Synonyms and the Climate Crisis
I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honors System.
Just about a year ago, I witnessed a radical shift in the field of research and publishing. Researchers around the country began to tiptoe around the target demographics of their research. Proposals were being rewritten overnight within all fields from psychology to physics, and for the first time, I saw the pages of my history books come to life. This was the beginning of trickle-down censorship.
The source is a list of words that would be removed from historical documents and require extra screening on research proposals. Words like health equity, females, disabled, climate crisis, elderly, emissions, among 350 others, were flagged for additional screening (1). And while there have been impacts in all fields, a recent interview with Dr.Phil Otren enlightened me on its impacts within climate research. He remarked that since most of his research is funded from grants, he has made small changes in order to fit the new standard, such as switching phrases like “climate change” to “long-term changes”. While he notes that it doesn't impact the works he publishes, just the grants, it reveals a more fearful trend of how much power language has on the perception of climate science.
Language is a powerful tool for researchers and journalists to communicate scientific findings to the general public. The comprehensibility terminology in climate science is extremely important,t especially in cases where we need the public to engage their votes and voices to protect the earth. When asked to rate their understanding on a scale of 1 to 5, the United Nations' foundations found that words such as mitigation and carbon neutral had the lowest understanding, while abrupt change had the most (2).
Follow-up studies revealed that a series of misunderstandings about climate language were clarified after the second interview (2). This is because of repeated use of the language in multiple contents, which illustrates the impact of asking researchers to change their language. Accepted grants go beyond the money they supply for research; they are a reflection of what's happening in the scientific field at the current moment. Reposts summarizing current grants accepted help the public understand how widespread a topic of interest may be. If the language begins to switch to newer or less popular terminology, the public may not associate it with their prior knowledge of the climate crisis. Additionally, it can skew the reposting of active research as new terminology isn't automatically linked to their prior synonyms.
This is particularly pertinent in climate science due to the immediate changes required to preserve the planet. Currently, our planet is heating 10 times faster than during the previous warming post Ice age (4). This acceptance results in the melting of the polar ice caps, resulting in rising sea levels and quickly eroding shorelines. NASA finds that we are emitting carbon into the environment 250 times faster than we saw before the last ice age, as indicated by dating on prehistoric trees. Much of this information is documented heavily in government archives and online websites. The censorship moves to the historical record as well, as in January 2025, we saw climate change as a phrase removed from many government websites. Additionally, phrases such as decarbonization, clean energy, and energy transition are being phased out of public records and research grants alike (3).
In September of 2025, NPR reported the Energy Department warned its own employees not to use phrases like climate change and green despite the agency currently working towards geothermal, wind, and hydrogen-based power. These changes are reflected on the agency's websites, with the phrases slowly disappearing. These disappearances, along with the others in grant proposals and articles, are the direct impact of censorship and may begin to trickle down to the general public. As we obscure concepts in order to keep programs afloat, we create a further gap in understanding between researchers and the public, undoing years of public work to increase the knowledge on climate change. While it's important to support research required changes, it does leave the question of how we can prepare the public for the changing archives and future headlines.
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