In an article in 2021, I wrote that one of the most important lessons that George Orwell offers us in his masterpiece 1984 year can be summarized as follows: “He who rules over language rules over the worldHow is this control exercised? Orwell gave several examples in a lesser-known essay published in 1946, Politics and the English Language:

• Villages are defenseless and bombed from the air, residents are driven from their homes, cattle are shot with machine guns, houses are set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called appeasement.
• Millions of peasants dismantled their farms and sent them on the roads with everything they could carry: this is called population movement or correction of borders.
• People who were imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the head, or sent to die of scurvy in arctic forest camps: this is called elimination of dangerous elements.

If we extend the examples to today, then the invasion of a country, the bombing of its cities and villages, the killing of civilians of all ages is called military special operation.

Following Orwell’s advice, I introduced the words vampire and defined them as follows:

The word vampire doesn’t just absorb the meaning of the word it’s attached to, it often changes that meaning. Often, vampire words are intentionally ambiguous or misleading.

Returning to Orwell, we note how old words – freedom, equality, objectivity, rationalism, etc. – their original meanings are removed and replaced by recent liberal/progressive/environmental surrogates with completely opposite meanings. War becomes peace, freedom becomes slavery, stupidity becomes intelligence, etc

My examples of vampire words included: fracking instead of hydraulic fracturing, climate change instead of global warming, climate simulation instead of climate realitycarbon dioxide emissions instead of carbon dioxide emissions, objectors instead of skeptics.

If you narrow the problem of word-vampires to the sphere of climate change, you can feel a strategic communication dissonance, the main enemy of which is insincerity. When there is a gap between real and stated goals, a person instinctively resorts to long words and euphemistic expressions, like a cuttlefish spitting ink (is cited Orwell). Climate communicators argue that the only way to get far-reaching action from governments and mass public support is to make a terrible presentation of weather/climate issues, trying to sell the climate apocalypse as cleverly as possible.

For example, until the mid-2000s – the climate problem, as it was called for a certain time global coolingpond global warming. But after a while, activists and propagandists felt that people were not really worried. So the nomenclature imposed a new name: climate change. (It’s a mystery to me how American expressions with a singular noun turned into Romanian expressions with a plural noun: climate change was translated change climatic and shale gas pond GAS from shale?! So much so that anyone who speaks Romanian does not know: how many changes or gases are we talking about? 2, 20, 200, 2000?! ).

But neither that nor the other climate change did not fully satisfy the apocalyptic appetite of some researchers or the media: change it sounds too quiet, too slow, needs something to scare people fast. Moved to such options as climatic heat (climatic heating), climate emergency, climate disaster, climate apocalypse, etc. If you are interested, search for example articles that have been published Guardian.

Another example of climate marketing and language gymnastics is the assignment of colors to different types of energy. I have repeatedly written that energies, whatever they are, are not colored. Adding a particular color to an energy form is actually using vampiric word and language New language. For example, “green” is a marketing term. It has neither scientific nor technical significance. In other words, this is 100% propaganda. Green is a color, not a political ideology.

If the current level of usage in political discourse, the media and environmental groups continues, “green” will become synonymous with “idiot/crazy” and we will need a new word to describe the color of a traffic light rather than red or yellow.

The belief that linguistic gymnastics and manipulative wordplay aimed at turning environmental policy into easy-to-swallow pills for taxpayers has spread to other areas. A few years ago, renewable energy advocates decided that describing wind and solar sources as “is flashing” make them seem insecure, unreliable. And then, hocus pocus, these sources will have to be described as “variables“. Anyone who uses the old terminology becomes suspect as a denialist, a defeatist, an opponent of renewable sources. The simple mention that there are still days and nights when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, and that this will cause problems for electric utilities, which should be available at all times is undesirable, even prohibited. Unfortunately, climate activists and propagandists ignore the fact that changing the terminology does not change the weather or opinion. But for a while, the new term was used as a password to identify those who play in the team Regenerabile

A recent Bloomberg article illustrates another example of manipulative linguistic gymnastics. This is now claimed by climate activists natural gas mined by hydraulic fracturing, no fossil gas Because natural gas sounds too good, as long as it’s natural! Once again, climate activists and propagandists ignore the fact that the world does not know that natural gas is a fossil fuel. Do they hope that by using the new name, functionally minded people will abandon the stove or oven and automatically switch to electric, microwave or resistance units?

