Abstract
I analyse the jargonized climate change language used in very common material including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), recent economic policy papers (Stern, The economics of climate change, 2006 and Garnaut, Garnaut climate change review, 2008), government responses, and the full set of abstracts for the Climate Congress held in Copenhagen in March 2009. Despite the best efforts of experts who try explain messages of climate action urgency, the fact of climate change seems to still suffer from a credibility shortfall. At least part of this problem are the climate change communication “code words” as described by Hassol, Eos 89(11):106, 2008. She explains that words such as “anthropogenic”, “bias”, “debate”, “enhance”, “positive” (as in positive feedback and trend), and, perhaps most dangerous of all, “theory” have common language meanings very different from their climate change meaning. She says that terms that now seem perfectly reasonable to global change scientists are still jargon in the wider world and always have simpler substitutes. For example few people say “spatial” and “temporal,” they say “space” and “time”. Surely, in day-to-day speech, people say “caused by us (or people)” rather than anthropogenic. The very terminology we have developed to talk about this diabolical challenge for humanity may be slowing down our ability to galvanize the actions so urgently required.
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Note on searching of Stern Report
The searches were conducted on the web-downloadable version available in August 2008. However, Sect. VI of Stern (2006) on the web at this time has an oddly re-numbered Sect.23. Pages as far as this are as in the 2006 version. However, p. 490 (2006 version) is missing and pages after p. 489 are numbered from 1 to 25 when the original numbering begins again. Herein all these page numbers have had 490 added.
Note on CPR Green Paper
The Australian government has since issued a White Paper on its proposed Emissions Trading Scheme which has been the subject of considerable debate. At the time of writing this paper (June 2009), the legislation was before the Federal Parliament.
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Henderson-Sellers, A. (2011). Changing Climate Change Communication. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) The Economic, Social and Political Elements of Climate Change. Climate Change Management. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14776-0_34
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