Climate Change Terminology

It’s all in the words we use

Variability in terms is a product of government climate

About a decade ago, when some of us were attempting to get the issues of Climate Change to be the basis for the debates on sustainable settlements, it was curious to see the distractions being manufactured in order to avoid taking these debates as comprehensively as they needed to be.

The most ardent opposition to a simple us of language actually came from particular academics who should have been the ones leading the charge to have clear and precise arguments. I suspect that despite their so called concerned views, the overriding pressure was that they were in fact part of large corporations, called universities, that had yet to step up and tackle the then conservative government’s point of views on climate change.

And so we had heated debates about what was the accurate and most appropriate terminology to use when talking about climate change or global warming or whatever.

There’s a good article by Professor Sharon Beder of the University of Wollongong in the Fairfax press that puts the case nicely about how governments are again trying to distract from dealing with the issues by attempting to change the language being used by the their bureaucrats.

here’s the article – click here