We still have problems differentiating ‘weather’ from ‘climate’. Our media must stop being part of the problem, and start helping change our long-term outlooks.

Language matters. Weather forecasts talking about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ weather, or pretending weather is unrelated to the climate, obstruct progress.

Good weather and bad weather

‘Turned out nice again’

‘Another beautiful day’

‘Organised pulses of rain sweeping in from the West’

‘Clouds will be hiding the sun’

‘I’m afraid the rain is here to stay‘

We’re so acclimatised to weather reporters attaching emotive words to atmospheric physics, most of us don’t even notice. This article asks why, and explains why we should care.

It’s not about woke…

We don’t accuse weather folk of cultural hegemony, pro-sun bias, anti-precipitation prejudice, UV-wokery or pollen count insensitivity.

Yet there are plenty of us with cause to object to this anthropomorphization of physics.

• Farmers with shrivelling crops may not appreciate cheery weather reports welcoming ‘lots more lovely sunshine’. Instead of heading for the beach, they may be heading for the bankruptcy courts.
• When sad-face reporters announce a ‘horrible, wet, soggy week‘, farmers may start humming ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, and cross off ‘call bank re emergency loan’ from their to-do list.
• Sufferers of lupus or other photosensitive illnesses may demur when they wake up to hear it’s going to be ‘another beautiful sunny day‘.
• Increasing numbers of people with severe asthma, hay fever or other respiratory conditions may feel their heart sink at the prospect of ‘more gorgeous weather‘.

We routinely issue trigger warnings out of consideration for people who might be upset by mentions of suicide, rape, sexual abuse, racist, sexist or transphobic words. Why are we so indifferent to the much bigger problem, to which all these other problems are secondary?

If this blunt statement seems insensitive to victims of rape, racist abuse, transphobia etc., that framing is precisely the problem this article addresses. We’re all programmed to respond emotionally to individual tragedy, but not to collective existential catastrophe.

Human inclination to identify with, and be moved by, fellow individual humans, is a powerful emotive force, as advertisers well know. It’s why ads for disaster relief charities feature emaciated children, and not per-capita GDP or debt-relief statistics.

Once a problem has been framed in one way, it’s very hard to re-frame it in another. It’s why we have speed awareness courses for drivers who exceed speed limits, but not carbon awareness courses for politicians who approve oil and gas licences.

Weather language should be neutralised. Not to protect farmers from offence, or the asthmatic from being stigmatised, or the Lupus community from feeling victimised.

It’s a step towards a common understanding of science, and away from each having our own truths.

Stories and Science

Instead of storytelling and science being in conflict, stories should serve science.

Science requires precision, and scientists are trained to beware of the consequences of loose language. Loose lips sink peer-reviewed paper submissions.

Climate scientists in particular face an additional dilemma – how to report terrifying results. If their tone is too ‘unscientific’ and emotive, they risk their credibility. Make it too ‘technical’ and abstract, and they condemn their life’s work to indifference, neglect or inaction.

It’s a tough balancing act. When the latest COP climate conference comes round, most of us switch off when reporters start talking about negotiations about ‘the language’ being conducted behind closed doors’.

High-level examples might catch our attention, like oil-rich countries arguing for ‘goals’ while low-lying nations argue for ‘commitments’, but that’s the obvious battle.

Politicians ‘Interpreting’ Science

More subtle, and more pernicious, is what happens when any politician ‘interprets’ science for their citizens.

This happens all the time, but comes to an annual peak with COP climate conferences. There’s a reason why oil company representatives often outnumber climate activists at COP meetings – they need to be there, whispering suggestions in politicians’ ears, promising riches in return for precisely how they ‘interpret’ the science to their citizens, via the mass media.

Politicians, like PR experts, understand the importance of ‘language’ when it comes to taking, or retarding, carbon drawdown action. They’re both storytellers, and language is their stock in trade. The scientists provide the numbers; leave the words to us.

Carbon capture tech/politician capture talk

This Drilled podcast about ‘What the IPCC Report *Actually* Said About Carbon Removal Tech’ exposes the reality of the newspaper headlines most of us read around the time of every COP conference.

