Fortunately for all of us, the climate isn’t changing as rapidly as the politics and language around it. What started out as global warming was redefined by proponents as climate change, enabling them to pivot from having to explain record cold snaps to including them in the catch-all of change.
While the Conservative Party readily concedes that the climate of the planet is changing, has been changing for hundreds of millions of years and will continue to do so for hundreds of millions more, claims that we can do something meaningful about it are errant nonsense.
The Australian reports, now the political barometer is generating more language shifts.
The alarmists, apparently, haven’t seen enough children crying at climate change protests so they want to up the ante. Left-wing newspaper The Guardian (along with The Guardian Australia online) is leading the crusade with a new dictate to staff – they should refer to the climate issue as an emergency, crisis or breakdown.
The paper’s official style guide has been amended saying the phrase “climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the situation”.
Wow. That is change you can almost believe in.
Up bobbed the phrase immediately in today’s Australian coverage. The Guardian Australia’s political editor Katharine Murphy covered the election fallout in full compliance. “This was an election in large part about the climate emergency, and the field evidence shows Australia in 2019 is deeply divided about the road ahead,” she wrote.
The Guardian is changing language in a brazen attempt to change politics. Later in the story, Murphy went on: “In his concession, Shorten noted that the divisions on the climate crisis were etched into Saturday night’s result.”
But a quick check of the transcript reveals a bit of an accuracy issue. Shorten never referred to a climate crisis. He spoke of “climate change” and “climate action” – guess he hadn’t got the memo.
It hardly needs saying this is the epitome of Orwellian.
As George Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language: “If thought corrupts language then language can also corrupt thought.”
The Guardian doesn’t like the way you are thinking so it is adopting more emotive language to frighten you into its camp.
As Orwell wrote in his seminal essay: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
And, just like that, you’ll now hear more words such as emergency, crisis and breakdown. Expect ABC reporters to broadcast them, too.
“The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world,” the paper said in a statement. “Instead of ‘climate change’, the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming’, although the original terms are not banned. We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”
Oh, The Guardian is also sceptical about the word sceptic. Apparently it’s not alarmist enough, either. The thought police have dictated that sceptics are now referred to as “climate science deniers” or “climate deniers” – terms that shamelessly echo the disgrace of Holocaust denial.
Even when they don’t have newsprint editions, the green Left is dealing in ink; like spurting cuttlefish, they want to muddy the waters and won’t be denied.
Conservatives’ leader Cory Bernardi speaking with Adam Peacock on the podcast Peacock Politics, explained why he is firmly of the belief that climate change alarmism is utter nonsense.
