Call It By Its Name: Climate Change

When a word or concept elicits a strong emotional reaction, it means there are unresolved feelings, experiences, traumas, and processing waiting to be dealt with. Climate change is one of those topics that triggers people in a spectrum of ways, bringing up complex feelings not easily resolved. This unresolved complexity permeates into our entire existence across mind, body, soul, and environment.

The current phase of climate change began by manmade actions in our species’ past; actions that illogically continue in our present. Our reaction and inaction towards it now and with each passing day will determine our future across all facets of our being. So it is no wonder that even the idea of talking about climate change can be polarizing, paralyzing, and galvanizing.

A multitude of dimensions of fear is largely behind the resistance to facing, let alone talking about, climate change. But we must. To face our collective fear about climate change and then to take appropriate action to correct our past mistakes that caused it, while also adapting to the changes that are now unavoidable, requires a species-level reckoning about our place and purpose on this great planet.

Humanity’s current shared calling is to address the all-encompassing existential planetary crisis that is human-caused climate change. We are failing, to the point where even among the believers and action takers, there has been a retreat in climate communication, where many are afraid to even call it by its name. But any avoidance to call Earth’s changing climate exactly what it is is to actively delay the inevitable macrosocietal transformation required, should we wish to preserve a habitable planet and prosperous future for our species and all life here.

We are at a communications tipping point that should not be underestimated in its significance in how we meet this moment, our defining moment. The only way forward is to call this moment by its name, and to never relent until every human has conquered their fear of facing this reality. We begin by understanding it.

EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE AND CLIMATE SYSTEM

Earth’s climate system changes naturally over tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. But the changes we are observing now, today, in this pinpoint moment in Earth’s 4.5 billion year timeline, are human-caused. That’s why we call this currently developing change, forged by human hands over the past century, “human-caused climate change” to differentiate between the natural and the human-caused changes to our climate. It’s an important distinction, because the human-caused change can also be human-solved, though that window of opportunity is closing fast.

The way our climate system works is actually fairly simple at its fundamental level. Earth’s atmosphere is composed of different gases, the majority of which are nitrogen and oxygen. These two gases are pretty neutral in that they allow both the sun’s energy that’s coming in and Earth’s heat that’s heading back out to space to pass through them without interaction. A very small fraction of our atmosphere is composed of gases that do interact with Earth’s heat. These gases redirect the heat emanating up from Earth’s surface back down again, rather than allowing it to escape into space, as the oxygen and nitrogen do. These interactive gases are known as greenhouse gases for their heat-trapping warming effect, and they include water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. This is fine and dandy, necessary even, when they are present in the very low numbers of the pre-industrial era, because they provide us with just the right amount of trapped heat, creating very comfortable living conditions for us here on Earth’s surface.

What is happening now is that the human activities of burning fossil fuels and burning forests at scale are rearranging the natural placement of billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane every year. Stores of these gases have been safely locked away underground and within living plants and animals, but by hands of humans, these massive quantities of heat-trapping gases are being relentlessly unleashed into our planet’s temperature-regulating atmosphere. Their growing numbers up above us alter the ideal composition of gases in our atmosphere by greatly increasing the presence of the heat-trapping kind. With a larger quantity of heat-trapping gases, more heat is retained between Earth’s atmosphere and its surface. That excess heat makes it hotter in our air, on our land, and in our water, hence the term “global warming.”

Global warming has impacts beyond just making it feel hotter outside or in our bodies of water. This new composition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere causes global climate change, where beyond and triggered by the increased heat, we experience changes in precipitation patterns, in ocean currents, and we experience more frequent and extreme weather-related disasters. All of these factors physically and fundamentally change living conditions on Earth, causing a snowball effect of even more changes, like sea level rise, extinctions from lack of food, water, or habitat, a breakdown of ecosystems, and even more greenhouse gases released from safe storage as nature itself loses its ability to contain them (ie permafrost thaw that releases massive ancient stores of methane and carbon, tucked away in long-frozen land).

The impact of these climate changes will vary around the globe. In these new world conditions that humans are shaping, survival will be a luxury of the most mobile and proactive because it is happening faster than nature can adapt.