The term “natural gas” was adopted in the 1820s to distinguish this product from gas obtained from the processing of coal and oil. It is a natural, colorless, odorless substance that is formed underground as a result of the decomposition of plants, animals and other organic substances. Natural gas is still being produced today in landfills, swamps, the Amazon jungle, and rice fields.

Environmentalists are calling for the old name to be dropped because they say “natural gas” is now being used strategically to hide the climate effects of methane gas while promoting it as a healthy option. Environmentalists avoid the reality that much of the reduction in CO2 emissions in the US and many other countries in recent years is due to the transition from coal-fired power plants to natural gas-fired power plants. And this reduction was not due to environmentalist-sanctioned killings, but due to the genius of geologists, geophysicists and engineers who found and extracted more natural gas.

Dangerous pun – inturning points

I did not find an adequate translation in the special Romanian literature. I used in 2020 the expression critical points (On the inconsistency of “tipping points” in the evolution of complex natural systems) with the following description:

Points at which significant non-linear relationships arise between the evolutionary attributes of a complex natural system (eg, ecological, hydrological, climatic) and the factors (natural or human) that cause changes in the system. If “tipping points” exceed a certain threshold, changes to a new state of the system occur rapidly and may become irreversible or exhibit hysteresis (a return to the initial state that occurs along a path different from the path of the initial change)

Officially called “climate tipping points,” they describe situations where abrupt changes occur that cause the affected system to suddenly transition from one state to another. Mathematically, they are identified in the theory of catastrophes as a system that has two stable states and is able to suddenly “jump” from one to another. The metaphor of critical “tipping points”, tipping points, tipping points, or whatever you want to translate them, has infiltrated the environment and climate debate with the clear intention of scaring people who don’t vandalize Western art, or stick to highways, they don’t do others varieties of Talibanism, but they need to be reduced to the path of reckless adoption of politics, as “No more oil”, “No More Fracking“, “Net zero emissions“, “No more ICE» etc.

Over time, the “tipping points” have formed an ever-evolving body of knowledge that is particularly prone to confusion and misinterpretation. Geologists, geophysicists, paleontologists and other categories of geoscientists have proposed slightly different definitions of “critical” points, and the lists of such “points” have undergone various deletions and additions. While sudden changes caused by El Niño and La Niña or tropical monsoons are no longer on the doomsday list, concerns remain about a weakening or halting of the Gulf Stream, deforestation in the Amazon jungle, melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, or sudden methane emissions from areas with permafrost.

In the earth sciences, including climatology, the term tipping point raises reasonable questions.

The first part is incline – assumes a speed similar to a car flipping over the edge of a cliff. But the available climate data show that sudden changes on a scale of 20-30 years are very rare and can be considered the exception rather than the rule. In addition, the five components of the climate system (lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere) undergo significant changes over many decades, centuries, or even millennia.

As I described in the article “Burning Ice” – Geological hazard, climate bomb or energy gold? (2), methane hydrates can “explode” with remarkable climatic consequences, but only on a geological scale (10,000 – 20,000 years), not on a human scale (~100 years). Therefore, future CH4 emissions from melting Siberian and Canadian permafrost, as well as sea level rise from melting Greenland ice sheets, may occur over many thousands of years. In other words, for me, as a geologist, turning points are long-term phenomena. Of course, for a layman who imagines a tipping point like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which can fall very quickly, the human scale of time is dominant.

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