Climate crusader Arnold Schwarzenegger is urging a rebranding of global warming as “pollution” to generate more intense fear among the general population.
“As long as they keep talking about global climate change, they are not gonna go anywhere,” Schwarzenegger said in an interview this week on CBS’ Sunday Morning. “Cause no one gives a shit about that.”
“So my thing is, let’s go and rephrase this and communicate differently about it and really tell people — we’re talking about pollution. Pollution creates climate change, and pollution kills,” the actor and former California governor added.
Schwarzenegger is not the first to spot the need to intensify climate change rhetoric if people are going to be to frightened into action.
Endless warnings of climate peril are “wearing the public out,” Arnold Schwarzenegger warned Thursday. https://t.co/AQvMaRgyPo
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 4, 2021
In 2019, for instance, the Guardian newspaper, the UK’s flagship of climate alarmism, announced it was updating its official in-house style guide to heat up its climate change rhetoric, adopting language meant to scare readers and motivate them to action.
“Instead of ‘climate change’ the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming,’ although the original terms are not banned,” the paper stated at the time.
“The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity,” said Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief.
“Increasingly, climate scientists and organisations from the UN to the Met Office are changing their terminology, and using stronger language to describe the situation we’re in,” she said.
The newspaper also said that in the future it would no longer refer to “climate skeptics” but only “climate deniers.”
“You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate,” the Guardian declared, and those who dare question the accepted climate groupthink deserve no place at the table.
For years, climate change crusaders have studied people’s emotional response to climate expressions and purposefully selected the terminology that elicits the strongest reaction.
Arnold Schwarzenegger said he is “starstruck” by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. https://t.co/3dnXO2I48N
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 28, 2019
In April 2019, a team of advertising consultants from SPARK Neuro published the results of a study suggesting that the expressions “global warming” and “climate change” do not frighten people enough, whereas a shift in vocabulary to “climate crisis” or “environmental collapse” produced a significantly stronger emotional response.
The expression “climate crisis,” for instance, got “a 60 percent greater emotional response from listeners” than “climate change,” the study found.
In its research, SPARK Neuro measured physiological data such as brain activity and palm sweat to quantify people’s emotional reactions to stimuli.
Of six different options, “global warming” and “climate change” performed the worst, beaten handily by “climate crisis,” “environmental destruction,” “weather destabilization,” and “environmental collapse.”
The CEO of SPARK Neuro, Spencer Gerrol, said that “global warming” and “climate change” are both neutral phrases with nothing “inherently negative or positive” about the words themselves, which could help explain why they elicit such a feeble emotional response.
Furthermore, both global warming and climate change are “incredibly worn out,” Gerrol said, and no longer produce the reaction they might have once.
For his part, the 75-year-old bodybuilder and governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has become a public voice about climate change through his role as the host of the Austrian World Summit, a global climate change conference.
File/Austrian-American actor, and former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaks in the “Bonn-Zone” during the World Climate Conference in Bonn, Germany, 12 November 2017. (Henning Kaiser/picture alliance via Getty Images)
“I’m on a mission to go and reduce greenhouse gases worldwide,” Schwarzenegger said, “because I’m into having a healthy body and a healthy Earth. That’s what I’m fighting for. And that’s my crusade.”
His proposal to rebrand climate change as “pollution” is a nonstarter, however, for the simple reason that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant and is not harmful to human health.
Unlike pollutants, carbon dioxide is odorless, colorless, and most importantly, non-toxic. Human beings expel carbon dioxide with every breath they take (without polluting) and breathe it in with every lungful of air they inhale — to no ill effect. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen.
Horticulturists regularly pump CO2 into greenhouses, raising levels to three times that of the natural environment, to produce stronger, greener, healthier plants.
Moreover, current levels of carbon dioxide concentration in the environment are substantially lower than they have been during earlier periods in the planet’s history. Without human intervention, the concentration of CO2 has climbed as high as 7,000 parts per million (ppm) in prior eras, whereas at present the concentration is just over 400 ppm.
Some experts on the environment, such as UN climate scientist Dr. Indur Goklany, have defended rising CO2 levels as a positive thing for humanity. Goklany has argued that the rising level of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere “is currently net beneficial for both humanity and the biosphere generally.”
“The benefits are real, whereas the costs of warming are uncertain,” he said.