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

Unfortunately, being proactive is not one of our species’s strong suits. For decades now, with mounting evidence, we have known the consequences of our actions and inactions. Yet somehow the message is still not getting through to drive the species-wide response required. Instead, we are in a state of fight rather than flight. We are fighting amongst ourselves, allowing the wrong ones to hold us back rather than taking coordinated flight out of this mess into the known direction of solutions. Remaining in the fight delays appropriate action, with each day’s additional emissions locking in even worse future warming. We are so caught up in the fight created by the bad-acting minority casting false doubt on the existence and urgency of global warming and climate change, that the rest and best of us are even fighting amongst ourselves about whether to even call this crisis by its name.

Why do we do this? Out of fear. Fear of change, fear of loss, fear of the unknown. The topic of climate change is more than its parts of science and physics and weather and energy. It is a topic about our humanity, our willpower, our inner strength, and our compassion. It asks us to reckon with our past choices and to reflect inwards to ask ourselves who we want to be and will we answer that call. Are we brave enough to step up and face this crisis head-on? Are we strong enough to move forward together to fix it?

This is no small ask. It is the ask of our existence because it requires us to do the heaviest lifting of our lifetimes. This is society-building work, the deep, all-encompassing work done by handfuls of generations before us, at points in time when civilizations churned and technologies overtook. In the timeline of our species, this is once again one of those moments. We are facing a convergence of forcing factors, including climate change and the aggressive push of artificial intelligence upon our society and planetary limits. But instead of allowing the wrong few to dictate the direction our world goes, the majority of us must answer the call to intervene and to rewrite the rules. This time, we get to rewrite them in a way that empowers our best qualities and disables our worst.

THE MAJORITY WANTS ACTION

To be clear, it is the majority of us who know these truths of climate change and planetary destruction to be self-evident, and we want them addressed. In a large global survey in 2024 from scientific journal Nature, it found that 89% of people on Earth demand that their government do more to fight global warming. 86% support pro-climate social norms, such as contributing 1% of their income to help fight climate change. This should be heartening to hear because it reveals the good in our humanity. We will need to collaborate and cooperate on an unprecedented global scale in order to address the crisis of climate change. That the majority of us know this and are willing to do it should be enough to finally move past this period of hesitance and delay.

However, a state of delay is where we are. There exists a climate perception gap, or a “false social reality”, which many studies prove. Most people greatly underestimate other people’s concern for climate change. In the US, a study in the journal Nature Communications found that 80-90% of Americans underestimate their fellow citizen’s support for climate policy, where ”supporters of climate policies outnumber opponents two to one, while Americans falsely perceive nearly the opposite to be true.” If people don’t think that other people are concerned, largely because they don’t hear people talking about it, this prevents them from talking about it themselves out of fear of expressing an unpopular opinion. This cycle perpetuates, resulting in what is called the spiral of silence, which is very dangerous when dealing with impending planetary demise.

It also highlights the serious communication problem we have around climate, where people are afraid to talk about it. Unfortunately, this provides fertile breeding ground for those who are obstructing climate action. This wrong minority, those against taking action, then have the space to be the loudest. And the perception gap works in the opposite direction, too, where the loudest voices making constant noise can more easily convince people of their position. Some of the world’s most powerful people and entities use this tactic regularly to prevent climate action. This includes oil and gas companies, petrostates, and their supporting cast of pro-fossil fuel allies in government and business.

But many pro-climate action people with power and influence are further delaying action, by not talking and educating about climate change enough, not enacting lasting change, and not sticking to their guns in times of adversity. This largely includes politicians, but also the media and business leaders. In the media, we can see one driver of that spiral of silence at work, where global news coverage of climate change has dropped by 38% since 2021. In the US, only 17% of people report hearing about climate change in the news in a given week, and since Trump took office last year, the already anemic climate coverage has declined further by 35%. To pour salt on the wound, climate desks at major broadcasters have been shrinking and disappearing altogether this year. For many people, if they aren’t hearing about it, they aren’t thinking about it, and this has serious world-shaping repercussions all the way up to policy decisions.

In the United States, you might be surprised that it is the majority of us who support climate action. Several polls by various institutions are taken year after year asking Americans about their opinions on climate change. The polls phrase and frame the questions differently, further strengthening the fact that no matter how you slice it, the majority is concerned. A Gallup poll from March of this year found that 66% of Americans worry a great deal to a fair amount about climate change, with another 12% worrying a little. That’s 78% of our country’s population that is worrying any amount about climate change. To me, that says most of us are aware of the problem and some are better able to compartmentalize it than others.