Drilled forensically demonstrates, having been among the few journalists to have trawled through those hundreds of pages of science stuff, read all the footnotes, and compare it to the summaries agreed by the politicians, that in the process of ‘interpreting’ the science, the politicians have turned black into white, and ‘ignore this’ into ‘this could work!’.

The scientists told them carbon capture is a white elephant. They told the world it was a silver bullet.

The podcast lays out how this misrepresentation is no accidental translation error, but the result of meticulous lobbying and cynical manipulation. Politicians prefer to offer a story of hope rather than sacrifice. Oil companies prefer to tell a story of the cavalry coming, rather than the cavalry not existing. From their short-term self-interest, these are ‘better’ stories’.

Big Oil knows that with 24-hour news cycles and deadlines, no journalist can actually trawl through the hundreds of pages of detailed reports. Even climate specialists will take weeks to examine the massive datasets, and every last citation and footnote painstakingly agreed, over years of collaboration, by climate scientists from every nation in the UN.

What will get reported in time for the news deadlines are the summaries, every word of which is negotiated by a committee of politicians. Their priority is not a concise, accurate summary of the work of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) experts. It’s to concoct some ‘form of language’ that leaves enough wiggle room to be spun by any individual country for its own citizens.

Big Oil understands the power, importance, and significance of language. That’s why they spend so much time, energy and money to control the narrative, and whispering in the ears of the politicians as they negotiate ‘the language’.

Dangers of Simplification

It’s why campaigns articulating simple, three-word slogans are so dangerous to their interests, and accounts for governments – at the behest of Big Oil lobbyists – criminalising campaigns like ‘Just Stop Oil’ to the extent of awarding 4-year sentences to protestors for participating in a Zoom call discussing peaceful civil disobedience actions.

Simplifying complex calls to action, like ‘Just Stop Oil’, has its problems too.

Just as climate scientists have to be wary that any scientific caveat they might insert in their research can be pounced on by climate denialists as evidence of ‘doubt’, climate change activists face the opposite challenge.

Oversimplify a complex problem, and you risk appearing naive, or making any call to action impractically vague. ‘Save the planet’ sounds good, but doesn’t tell you what you need to do, and is saving the wrong victim.

Conflating the fate of a 4.5Bn-year-old ball of rock with the fate of a species that’s only been around for 300,000 years may be counter-productive. It certainly exhibits the anthropocentrism that caused the problem in the first place.

It’s not ‘the planet’ that needs saving, but human civilisation. Human oppression of other humans, in all its historic forms, nasty though it is, is not as nasty as drowning, burning and shrivelling.

Concerns about racism, sexism, transphobia etc. will be a moot point if we allow the supporting structure of our civilisation to collapse.

Which means we need to start talking more about climate, and less about weather.

…nor about storytelling…

Language forms the building blocks of storytelling, and we humans are suckers for a good story.

Half a century of climate inaction has proved, if anyone is any doubt, that facts and science alone aren’t enough. Big oil hires expert storytellers to advance their denialist agenda and retard climate action. Anyone seeking to speed up carbon drawdown should use the same storytelling playbook.

This means being more discriminating about how we deploy storytelling in our daily lives, and the subtle but powerful way language influences our thinking.

We can’t expect ordinary people, whose daily concerns are not about the future of human civilisation, but about putting food on the table, paying the mortgage or overcoming personal adversity, to be moved to action by stat-bashing, or even anything that overtly mentions ‘carbon’, ‘climate’, ‘environment’, ‘green’, or any other labels Big Oil has so successfully weaponised into culture war trigger-words.

To understand the dangers of something as apparently innocuous as attaching good/bad narratives to weather reports, we first need to understand the difference between weather and climate.

Take the world’s most popular sport, football.

…it’s a game of 3 halves

At the 2024 European Football Championships Finals, hosts Germany were playing Denmark in Dortmund. The players were drenched as they kicked off, and got wetter. Rain, usually invisible on TV cameras, became visible as it got heavier. Thunderclaps interrupted the commentary. Commentators started to mentioned lighting strikes.

After 35 minutes, the thunderstorm became so severe it stopped play. The lightning was now so frequent and so close, the referee feared it might endanger the players’ lives. He took the extraordinary decision to suspend the match.

As the players waited, out of sight, in their dressing rooms, TV viewers saw the rain turn torrential, overwhelming the stadium’s capacity to drain it. The edges of the stand roofs became waterfalls, the pitch was battered by hailstones, lightning strikes occurred seconds apart.

