chaotic system in itself.
(Hulme 2009a:27)
Some sort of a climax was reached just prior to the Copenhagen Climate Conference at the end of 2009, when people started to generally use figures of speech like “destruction of the globe” or ”saving the planet”, respectively, in the context of climate change. For example, on its official Internet site, the European Parliament provided a counter that calculated the days, hours and minutes that humankind had left to save our planet from destruction. The destruction deadline was the afternoon of the last day of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, at the precise moment when the decisions are usually presented according to the climate conference format.
As is generally known, the final results obtained from the Copenhagen Climate Conference were rather meagre.
As climate change developed conceptually, also, a huge change took place in the entire framework of the climate change narrative. As in the 1990s climate change was still generally regarded as an environmental problem comparable to acidification or ozone depletion and researched by meteorology and other natural sciences, during the first decade of the 21st century the interpretation of the problem was extended to cover entirely new areas. Today, climate change can be regarded as an economic issue (e.g. Stern 2006) or an energy issue (IEA, IAE); it can be considered from the viewpoint of moral and societal justice (e.g. the World Council of Churches, WCC), from a cultural heritage perspective, or as a development question (e.g. Earth Summit 1992 and Johannesburg Summit 2002), as a national and international security issue (e.g. Pentagon reports of 2004 and 2010), as a future challenge of humankind (UN) or as a demographic phenomenon. In addition to this, climate change has rapidly spread from the world of science, politics, media, public discussions and the Internet to the arts: theatre, cinema, music and literature. Films such as The Day
After Tomorrow (2004) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006) had a crucial impact on how climate change became part of public discussion, as well as into the political awareness in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, although according to surveys these films aroused controversial reactions in viewers (Reusswig &
Leiserowitz 2005). (Hulme 2009a:225–228)
In recent years, climate change and the combating thereof has received more and more public attention and has also taken more shocking forms with even traces of ecofascism27. One of the most shocking examples is the advertisement video ‘No Pressure’28 of the 10:10 climate change campaign, which was released in Great Britain in October 2010. In the film, persons in classrooms and in other places claiming to be indifferent towards their carbon footprint are exploded into pieces in a showy manner. The campaign video, which was financially supported by the British government, was claimed to be justified with the casualties of climate change. “We
‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change.”29
Another example of a shocking campaigning was from the video30 of Greenpeace in 2007: a young, angry boy has been staged as a threatening creature, whose hatred has been interpreted as similar to fundamentalism31.
All in all, over the past years climate change has become a kind of hyper ideology which is, according to Hulme (2007b), a great mixture of religious, historical, cultural, political and ideological baggage. As a curiosity I could mention certain web pages32 here presenting different issues and phenomena plucked from public discussions and which are claimed to have been caused by climate change. The list is quite interesting in its variety, proving the omnipotent explanatory power of climate change. In Chapter 5, I will deal with the framework narrative of climate change more specifically and analyse the different ways in which climate change is conveyed to the public and our perceptual consciousness. The means and approaches that are regarded as the solution for climate change are directly comparable to the conceptual and philosophical reality through which we perceive climate change.
Climate change can be regarded as a result of, for example, population or economic
27 Among others, the conservative website The Blaze interpreted the No Pressure campaign to be a glorifier of ecofascism: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/no-pressure-new-environmental-campaign-glorifies-eco-fascism/. A similar interpretation was presented by a blogger of The Daily Telegraph: http://blogs.telegraph.
co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100056586/eco-fascism-jumps-the-shark-massive-epic-fail/
28 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/30/10-10-no-pressure-film
29 The statement concerning 300 000 annual victims of climate change is debatable and difficult to trace back;
the IPCC, for instance, has not presented any approximations as such.
30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7875_rv1s
31 An example of an exaggerating comparison, according to my judgement, can be found on the following blog:
http://notrickszone.com/2013/10/19/young-arctic-sunrise-activist-denied-bail-greenpeace-insists-its-the-moral-conscience-truth-of-the-planet/
32 http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
growth, values, technological development, institutional changes, power dynamics or of other factors that increase greenhouse gases. This abundance of competing viewpoints is one of the characteristics of a wicked problem, which I will present in more detail in Chapter 6.
As was noted in the chapter concerning the IPCC, it is noteworthy for the purpose of climate change discussions to recognise that the concept “climate change” has varying meanings. The same word can refer to natural climate variation or to human-induced anthropogenic climate change. Therefore many people use the prefix to specify the phenomenon in question. The IPCC’s reports speak of climate change in general – about climate change independent of the causes – whereas in public discussions climate change includes an implicit reference to a change caused by humankind. In this respect ”global warming” is a less ambiguous concept, and it has therefore become more and more common over the past years, when referring to human-induced climate change33. (Hulme 2009a:xxxviii–xxxix)