Hacker News Reader

Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

I like that. But Chaos sounds a little bit like chance/random, throwing the burden of action away.

I can't think of a word to truly feel how life on the line huge this crisis is?

Climate Catastrophe is what I have been using. But with $ for eyeballs news pushing so many tragedies so it loses it's punch. Mad Men Don Draper has a good rant about degrading the word love.

View on HN

To me, "Catastrophe" also removes the burden of action by framing climate change as a fait accompli. It makes it sound like something that has already happened and now we need to deal with the consequences, rather than something we must act to stop. (I appreciate that in reality it is both.) I like "Climate Crisis" more because everyone understands a crisis as something that must be solved urgently.

Yeah I like crisis too. words are hard!! maybe we should just stack a bunch of adjectives together ;)

I like "Climate Catastrophe" more than "Climate Crisis" which is the term in vogue in left wing circles here in Britain. But I think I still prefer Climate Change because to me the other terms fail to relate that what's happened is we've hijacked earth's systems and it's changing in response.

For me, crisis and catastrophe are too immediate and too direct. What's insidious about the climate is how diffuse and difficult to comprehend it is. Additionally, while I do expect a lot of peoples lives to get more difficult in the coming decades (at least re: weather) it is by no means the end of the world, excepting of course island communities and countries for whom it literally is. That I am happy to call a crisis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com