Introduction

Words have power. Words can be used to frame a discussion fairly or unfairly to limit and control how the members of that discussion are able to think about the presented concepts and issues. This framing can be done completely without the members knowing that their thinking (or options) to understand (or resolve) some issue has been invisibly limited and controlled. On political and social levels, the unfair or inaccurate reframing of words is called propaganda.

The four reasons why we must stop using the term climate change wherever possible

Reason 1: The first reason is exceedingly simple. We need to use terms that most reflect the actual reality of our current climate condition. Unfortunately, the term climate change does not do that or even come close.

On the other hand, using the term runaway global heating extinction emergency far more accurately reflects the reality of our current climate condition. We truly are in runaway global heating because we have already crossed critical amplifying climate feedback loops and climate tipping points, creating the beginning stages of runaway global heating. According to James Hansen, the respected NASA climate scientist, we entered runaway global heating when we passed the atmospheric carbon level (CO2) of about carbon 386 parts per million (ppm) level around 2015. (As of March of 2022, we are now at Carbon 421 ppm.)

Runaway global warming is very serious. If you imagined runaway global heating like a train without brakes rolling down a mountain that is getting steeper and steeper, you would have a good idea about the seriousness of runaway global heating consequences and how they will keep increasing faster and faster.

You can see our runaway global warming in the atmospheric carbon CO2 graph below. As atmospheric carbon rises faster and faster (the steepening dotted line), so is global heating.

Reason 2: There is no current and credible scientific doubt consensus that we are currently experiencing global heating caused by humans burning fossil fuels. (See the global heating explanation link at the end of this page.)

Reason 3: The term “climate change” was heavily promoted by Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who suggested using it in government publications and discussions because it’s less “frightening” than saying “global warming” This was then picked up by the fossil fuel lobbyists. 

The well-funded fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists have successfully re-framed our real runaway global heating extinction emergency into the widespread use of the vague and non-threatening concept and term called climate change. Unfortunately, this clever re-framing of our current extinction-triggering global heating as climate change has dramatically hindered the public's ability to think accurately about the absolute urgency and severity of the runaway global heating extinction threat.

Well-funded fossil fuel lobbyists have invisibly and successfully re-framed the global heating emergency by getting governments, worldwide media, and even many unwitting environmental groups to use the innocuous, vague, and relatively calming "climate change" term. This climate change propaganda is designed to redefine (or confuse) the ordinary meaning of words and their concepts to control a target's ability to think about those concepts or, even hold specific "undesirable" concepts in their minds, which the source of propaganda does not want to be considered.

This term re-framing technique is how the 28 trillion dollar-a-year fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists have successfully redefined the truth and power of what we are facing, namely, the runaway global heating extinction emergency. As a result, the fossil fuel industry has redirected the mass public's attention away from the urgency of the real threat to something that the average citizen does not see as a threat or problem, the mushy climate change idea and term.

This sleight-of-hand terminology swap has turned a scary and honest global heating truth that needs to be dealt with on an urgent and emergency basis into the nebulous and benign concept in the average citizen's mind. In the average citizen's mind, this looks like the ideas that, "the climate (the weather) is always changing. It is changing exactly how it has customarily and always behaved during my lifetime."

Because of this intentional misdirection and climate condition terminology reframing, people falsely feel safe. They then believe that nothing much needs to be done (or is done) to deal with the "ever-changing natural and seasonal processes of the climate." Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth!

Reason 4: We are genuinely in an extinction emergency and a fight for the very survival of humanity. Reframing the runaway global heating extinction emergency into climate change was not the only clever propaganda manipulation by the fossil fuel lobbyists. 

These fossil fuel lobbyists also have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations (as well as worldwide media and our governments) telling us that climate change is only a vague and nebulous "existential threat" at some yet unknown or unspoken date in our future.

Here is the problem with telling people there is an existential threat sometime off in an unknown future:

1. The average human IQ is 100.

2. The majority of the human population has little to no idea what the word existential means. Does it relate to the existential philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard?

3. Even if they look existential up, they get the definition of "relating to existence." That sure could mean a lot of vague things and not be experienced as anything close to what we are now facing, which is a rapidly accelerating global heating extinction threat to our soon arriving future. (Extinction by mid-century for about half of humanity and around 2050- 2080 for most of the rest of humanity.)

I think you can see why we have to stop feeding vagueness and using an "existential" threat. This is not a vague or low-probability threat. (Links at the end of this document will give you a deeper understanding of how runaway global heating has become an extinction emergency.