THE REAL VOTER PREFERENCES IN AMERICA

Said another way, the long-running twice yearly poll from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication entitled “Climate Change In The American Mind”, specifically focuses on voters and asks a variety of questions about climate policy. Their recent Spring 2026 report found that the majority of all voters, 58%, prefer to vote for a candidate who supports action on global warming, while only 14% prefer to vote for a candidate who opposes action. Right now, our government is being run by the preference of the 14%. But let’s dig into this Yale survey further to really understand how deep the desire for climate action goes when brought to light and asked directly, aka when called by name and said out loud. We’ll contrast it with the actual actions being taken by the current administration.

By repealing the endangerment finding, which is a rule in the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources and transportation, the Trump administration is acting against the 77% of voters who support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Where the Department of the Interior, Department of Defense, and other agencies are blocking wind and solar projects from getting built on our public land and water, they are dismissing the wishes of 72% of our population who support generating renewable energy on public land.

By denying research grants, firing scientists, canceling climate-related reports and studies, shutting down entire climate-affiliated departments, and removing mentions of and data about climate change from federal websites, the Trump administration is actively choosing to ignore 77% of voters who oppose ordering all federal agencies (such as NASA, NOAA, and the EPA) to stop doing research on global warming, and the 77% of voters who oppose ordering all federal agencies to stop providing information about global warming to the public. This indicates that voters acknowledge climate change is happening and they want our government to be researching it, at the least.

It’s not just climate change that the majority of Americans want to see addressed. It’s other environmental issues, too.

Just this month, Climate Power, an advocacy group, did a poll about pollution and public health. They found that 72% of voters are concerned with pollution’s effect on the health of their communities, and 62% are most concerned with “corporations polluting our air and spilling chemicals into our water, making Americans sick, all in the name of profit.”

The Trump administration has touted its parade of deregulation within the Environmental Protection Agency, with too many examples to list here, but resulting in polluting industries, like oil, gas coal, and chemical companies winning the freedom to continue polluting at the expense of public and environmental health. And despite these actions happening out in broad daylight, with at least some media coverage, half of the population has heard nothing at all about these deregulations by the Trump administration regarding the health of our air and water, according to the Climate Power poll. And the majority of voters support stronger regulation on companies to keep our air and water clean.

These are significant numbers. Most people who vote in our country do not agree with the current administration’s attacks on our own government’s ability to research climate change, to regulate planet-warming emissions, regulate corporate polluters, and to allow renewable energy to grow. If Republicans are the party carrying out these highly unpopular actions, then Democrats must balance these actions by being the party to right these wrongs and appeal to the wishes of the majority. So why on Earth aren’t they? Why aren’t Democrats relentlessly talking about and campaigning on the popular topics of climate action and environmental health?

DEMOCRATS RETREATING

One reason is that Democrats seem to suffer from tunnel vision in that they are laser focused on one think tank report telling them to never say “climate change”, and a voter ranking exercise that, in aggregate, never lists climate change as one of the top few issues that voters prioritize. At face value, and to the uninsightful and unanalytical mind, one might think that any issue in the bottom half of a list is simply not important to voters. But that’s short-sighted and simply untrue. Voters, people, care about many things, and those things shift in priority in relation to their current life circumstances. The thing about climate change is that its consequences impact nearly every other issue imaginable. So it would be wise for Democrats to leverage the wide support for addressing climate change and use it to show voters how climate action and building clean energy will directly address their immediate priorities, like how building abundant clean energy will lower their bills.

One of the few politicians who understands this is Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He is unwavering in his commitment to communicate about climate change, and he has been consistently vocal about the cowardice and stupidity in his own party to miss this prime opportunity, especially those succumbing to the damaging trend of “climate hushing”. “Climate hushing” refers to the phenomena of people in government, business, and media decidedly avoiding mention of climate change by its name because they think it hurts their power and influence (see think tank report above). It’s a nuance in the spiral of silence and in the climate perception gap. Most Democrats are now avoiding the topic entirely as we approach the midterm elections, which plays perfectly into Republican hands, allowing the wrong ones to own the narrative and own our future.

