As a child growing up in the early 1990s, I remember learning in school about the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels traps heat near the Earth’s surface, like the glass of a greenhouse. I imagined myself on the playground, roasting inside a humid hothouse.
Fast forward 30 years, and the terms have changed.
For a while, “global warming” was the go-to expression for talking about rising global temperatures and the role of human activities, particularly the use of fossil fuels. It had a spike in internet searches in 2007, probably due to former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning,” which hit theaters in 2006.
Near the end of the Obama administration, “climate change” became the most common term. It’s now trending in Google searches more than global warming. Both terms make the same point: Rising global temperatures have major consequences on local weather patterns and worldwide climate effects, including stronger hurricanes, droughts, floods and fires.
However, the words we use to discuss these effects can make a large difference in how people understand the risks and the need for more sustainable choices.
What’s in a name? A lot, it turns out
I’m a linguistics researcher currently living on Mayotte Island, off the coast of Madagascar, where I study climate change knowledge among local populations and the language they use to discuss it.
Local fishers on Mayotte struggle to talk about the phenomenon because there is no established terminology for it. What my colleagues and I have learned offers some insight into the difficulties people in many cultures have with understanding climate change.
In the grand scheme of climate change education and sustainability efforts, this seemingly minor problem of translation is in fact symptomatic of a larger underlying issue regarding the relationship between humans and their environment.
In fact, when we dig deeper into challenges of communicating climate change across cultures, two factors come into play: spiritual beliefs and notions of time.
Spiritual language can overlap
Spiritual and religious beliefs can play an important role in how climate change is understood and even named. For example, the translation for the term climate in Inuktitut, an Inuit language spoken in Canada, is “sila.” However, sila also refers to wisdom, the spirit, the earth, and the universe. It is something sacred to be revered.
Seen through the lens of this second set of definitions, sila is effectively impossible for people to influence. It is beyond humankind’s reach to change the cosmos. As a result, communication aimed at promoting awareness of climate change becomes politicized in Eastern Canadian Inuit languages.
My colleagues and I encountered similar challenges while discussing possible future efforts to slow down environmental destruction caused by climate change on Mayotte.
The Maore fishers we interviewed, many of whom were of a deep Islamic faith, often responded with “Inshallah,” or God willing, when questioned about efforts the community could make in the future to address the problem. They saw these climate change-related events as out of their hands, as something only God could interfere with.
People understand time in different ways
Second, we might think that time is objective and therefore shared across cultures. But as Albert Einstein argued, time is relative.
Time is not only relative scientifically speaking, but also culturally. For example, the ancient Greeks had more than three types of time, one of which we still use today, Kronos, or linear time – think chronological order. We have all but forgotten Aion, or sacred, eternal time, and Kairos, or cyclical time.
Notions of time play an important role when thinking about climate change, since the heart of the phenomenon involves a slow, continuous change over a long period. We cannot see climate change happen with the naked eye, because it occurs over years and decades. Of course, we can see its effects on weather patterns, including extreme heat waves and heavy downpours.