Climate change terminology does not influence willingness to take climate action

Abstract

Despite widespread concern about climate change, a majority of people are not engaging in climate actions necessary to help decrease the risks posed by global warming. Many practitioners and scholars have argued that the climate change terminology can be leveraged to elicit distinct reactions. However, the results of different climate change terms have been mixed. The current research addresses this ongoing debate by directly testing the impact of climate terminology. Across two experiments (Ntotal = 6,132, recruited globally in 63 countries in Experiment 1, and a replication in the US in Experiment 2), we explored whether climate terminology influenced the extent to which individuals were willing to engage in preventative action. We tested the differential effect of 10 frequently used terms (i.e., “climate change”, “climate crisis”, “global warming”, “global heating”, “climate emergency”, “carbon pollution”, “carbon emissions”, “greenhouse gasses”, “greenhouse effect”, “global boiling”). Despite high willingness to engage in climate action (74% in Experiment 1 and 57% in Experiment 2), the terms had no impact on intentions to act. Bayesian ANOVAs strongly supported the null hypothesis in both studies. This pattern of null results was robust across a wide variety of populations (including age, gender, political ideology, socioeconomic status, and education level), as well as across numerous psychological and cultural variables. Our null results suggest that subtle differences in climate change language are not a barrier to climate action, indicating that focusing on subtle terminology in climate messaging is not an effective use of resources.