Trump deeply understands the art and impact of communication. It’s one of his trademark characteristics, to conjure up a derogatory alternate phrase for a person, concept, or thing, and use it relentlessly until it becomes one with the original. He’s done this for many climate words, and I don’t wish to repeat them. But as he works to replace the real with the derogatory, he’s also focused on erasing mentions of “climate change” from the federal vernacular by ordering his administration to scrub the phrase “climate change” and all its derivations from federal agency websites, national park signage, and even approved vocabulary that government employees are allowed to use. I think he’s losing his own battle. His obsession with eradicating the concept of climate change from human existence is picking up the slack and keeping the subject in the conversation while Democrats are busy “climate hushing.” Granted, Trump and Republicans are spewing lies and misinformation about climate, but if there’s any truth to the adage “all press is good press”, then the GOP is keeping the climate movement alive.

To further boggle the mind as to the Democrat’s climate abandonment, we are witnessing a number of them take significant strides to the right by actively diminishing hard fought climate laws already won. This is fear at its finest, and confounding to the majority of us who want climate policy enacted. A recent example is New York State Governor Kathy Hochul using the state budget bill to severely weaken what was a nation-leading climate law, the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The people of New York voted that law into existence. They did not ask for it to be reversed.

Sadly, she is not alone. Governors in blue states are contemplating weakening their own climate laws. Their motivation is driven by the topic of “affordability”, which the party is clinging to so tightly now at the expense of so much else. And while affordability is important to address, and is a top priority for voters, the Democratic party’s fixation on it is triggering a dangerous case of that tunnel vision. Their clinging behavior to the topic of affordability is perhaps out of PTSD from their losses in the 2024 Presidential election, which many attribute to the “cost of eggs” rather than a few mentions of climate change, as the climate hushers would have you believe.

Yet the Democratic party has made climate change their scapegoat. Do you recall Democratic candidates in any of the 2024 races talking about climate change? Probably not, because as always, it was not talked about. Not in debates, not on flyers, not in speeches, not in attack ads. Yet somehow, one of the least talked about issues is being blamed for the Democratic party’s enduringly weak messaging and inability to boldly connect with voters where they’re at.

Take for example, what I believe was the biggest missed opportunity for Democrats leading up to the 2024 election: they didn’t talk about the biggest achievement of Biden’s term, which was the passing of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), aka the climate bill, that was already benefiting communities and catalyzing investment across sectors, with the purpose of building a homegrown clean energy economy. They could have campaigned relentlessly about how it was benefiting the economy, would lower bills and safeguard our communities from extreme weather. They could have educated Americans about how the IRA plus the Infrastructure Act would address voters’ top concerns. But they didn’t.

In fact, the majority of Americans had never even heard of or didn’t know much about the IRA at all. In an interview with Yale’s YPCCC Director Anthony Leiserowitz discussing polling before the 2024 election, he said “Less than half of Americans have even heard of the Inflation Reduction Act and that includes liberal Democrats. But when you give them a description of what’s in the act, most Americans support it—around 70%. But there are a lot of issues at stake in this election and that makes it harder for the climate message to cut through.” It is the job of politicians to control the narrative and ensure that a good message does cut through. Democrats had all the ingredients laid out on a silver platter to address top voter concerns and make the connection to climate action and the IRA. They didn’t, and we are all paying the price for their inadequacies and worsening climate abandonment.

THE RIGHT PATH FORWARD

It should be crystal clear where we go from here. In our current fractured and failed state of climate action, the practice of ignoring and being silent about climate change has proven to be a losing strategy on all fronts. We know that the majority of humans alive right now want climate action from their governments, businesses, and fellow citizens.

To honor the wise wishes of our collective population, we get to talk about climate change, we get to educate about the consequences from inaction, and we get to share about the many benefits to our personal lives, our health, and our finances from taking action. We get to connect it to top voting issues, and we get to hammer home the unpopular, polluting, and dangerous decisions and actions by the Trump administration.

There is so much room for creative communication and action that points to a beautiful future if we commit to meeting this moment, overcoming our fears about it, and getting to work. We can decide to make the “change” in “climate change” stand for good. But we can only get there by facing it head on, starting with the simple act of calling it by its name: climate change.