Gradually, the storm passed. 24 minutes later the match was resumed.

But this isn’t the point.

Off-script weather

For 24 minutes, something unprecedented occurred. No one knew what to do next, or what the consequences might be.

Professional broadcasters found themselves tested to their limits. The ITV commentary team, beaming the match to British viewers, had to scramble, busk it, improvise.

Their commentators, presenters and analysts, at the stadium in Dortmund and at their Berlin studio base, suddenly found themselves having to fill time, with no idea for how long, without any script to help them.

All those football experts, ex-players, and their off-camera support team, suddenly had no football to talk about.

The storm had blown them from their comfort zone. They were now naked, unarmed, in an unfamiliar hostile environment, forced to improvise with the tools available.

Team of producers in the master control room in their ears, inaudible to the audience, could make suggestions and issue instructions via their earpieces, but the backroom staff were improvising too.

The storm was, quite literally, not in the script.

Even live sport commentary have scripts, of a kind. Before the match, the commentators and pundits would have gone through reams of research in preparation. Their producers in the master control room have instant Internet access, and thick, alphabetically catalogued, files of research, to pass to the front-of-camera team via their earpieces.

For rapid access, these files, physical and on their screens, would be catalogued, probably in alphabetical order. Jokes based on national stereotypes under ‘J’, maybe. Player’s food preferences under ‘F’, tactics under ‘T’, etc.

The tabs would cover individual players, managers, referees, historical results between these two teams, FIFA regulations, the national dishes of Germany and Denmark, prepared lines for various scenarios, and many other anticipated contingencies.

Just in case.

So what happened when the match was interrupted?

Weather vs Climate

For 24 minutes, a qualifying-round match in a regional football tournament became an exquisite metaphor for human’s reluctance to confront the reality of climate change.

For 24 minutes, the on-camera team stated, repeatedly, with varying degrees of astonishment, incredulity and even outrage, that suspending a match because of bad weather was unprecedented. One by one, ex-pros and veteran commentators, repeated they they’d played for X years, or been watching football for Y years, and had never, ever, ever seen a referee suspend a match because of weather.

There was, it seemed, nothing else to say. If the producers in the control room had a tab prepared in the files labeled ‘Weather’, flicking through to ‘W’ didn’t help much.

What they didn’t appear to have was a tab under ‘C’ labelled ‘Climate Change’.

For 24 minutes, all these professional broadcasters, grown men and women, many with children, some even with grandchildren, described an unprecedented breakdown in a major global event caused by extreme weather without mentioning the C-word.

Lots of Weathers, Not a single Climate.

Avoiding the C-word

Here are three possible reasons why none of the presenters, pundits and players mentioned the ‘Climate’ word:

Climate Ignorance

We must entertain the possibility that over the 24 minutes, not one of the people involved thought this unprecedented extreme weather event might be linked to climate change. Maybe sports broadcasters on both sides of the camera, despite being adults living in 2024, lack the collective knowledge to make the connection. Maybe they all only read the back pages.

Climate Censorship

A senior executive overseeing the broadcast, fearing one of the on-air team might utter the C-word, pressed the button that opened the microphone they could all hear in their earpieces, and explicitly instructed them not to mention it. Whatever their personal opinions or proclivities, they all complied.

Climate Avoidance

The C-word occurred to most, or even all of the on-air team, but they collectively avoided uttering it. This self-censorship may have been conscious, in the form of a suggestion, rather than an instruction, in their earpieces. Or it could have been a reflection of their common understanding of what it meant to be a ‘professional’ sports broadcaster. Climate is controversial. Hearing the word might upset people. Viewers don’t want to be lectured. We’re here to entertain, not be party-poopers.

We have no idea why none of ITV’s team mentioned the C-word. Pushed to guess, we’d reckon Climate Avoidance is most likely.

Most people in their daily lives, including sports broadcasters, don’t want to court controversy, rile people for no good reason, or harsh anyone’s mellow.

We all, in our different ways, would prefer to ‘keep it light’, given the choice.

We don’t need anyone to censor us, because we’d rather censor ourselves, even if in our heart of hearts we know we shouldn’t.

Which is precisely the problem this article addresses.