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<h1>A Slip of the Tongue: The Language of Climate Science</h1>
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<div class="">Posted September 16, 2015
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<p><em><span class=""><img alt="Inline image 1" src="cid:ii_14fe14da28d8de1a" height="293" width="440"></span></em></p><p><em><span class="">by </span><span class=""><a class="" title="View all posts by Nicholas Gallie" href="http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/sussexenergygroup/author/nig21/">Nicholas Gallie</a></span><span class=""> </span></em></p><h2><em>On the language of climate science following the Tyndall Assembly 2015</em></h2><p>Hopes
for a legally binding “hard” international agreement amongst nations
attending the 21st COP in Paris in December are fading. A more likely
outcome is a “strong symbolic agreement” with a built in review
mechanism that would allow the “Paris Treaty” to be revisited and
updated on a regular basis. As the prospects for a binding agreement
slip away, so does optimism that the world can keep within the so-called
2 degrees of warming “safe Limit” that is the nominal policy objective
of the UNFCCC. That limit itself, from a climate science perspective
looks increasingly inappropriate. At last week’s Tyndall Assembly – a
gathering of climate scientists, policy academics, psychologists, energy
industry and UK Government representatives, held at the University of
Sussex, the mood was very much that even with a global warming target of
1.5 degrees over pre-industrial temperatures, the world would be
pushing its luck.</p><p>What language then, would be appropriate to
describe the impacts of climate change and their risk of occurrence
should the world, as looks increasingly likely, find itself committed to
“somewhere between three and five degrees” of warming by the end of the
century? Language matters a great deal, because policy and action
consequent upon policy are determined by it. Policy is constructed and
construed within language; it matters profoundly, for example, whether
science advice to policy makers is couched in terms of “danger” or in
terms of “adverse or negative consequences”.</p><p>Climate science,
understandably enough, is concerned with being able to make measurable
observations of real world events and quantify probabilities, but policy
makers (who are people) and people at large lead their lives in terms
of quality, and they respond only to qualitative threats to life as they
know it or would have it. Quantity is only of interest as a bearing on
quality. We forget this. The “negative impact” that a risk assessment
seeks to evaluate is a qualitative event, not a quantity. A 2 degrees of
warming notional boundary is set with respect to increasing likelihoods
of qualitatively devastating events occurring as the climate changes in
response massive energy build-ups within the global atmosphere.</p><p>The
language of carbon, carbon dioxide, two degrees, mitigation,
adaptation, even the term climate change itself, are hopelessly abstract
and completely fail to express or capture quality. The focus on a
chemical element (carbon) takes the eye off the interests behind the
daily decisions that ensure the planet’s energy balance is thrown ever
more out of kilter. This is a major reason why ‘climate change” has so
significantly failed to engage policy makers and the public at large in
the sense of triggering dramatic action and fundamental change necessary
to avert a global lock-in to a catastrophic future.</p><p>But the
linguistic problem, surely the most easy to solve among this problem of
problems that constitutes climate change, turns out not to be not so
easy at all. The scale – the global framing, the futurity, the
imponderability of climate negotiation mechanisms, all these ways of
talking about it, drag climate change out of the reach of lives lived
now and crucially, out of reach of qualitative affect. Unless of course
one’s life is visited by a climate induced event that shatters one’s
sense of place in the world. But for the vast majority of us who live in
advanced economies, this has not the case.</p><p>How about systemic
threat? How about the combined effects of crop failure, mass starvation,
heat stroke, water stress, economic collapse, endemic conflict,
enforced mass migration (refugees or economic migrants?), new pandemics,
of which we are witnessing only the tip of the iceberg (to use a very
unfortunate metaphor) today? Does it help to take a systems view of
climate change impacts if one-off events don’t cut it? But then we are
driven to the limit of language to even begin to describe what all this
might mean in terms of quality, of suffering, of consequence.</p><p>Where
is this driving? In the Tyndall Assembly it was noted how the language
of climate science and policy is already sliding further and further
into the abstract, necessary perhaps to ameliorate the collective
failure (not ours, surely) to address the reality unfolding before us;
language whose quantity is multiplying exponentially along with the
number of aspects and avenues of the problematique that analysis
reveals, while its quality is more and more sifted of affective
potential. A sliding language that retreats lock step with sliding
policy goals and the determination to meet them. We are like the hare,
caught in the headlamps of the <em>thing</em> that is bearing down upon
us but which we can neither describe nor react to because, like the
hare, we don’t have the language for it.</p><p>We ask, what can we do right now, we who are dumbstruck in the face our finitude? And the answer is <em>speak . </em>To
pull climate change into the present, to bring it down to our size, we
have first to make it present in our lives so that it touches and hurts.
Take a leaf out of <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/2071/chris-rapley/duncan-macmillan/9781473622159" target="_blank">Chris Rapley’s book (subject of a brilliant Royal Court Theatre performance earlier this year) <em>2071, The world we will leave our grandchildren</em></a>,
or go for a walk among wildflowers and chase butterflies whose fate is
already sealed – and weep. Our first duty is to make this <em>thing</em>
real in our own lives, by whatever means, and then from that feeling,
from that realisation of quality – act within our own spheres of
influence, limited though these most certainly are. Action has a strange
quality. In the presentness of action, boundaries dissolve and the
nature of what is possible opens up. Anyone who has taken “political”
action will tell you this is true.</p><p>Did I say something
inappropriate. A slip of the tongue, surely? Does feeling really have a
place in an academic science policy forum? This was the subject of a
debate in the University of Sussex’s Politics of Nature forum that ran
simultaneously with the Tyndall Assembly. A great pity there was no
cross over between the events. Without feeling, the forum mused, how are
the people to rise up – us in whose name the world is being consigned
to oblivion.</p><h4>Nick Gallie is a Doctoral Researcher (PhD Candidate) at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Sussex University</h4><a href="http://www.theenergycollective.com/sussexnrggroup/2272238/slip-tongue-language-climate-science">http://www.theenergycollective.com/sussexnrggroup/2272238/slip-tongue-language-climate-science</a><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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