We have to get the IPCC, our media, and our governments to start using the correct terms for our current climate condition, which average people can understand and that will motivate them into action. Imagine what could change if billion of citizens realized that their extinction from runaway global heating is just a few decades away or sooner.

It is now time to do something about this hidden theft of our collective ability to think correctly about the runaway global heating extinction emergency and its imminent threat to all life! It is time to use more accurate climate terms and change how the world thinks about what is going on with runaway global heating.

The Aikido of one unique wording option

Aikido is often defined as the art of using whatever attack is thrown at you against itself to overcome an adversary. One way we can do some Aikido when we are forced to use the term climate change is to add to it. When we change climate change into the climate change extinction emergency, it completely defeats the purpose of the fossil fuel industry lobbyists.

Please Take the "I Will Stop Using the Term Climate Change Whenever I Can" Pledge

• I hereby pledge to stop using climate change in my daily conversations. Instead, I will use the terms global heating, the runaway global heating extinction emergency, the climate change extinction emergency, the global warming emergency, escalating global warming, out of control global heating, or catastrophic climate destabilization to describe the current accelerating increase in the Earth's average global temperature and the ongoing and escalating destruction to our lives and the environment caused by global heating primarily due to our burning of fossil fuels.
• I pledge that I will contest the fossil fuel industry lobbyists and climate deniers mis-framing and falsely defining the real dangers of the runaway global heating extinction emergency by calling it climate change! 
• I pledge that I will help forward this pledge to others particularly, other environmental groups I know about.

Here is a chart to provide more ideas about better language because the language we use in vitally important.

(Please note: Our organization does still occasionally use the term climate change on our website, but only to guide people to our website on the Internet using the still dominant climate change search term. We also use global heating-related terms when mentioning climate change on our website. 

To learn more about why runaway global heating is a true extinction emergency, see this link.

To learn more about the leading global heating extinction-accelerating tipping points and why we have only until 2025-2031 to prevent our near-total extinction, see this link.

To see credible science on the existence of global heating, see this link.

Please also, forward this article and pledge to anyone you know in the environmental and climate education groups.

See how this pledge will be used

Divesting from all fossil fuels and moving fully to green energy generation is critical to our survival.

(There are similar short and long emergency petitions below. After reading either one, sign electronically with the Sign button or at the bottom of this page. After signing, you will receive an immediate email copy and acknowledgment.)

Tens of thousands have already signed this petition and similar petitions worldwide! 

(Short Form) The Climate Change and Runaway Global Heating Extinction Emergency Petition 

We are now facing the worst-case climate change and global heating scenario. Its environmental deterioration, and extinction threat can only be slowed down by our politicians forcing our governments to immediately enact the correct 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets.

Getting close to the correct 2025 global targets will reduce damaging greenhouse gases like carbon, methane from fracking, and the melting permafrost. It will also help prevent the loss of 10 million lives a year from the effects of toxic air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning. 

Therefore, I hereby demand that my political leaders act today before it is too late to prevent untold suffering and even the extinction of much of humanity by as early as mid-century! 

I specifically demand that our government leaders meet to first:

1. Formally declare a national and international Runaway Global Heating Extinction Emergency. (Unless we call the climate change threat the emergency that it really is, we will never be able to manage it.)

2. Next, immediately pass enforceable and verifiable national and international laws that will get us close to the required, correct, and honest, 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. (These laws and actions are described here.)

3. Next, order an immediate government mass mobilization of ALL necessary resources and personnel to execute ALL required governmental actions to come as close as possible to the correct 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. (This will slow and lessen our accelerating climate change and global heating emergency.) And then,

4. Do everything possible to start preparing and adapting our nation and the world to the many soon-arriving severe climate change and global heating consequences which we can no longer avoid or prevent.

By electronically signing this petition (in the box at the bottom of the page,) I am officially petitioning my national politicians to execute the four above actions to protect and preserve humanity and all animal and biological life on Earth before we run out of time to do so sometime near 2025.

That is the end of the short-form petition. To sign, click the red "Sign Petition Now" button just below or sign it at the bottom of this page.

(Long Form) The Climate Change and Global Heating Extinction Emergency Petition 

(When you electronically sign the form at the bottom of this page, the petition is activated and we immediately email you a copy.) 

Introduction

We, the citizens of our nation and of the Earth, are endowed with certain rights, powers, and obligations, which demand we act to preserve and protect the future of humanity and Earth's other animal and biological life.

Based on abundant scientific evidence or our own current experiences, we recognize that the global climate is rapidly warming and becoming increasingly unstable due to human-caused atmospheric carbon pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.

