In Oscar Wilde’s comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Cecily and Gwendolen want to marry a man named Ernest simply because of the name’s connotations. They are so fixated on the name that they would not consider marrying a man who was not named Ernest. The name, sounding like “earnest”, shows uprightness, inspires “absolute confidence”, implies that its bearer truly is honest and responsible.
A name can truly be very important when it embodies the communication of a message. Surprisingly (or not) it is also important when dealing with international treaties and initiatives. An example is the story of the Ozone Hole and the Montreal Protocol, the most successful governmental agreement on an environmental problem at the global scale. The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987 by 46 countries (now having nearly 200 signatories), banned the use and production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) worldwide, recognizing that they represented a threat for the stratospheric ozone layer. During the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Protocol, Jonathan Shanklin, Head of Meteorology and Ozone Monitoring Unit for the British Antarctic Survey declared that in retrospect, the Ozone Hole was a really good thing to call the ozone depletion problem “because an Ozone Hole must be bad. Almost automatically, it meant that people wanted something doing about it. The hole had to be filled in”.
Much more confusion is involved in naming another problem at the same global scale: global warming, or climate change. The international agreement on it, the Kyoto Protocol, is not being as successful as the Montreal one.
“Global warming” and “Climate change” are two different phenomena, casually related. “Global warming” refers to the observation of a long-term trend of increasing temperatures. “Climate change” refers to different changes in climate phenomena driven by the increasing concentration of greenhouse-gases in the atmosphere. The alternative use of the two “names” probably contributed to the misunderstanding of the problem for the general public, giving alibis to those who are (conveniently) sceptical about climate change. That happens for example whenever a winter is colder than the year before, or more snowy, then “where is the global warming?”.
Surely the fact that the Montreal Protocol was successful and Kyoto Protocol is not, has much more profound and complex reasons than just the “naming”. There is however a trade-off between scientific rigour and effective communication to deal with. Scientific rigour should guide our management plans, effective communication should stimulate actions.
The scientific community and political stakeholders have to be “earnest” in balancing rigour and communication strength.
Author
Luca Coscieme, coscieml[at]tcd.ie