A new term for global warming, a new effort to define those who refute it

We should call the coming cataclysm not global warming, not climate change, but “deteriorating atmosphere,” according to a study released yesterday by the non-profit public relations firm EcoAmerica. What then, should we call the people who refute it: skeptics? deniers? delayers?
Global warming promises to be a hot topic for the rest of 2009, but with key debates still around the corner, the likely pitchers are warming up by writing about how we should write about warming.
EcoAmerica’s study prematurely made a splash a month ago when a participant leaked some of its survey materials to the media. The media focused on whether it was better or worse to refer to the coming cataclysm as “global warming” or “climate change.” Much snark followed, but all for naught, because in the final report, both terms get the thumbs-down:
For climate change, leading with global warming, climate crisis or climate change tends to polarize and weaken the message. The language itself is especially problematic among swing voters. We should speak of deteriorating atmosphere and only after establishing connections with Americans’ other values first.”
Deteriorating atmosphere just doesn’t have much of a ring to it, much urgency about it, or much imagery within it. But EcoAmerica tested the terms in focus groups and telephone surveys. And their results reflect the influence of Barack Obama, urging two of features of his rhetoric on environmental policy: couching environmental issues as energy issues and wrapping them in values.
Voters are more energized around the energy debate than the climate change debate, but they can become engaged in climate to the extent that they see it as part of energy or pollution, or related to other values and concerns. Messaging on both energy and climate change is much stronger when it uses values-oriented language rather than a technical or policy-oriented approach or when we debate science.
While EcoAmerica tries to define the most successful approach to the debate, Joseph Romm tried again this week to define those on the other team. Romm, a physicist, former assistant secretary of the Energy Department, and blogger at Climate Progress, wants journalists to stop referring to people who refute global warming as “skeptics”:
Let’s first note that neither the deniers nor the delayers are skeptics, the term they (and the media) like to use.
THEY AREN’T SKEPTICAL — THEIR MINDS ARE MADE UP
The traditional or mainstream media still call them “skeptics,” as in this NYT headline. As long as they do so they trivialize the problem and render the word “skeptic” devoid of meaning. All scientists are skeptics…. Skeptics can be convinced by the facts, but not the deniers and delayers. Skeptics (and real scientists) do not continue repeating arguments that have been discredited. Deniers and delayers do.
Romm insists he’s not trying to evoke the spectre of holocaust deniers, but the word denier bears some of that weight. And I wish I could agree with him about “skeptic,” but he’s clinging to a narrow definition of a word that proves very flexible in general use. It can not only mean non-believer and doubter, but one thesaurus considers “prophet of doom” a synonym, suggesting the word can reach all the way around to prophets of global warming doom, like Romm. The problem is that skeptic sounds too noble for people who are dragging their feet on a planet in peril.
Is he asking too much of the media? If you think so, consider that activist/columnist George Monbiot of Guardian UK is asking much more. He wants newspapers to refuse advertising from businesses that harm the environment:
I am much more concerned about the false picture of the world conveyed by advertisements the newspapers carry. They generate behavioural norms, telling us, in effect, that the goods and services which are destroying the biosphere are acceptable, even beneficial. I believe that their presence in the newspapers makes hypocrites of all those of us who write for them. Our editorials urge people to reduce their impacts. Our advertisements urge people to increase them.”
You could look at it this way: we sometimes pressure publishers to refuse erotic services ads, and publishers sometimes do, but at least the heat generated by erotic services ads can be rendered safe. So it shouldn’t seem unreasonable to ask newspapers to stop promoting a problem too large for any presently available prophylactic.
Nonetheless, newspaper publishers may not rush to embrace Monbiot’s idea, even though it offers them an excuse for the disappearance of advertising: “we’re phasing out everyone who harms the planet.”
Because, who doesn’t harm the planet? Only trees will be eligible to advertise, and trees, I’m guessing, would just as soon see newspapers go the way of the brontosaurus.