The case for renaming ‘global warming’

What's in a name? Well, in science, quite a lot: the honour of naming a discovery, or the fame and fortune that might follow from coining a successful new term; perhaps even the ability to influence the future of life on Earth – or at least, life as we in the West have come to enjoy it.

Twenty-five ago, when I was a rookie journalist in this newspaper, I reported on the new story that was “global warming”. Even then it seemed a poor term. Irish people thought “warming” was to be welcomed, not feared. Bring it on, they said, and the quicker the better, swayed by visions of sultry summers and vineyards in Ventry. Only now are we really becoming aware of the storm damage, heatwaves, and diseases that will also come with climate change (more of which anon).

An advantage of making a scientific discovery is that you might get to name it, or have it named after you. George Gabriel Stokes, from Co Sligo, was a great 19th-century scientist. The long list of things named after him is a measure of his many contributions, from Stokes's conjecture and Stokes's phenomenon to Stokes's law of fluorescence (in fact, Stokes also coined the term "fluorescent").

Another great Irish scientist, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, is commemorated with the Hamiltonian (symbol H), which physicists, mathematicians, and even economists use every day.

Irish people and the Irish language have supplied many words that made their way into scientific and common usage. Drumlins and eskers, for example, are glacial features named from the Irish words for these formations.

Other words we have given the world include barometer, electron, quarks, and Yahoo. Robert Boyle coined the term "barometer"; George Johnstone Stoney named the electron in 1891; subatomic quarks were named after a word James Joyce invented in Finnegans Wake. And the original Yahoos were a race of creatures in Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Survival of the fittest names

Naturalists who discover a new plant or animal species usually have the honour of naming it. Indeed, naming a species is an integral part of classifying it and putting it in its scientific place. A new species name might simply be descriptive or used as an occasion to honour a colleague or patron or the person who first spotted the "new" species.

So it was that some of the fossils found in Co Kilkenny in 1864 were named after local people who had played some role in the find.

Choosing a good name for your discovery can be important in helping to popularise the concept. “Black holes” and “the selfish gene” are well-known today partly because the concepts were so well-named.

Which brings us back to global warming. Twenty-five years ago that seemed a poor choice of term. A full generation later, as climate change starts to take hold, it also seems wrong. We now know that there is much more to climate upheaval than simply “warming”. So what should we call it? Biologist Eugene Stoermer and Nobel chemist Paul Crutzen call this era we are living in the Anthropocene, when people are having a significant impact on the planet and its ecosystems.

(As an aside, it’s unusual these days for people to draw on classical Latin or Greek when coining a new term, but perhaps Anthropocene reflects Stoermer and Crutzen’s age and education. Classical neologisms – think “television”, “nucleus”, “atom” – were much more common when Latin and Greek were regularly taught. Now, people don’t coin new words so much as create awkward compound terms and acronyms, such as: computed axial tomography – Cat scan – and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, NMRI.)

When it comes to climate change, however, it’s not just someone’s career or posthumous memory that’s at stake. There is a real challenge to find an effective way to communicate what’s happening. Personally, I think “climate chaos” is better at capturing some of the urgency needed.

So it will be interesting to hear the views at a meeting to discuss the challenge of communicating climate change and sustainability, organised by Queen’s University Belfast and DCU, on March 5th. For more details, contact Padraig Murphy at Celsius, DCU’s science communication unit.

Mary Mulvihill is a science writer with an interest in science communication. She tweets about Irish science heritage at @ingeniousie