We also recognize that in spite of 40 years of credible scientific warnings, global heating is still rising and has now reached dangerous levels causing the widespread deterioration of our environment!

We are now facing the worst-case global heating scenario. The climate change and the runaway global heating extinction emergency, its environmental deterioration, and its extinction threat can only be slowed down by our politicians passing new laws and getting our governments to immediately mass mobilizing and enforcing the correct 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. These laws and actions are described here.)

Getting close to the correct 2025 global targets will reduce damaging greenhouse gases like carbon and methane from fracking and the melting permafrost. It will also help prevent the loss of 10 million lives a year from the effects of toxic air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning. 

We have already seen or experienced global heating-aggravated weather, like record-breaking floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. We have witnessed the "worst in centuries" droughts and dust storms. We have experienced alternating unseasonably cold then warm winters, extreme storms, bomb cyclones, and rain bombs where weeks or months' worth of rain falls in a few hours or a few days.

With our own eyes, we see that something very abnormal is happening to the previous normal stability of our seasonal weather patterns. We have also noticed that global heating-connected consequences (like those just mentioned) are becoming more frequent, more severe, and are affecting larger and larger areas of our country and the world!

We recognize that if we do not immediately reduce our global fossil fuel burning behaviors before additional critical global heating tipping points are crossed, the destabilization of our global climate will continue at even faster rates, causing unprecedented global crop failures and unthinkable mass starvation.  

Our best climate scientists have determined that if we do not meet or come very close to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets (found here,) we will face a massive extinction event where about half of humanity will die by mid-century. We also recognize that the hyper-optimism of current new technology carbon capture schemes (NETs) are in reality, no more than asking us to believe that magical carbon-sucking unicorns will appear at the last minute and save us from our own continuing failure to radically reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Unsurprisingly, escalating global heating will not only affect humanity's survival possibilities. It also presents an equally grave extinction threat to much of the animal and biological species on Earth.

Rising global heating has already become the 21st century's single greatest disruptor, multiplier, and amplifier of existing economic, political, social, and biological instability. It will also act to make most of our other 11 most destructive and important global problems far worse.

If we fail to make the life-critical 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets in time, escalating global heating will pass multiple points of no return and the laws of climate physics will take over and global warming will go out of our meaningful control.

The primary and secondary climate change consequences are already affecting millions in many areas of the world. No one will be ultimately safe from the consequences of runaway global warming and the real and present mass extinction threat it presents. 

Many individuals and businesses are already forced to deal with global warming-related catastrophes, food, and resource depletion, as well as the mass migration of desperate climagees (climate migrants.) Long before mid-century, climate change catastrophes will be harming billions of people everywhere on Earth! 

The coming financial bill for escalating climate catastrophes will eventually crush the economies of most nations. 

We now face a world in which runaway global heating can cause the extinction of half of humanity and create increasing social, economic, and political chaos, not sometime near 2100 as was wrongly predicted, but as soon as mid-century.

Worse yet, as our average global temperatures continue to rise, the world's 11 other major social, economic, and political challenges will also amplify each other. Our 11 other largest global challenges (other than climate change and immediate global nuclear war or biological or nuclear terrorism,) will interact with each other and will also worsen as global warming gets worse.

Those 11 other major global challenges are:

Global Challenge 1: ever-rising over-population, (the Earth has the carrying capacity for about 1 1/2 - 2 billion people. Currently, we are near 8 billion people adding about 130 million additional people each year racing to 9.8 billion by or before 2050. (About 50 million people a year normally die.)

We are way over sustainable population levels already yet, no government other than China seems willing to set a one child per couple policy! Future and current generations will suffer unthinkable catastrophes because, as humanity, we failed to manage the size of our global population to match the carrying capacity of our global environment and the Earth's available resources.

Please note that as the global population continues to rise, the additional population serves to further amplify and multiply the most harmful consequences of almost all the 12 other global challenges and consequences listed on this page.) One could easily say that overpopulation and its inherent over-consumption beyond our carrying capacity is also a major cause behind today's climate change emergency. (Please click this carrying capacity link to learn more about why this rapidly rising overpopulation challenge is so dangerous.)

For a candid and balanced article on the immense suffering caused by our overpopulation global challenge, please see this article, Population, the Great Knee-Jerker: A Holistic Survey and Plea to Reduce Suffering.

