Carbon pollution: Whats the use of a new term in the climate debate?
Carbon pollution – it sounds made up, and it is. We examine the birth of the new term and whether it could help create a more accurate climate debate.
Communicators have long been interested in which terms in the climate debate have the greatest resonance. Perhaps the best-explored is whether it’s more effective to refer to ‘global warming’ or to ‘climate change’ – which some US studies have shown to affect how concerned people feel about the climate.
In June, one of the world’s most quoted people threw a new term into the mix: ‘carbon pollution’. In a speech, US president Barack Obama addressed the scientific basis for climate change, saying: “… year after year, the levels of carbon pollution in our atmosphere have increased dramatically”. He repeated the term another 29 times.
US government departments such as the Environmental Protection Agency and NGOs like the Center for American Progress are also using the term, which now appears on their websites as of this year.
Climate change and global warming: Too divisive?
Dr. Ashley Anderson at Colorado State University has contributed to research projects with Yale University’s project on climate change, examining the terms we use to describe the effect of greenhouse gases, and how they affect perceptions of the issue. She says:
“The differences in interpretations of the two phrases tends to fall on political lines, with Republicans being less likely to believe global warming is happening than climate change. Democrats and Independents, on the other hand, are not any less likely to believe one or the other is happening. Republicans have also rated global warming as less serious than climate change, while Democrats would rate global warming as more serious than climate change.”
In addition, some research suggests the use of the term ‘global warming’ sounds more frightening, while ‘climate change’ sounds less threatening and more controllable.
Anderson explains that Yale research shows strong cross-party support for clean energy – a finding the president taps into in his speech. She says:
“By using the phrase “carbon pollution,” Obama is connecting the issue to energy-related topics – and the data show Americans broadly support clean energy – rather than the more potentially politically polarising terms of climate change or global warming.”
The science bit
There’s a big difference between the new kid on the block and its more venerable counterparts. While ‘carbon pollution’ has been invented with a specific political end in mind, ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ are scientific terms describing specific processes – even though the press and politicians have deployed them interchangeably.
Nasa explains the difference between the two older terms in a blog post. While global warming refers only to the surface warming of the atmosphere, climate change encompasses all the changes that might occur on earth as the climate warms.
It says:
“[T]emperature change itself isn’t the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So “global climate change” is the more scientifically accurate term.”
Horses for courses
Commonly-used scientific terms have frequently become lost in translation when scientists try to use them with the wider public. People often find it hard to understand what scientists mean when they talk about uncertainty, for example – taking it to mean ignorance instead of the range of understanding. The word ‘error’ and ‘bias’ also mean very different things to a lay audience.
A 2011 paper suggests scientists use simpler substitutes for these easily-confused terms so that people don’t get muddled or distracted from the main message. Carbon pollution works on a number of levels: not only does it aim to dissociate from the politicisation of global warming and climate change, it firmly puts the finger on carbon dioxide as the source of the problem and implicitly suggests a solution – carbon reduction.
This strategy could yield interesting results, especially as polling in the UK and US suggests people are still unsure about the causes of climate change, even though they support policies aimed to reduce our emissions – like clean energy.
Writing for the Yale project, Dr Michael Svoboda at the George Washington University says the US president’s speech feeds directly into his government’s new carbon strategy. It builds on a “thematic foundation” , laid weeks before in a report that classes carbon dioxide as a pollutant that levies a social cost on the economy, public health and the environment, he says.
As Svoboda argues in another blog,
“[T]he pairing of “carbon and pollution” creates an implicit argument, linking greenhouse gas emissions with “dirtier” and more directly toxic substances. As a “public bad,” “pollution” creates a demand for public action.”
The tactic has been criticised as “Orwellian” spin by some parts of the media in the US. But there’s another interpretation – the term ‘carbon pollution’ leaves the scientific terms out of the policy debate in Obama’s speech and creates a new term to discuss climate in the political sphere.
Could it work for the UK?
Carbon Brief wanted to test whether there was any difference in people’s reaction to the different terms using our UK tracker poll.
In August, we asked half of respondents if they agree that “The UK needs to work with other countries to reach international agreements to cut carbon pollution”. We asked the other half roughly the same question, but used the term climate change.
Does ‘carbon pollution’ work to make people feel more, or less, convinced about the need for action? From the results, it appears there’s no difference: Seventy-seven per cent of the group we asked about carbon pollution said they wanted to see the government cooperate to combat it – that’s only a one per cent difference from the ‘climate change’ group.
The results aren’t very different to our first poll, carried out in May. We split that survey down the middle, using the term climate change in the questions for one half and global warming for the other. Again, the results showed a difference of only a couple of percentage points.
Balancing accuracy and resonance
But perhaps the question of whether different terms intrinsically make people want to act on climate change or not is the wrong one to ask.
Imperfectly repurposing scientific terms like global warming for the public sphere can backfire, even creating political undertones that distort the original intention. New terms like ‘carbon pollution’ could help start a conversation about how we can be pickier about saying what we mean when we talk about climate change and what to do about it.