{"id":6021,"date":"2014-05-29T06:30:37","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T06:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6021"},"modified":"2014-05-29T06:30:37","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T06:30:37","slug":"watch-your-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2014\/05\/29\/watch-your-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch your language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2014\/may\/27\/americans-climate-change-global-warming-yale-report%20\">Guardian<\/a> reports that university researchers recommend saying\u00a0global warming rather than climate change if you want to influence Americans. \u00a0The two terms are often used interchangeably but they generate very different responses, according to researchers from Yale and\u00a0George Mason Universities.<\/p>\n<p>The term global warming resonates far more powerfully, triggering images of ice melt, extreme weather and catastrophe. \u00a0Mention climate change, however, and many Americans switch off. \u00a0The researchers found naming the issue as global warming rather than climate change made it easier to communicate with\u00a0Americans being\u00a013% more likely to say that global warming was a bad thing. \u00a0It's said that George W B swapped the term climate change for global warming in 2002, on the advice of a political consultant because it was a less\u00a0\u00a0frightening idea than global warming. \u00a0I heard\u00a0President Obama last night hedge his bets by using\u00a0both phrases in the same sentence.<\/p>\n<p>Over here, there was a similar process, but for the opposite reason. \u00a0The campaign in the late 1990s by high-profile insider-activists to replace global warming by\u00a0climate change\u00a0[actually, rapid climate change, though the rapidity tends to get lost] in discourse of all kinds was based on the idea that too many people thought that global warming would mean warmer weather, and therefore might well\u00a0be\u00a0a good thing, and might even\u00a0lead, as it has, to much planting of pinot noir vines across the south of England. \u00a0I remember thinking at the time that the problem with a discourse around climate was that its very essence was\u00a0change \u2013 and had been from the beginning. \u00a0Thus there was a risk of confusing people more than we needed to. \u00a0And anyway, the climate is changing (rapidly) because of global warming, and is thus a secondary issue. \u00a0And anyway, anyway, the earth is only warming because of the way we are buggering up the biosphere through\u00a0our economy, and so even that's only a symptom, and not the cause. \u00a0Back to basics anyone? \u00a0Back to environmental education?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Guardian reports that university researchers recommend saying\u00a0global warming rather than climate change if you want to influence Americans. \u00a0The two terms are often used interchangeably but they generate very different responses, according to researchers from Yale and\u00a0George Mason Universities....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}