Global Challenge 2: rising global resource depletion (aka overshoot) caused by overpopulation, toxic pollution of water, lands, and air, crop failures, overfishing, topsoil loss, resource distribution injustice, and the massive “overconsumption and waste” of the Earth's finite resources. Global resource depletion will significantly increase food shortages and cause soaring food prices leading to more starvation and mass migrations. For example, the following are estimates of when only a few of our critical global resources will be depleted; freshwater 12 years (2032), fish stocks almost totally gone by 2050, adequate topsoil for crop growing gone by 2070. (See this page to see 90 percent of fish stock already overfished and to see charts on how this loss will throw much of the world into starvation.)

Of particular concern is the depletion of phosphorous critically needed for crop fertilizers. Adequate access to this could run out in as little as 35-45 years.

(If you still do not believe that massive resource depletion and overshoot is a huge soon-arriving problem? Watch this fantastic resource overshoot video with great graphics and global resource depletion amounts and time frames in simple illustrations by Hugh Montgomery, a noted English professor. We strongly recommend you watch this video for all of the food and non-food resources that are in an accelerating depletion peril. [Forward the video to the 10 minutes and 30-second mark to begin watching Professor Hugh Montgomery's compelling graphic presentation.])

There are also many other critical mineral and non-mineral resources that will also run out soon, click here for more about these.

Global Challenge 3: escalating pollution of lands, air, and waters. Ongoing and accelerating toxic pollution kills crops, fish stocks, and poisons our air, water, and soil creating and accelerating all types of global health, social, and economic problems. (Ocean heating and ocean acidification from carbon from global warming will eventually kill off much of the oceans' oxygen-producing plankton. These plankton are responsible for as much as 50% of all oxygen produced on the planet.) 

Global Challenge 4: loss of biodiversity, we are having more plants and animals go extinct than at any other time in human history. This is due to an ongoing and accelerating loss of natural habitat due to overpopulation, global warming, overuse, pollution, etc. (Leading Stanford University biologists, who were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner, which may be another tipping point for the collapse of human civilization.)

Global Challenge 5: growing economic inequality, social and racial injustice, hunger, and poverty. Today less than 1% of the world's population owns more than 50% of all wealth. Over the last several decades, this ownership percentage continues to grow in favor of the wealthy.

Growing economic inequality and poverty always increase food shortages and often cause food prices to soar leading once again to mass starvation and mass migrations. This year (2020,) 130 million people are lacking adequate food and could starve to death. COVID-19's effect on the world economy could double that number of the next few years. Over the following decades, climate change consequences will raise that number into the hundreds of millions eventually rising well past a billion.) 

Global Challenge 6: Resolving the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic. Directly and indirectly, the current COVID-19 pandemic is due in significant part to the loss of natural wild animal habitat caused by global warming and other man-made causes such as eating more wild and not domesticated animals, the exploding and hungry world populations crowding into urban areas, and the overall deterioration of global health services. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to go on around the world until mid to late 2022 or even into early 2024 before everyone is vaccinated. Like what has happened with AIDS and other viruses over the last 30 years, we will be living with the effects of COVID-19 possibly forever or until a “herd immunity” is developed (if that type of immunity is even applicable to this specific virus.)

Global Challenge 7: increasing global economic instabilities that are leading to regularly reoccurring global and national recessions or depressions over shorter and shorter time periods. (These recessions and depressions are fueled by existing economic weaknesses, lack of financial reserves, huge national deficits, low financial system resilience, and major unexpected shocks or events (like COVID-19,) hitting the global markets and global financial systems.

COVID-19 is predicted to create a global financial recession or depression that could last until late 2022 or until 2025 or as long as 2030. (Ten years for recovery from a COVID-19 global recession or depression is not that long when you consider that ten years is the time it took to recover from the 2008 global banking and housing meltdown and recession.)

Global Challenge 8: escalating regional and international terrorism, conflicts, and war. While COVID-19 has temporarily slowed some regional and national conflicts, expect these conflicts to increase in intensity, frequency, and scale once COVID-19 is brought under control. The world still faces all of the other global challenges on this page getting worse and being mostly unresolved. Global nuclear war is still both a real and escalating threat as all of the global challenges on this page continue to get worse and nations with nuclear weapons contest with each other and other nations for safer lands and dwindling resources.

Global Challenge 9: More mass migrations, political and economic instability, increasing terrorism, conflicts, and war plus global warming, and many of the other listed global challenges on this page will both create and expand sudden, massive migrations of millions then billions of people. During this phase, as the listed global challenges on this page intensify, various stronger governments will order precautionary evacuations to limit casualties and losses from their most vulnerable areas. Before 2030 because of climate change alone, the world will see hundreds of millions of climagees (climate refugees.)

