page_title: Climate crisis
section_title: Alternative terminology
hierarchical_section_title: Climate crisis / Alternative terminology
caption_attribution_description: English: Graph of Google search term usage (web searches, global) for "climate crisis" and "climate emergency". Data source: Google trends https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&amp;q=climate%20crisis,climate%20emergency
context_page_description: Climate crisis is a term describing global warming and climate change, and their consequences.
  The term has been used to describe the threat of global warming to the planet, and to urge aggressive climate change mitigation. For example, a January 2020 BioScience article endorsed by over 11,000 scientists worldwide, stated that "the climate crisis has arrived" and that an "immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
  The term is applied by those who "believe it evokes the gravity of the threats the planet faces from continued greenhouse gas emissions and can help spur the kind of political willpower that has long been missing from climate advocacy". They believe that, much as "global warming" drew out more emotional engagement and support for action than "climate change", calling climate change a crisis could have an even stronger impact.
  A study has shown that the term does invoke a strong emotional response in conveying a sense of urgency, but some caution that this very response may be counter-productive, and may cause a backlash effect due to perceptions of alarmist exaggeration.
context_section_description: Research has shown that what a phenomenon is called, or how it is framed, "has a tremendous effect on how audiences come to perceive that phenomenon" and "can have a profound impact on the audience’s reaction".
  The effects of climate change are sometimes described in terms similar to climate crisis, such as: 
  "climate catastrophe" (used with reference to a 2019 David Attenborough documentary and the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season)
  "threats that impact the earth" (World Wildlife Fund, 2012—)
  "climate breakdown" (climate scientist Peter Kalmus, 2018)
  "climate chaos" (The New York Times article title, 2019, U.S. Democratic candidates, 2019), and an Ad Age marketing team, 2019)
  "climate ruin" (U.S. Democratic candidates, 2019)
  "global heating" (Richard A. Betts, Met Office U.K., 2018)
  "climate emergency" (11,000 scientists' warning letter in BioScience, and in The Guardian, both 2019),
  "ecological breakdown", "ecological crisis" and "ecological emergency" (all set forth by climate activist Greta Thunberg, 2019)
  "global meltdown", "Scorched Earth", "The Great Collapse", and "Earthshattering" (an Ad Age marketing team, 2019)
  "climate disaster" and "climate apocalypse" (The Guardian, 2019)
  In addition to "climate crisis", various other terms have been investigated for their effects on audiences, including "global warming", "climate change", and "climatic disruption", as well as "environmental destruction", "weather destabilization", and "environmental collapse".
caption: Google trends data shows that, following the 2006 release of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth,[30] "climate crisis" searches increased, with a resurgence beginning in late 2018. Also graphed: "climate emergency" searches (see Climate emergency declaration).
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