Global Challenge 10: increasing political instability and collapsing governments. Fueled by existing internal and external conflicts, soaring deficits, and the intensifying global challenges listed on this page, poorly managed nations with weak economies and low existing resilience will fall first. In 2020 we already see numerous countries on the verge of economic or political collapse. As the increased stresses of these listed global challenges continue to increase upon already weakened nations, more nations will steadily collapse. 

Global Challenge 11: Our failure to evolve effective global governance with the needed legislative, judicial, and enforceable executive powers to solve global challenges that cross national borders. If you think about it carefully, you will discover that this global challenge (and critical evolutionary failure,) of having no unified or truly effective global governance, IS one of the single biggest reasons and core structural causes for why most of our other global challenges have not yet been resolved or, continue to exist. The evolutionary absence of effective global governance alone acts to facilitate, escalate, or enable almost all of the other global challenges that we currently face. 

Global Challenge 12: New COVID-19 like pandemics as well as other new and older disease epidemics that will now likely occur every decade. This will in part be due to global warming melting of the permafrost, loss of natural animal habitat, eating more wild animals, overcrowding, less resilient health systems, mass migrations, wars and conflicts, and many of the other challenges and consequences listed on this page.

Additionally, new and older disease epidemics will occur more frequently and be more severe because of the abuse of antibiotics in animal product production. This abuse has resulted in bacteria that are now resistant to every known type of antibiotic. Worse yet, because of accelerating global warming, more COVID-19 type global pandemics could come as often as every decade. The AIDS virus became widespread in the late 1970s, the SARS virus in 2003, the MERS virus in 2012, and the Ebola virus in 2013. Click here for more about how escalating global warming may begin producing COVID-19 like pandemics every decade. 

In Conclusion:

Despite 60+years of scientific reports as well as 33 International conferences about the certain extinction effects of the massive carbon (and methane,) pollution of our atmosphere, global heating temperatures have both continued to rise and have accelerated to levels that have already passed dangerous tipping points.

There is now a true urgency to sign the Runaway Global Heating Extinction Emergency Petition. Help Prevent Mass Human, Animal, and Biological Extinction within Our Lifetimes. 

Our average global temperature and atmospheric carbon levels are far too close to crossing the final three extinction-accelerating tipping points. 

It is now too late for individual fossil fuel reduction actions alone! Our politicians must force our governments to act in an immediate, all-out mass mobilization creating all of the needed resources and enforcing any needed new laws to ensure we come close to the 2025 fossil fuel reduction targets.  

If we fail to get close to the 2025 targets, this emergency becomes a no-win game for everyone, no matter how much money or power they might have and no matter where they might try to escape to!  

Our current climate change and global heating extinction emergency can only be resolved by first immediately and radically reducing the global human-caused production of fossil fuel carbon and other key greenhouse gases (like methane) produced directly and indirectly from the global burning of fossil fuels.

Therefore, we hereby demand

that our national politicians act now before it is too late to slow down and lessen the untold suffering of a mass human, animal, and biological extinction by about mid-century! 

I specifically demand that our politicians meet to first:

1. Formally declare a national and international Runaway Global Heating Extinction Emergency. 

2. Next, immediately pass enforceable and verifiable national and international laws that will get us close to the correct 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. (These laws and actions are described here.)

3. Next, order an immediate mass mobilization of ALL necessary resources and personnel to execute ALL required governmental and individual actions needed to come as close as possible to the 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets. And, then

4. Do everything possible to start adapting our nations and the world to the many coming severe global heating consequences which we can no longer stop or avoid.

By electronically signing this petition (in the box at the bottom of the page,) I am officially petitioning my national politicians to immediately execute all four above actions to end global heating and protect and preserve humanity and life on Earth.

Furthermore, realizing that most of the worst climate change consequences that are already occurring will take centuries to thousands of years to repair (which will create an unthinkable nightmare for any surviving future generations), I further pledge to continue to act to help resolve this accelerating extinction threat and emergency until it is successfully resolved!

When you sign the petition, you are giving us permission to send you the petition signature acknowledgment and critical climate change emergency progress updates once a month.

See Key information about how this petition will be used here.

Additional Petition Documentation and Information If Needed

1. If you still have any hesitation about signing this petition, please see this page which discusses the four extinction-evoking global warming tipping points soon arriving!

2. Click here for details on the primary and secondary global warming-related consequences that are bringing about real threats of mass extinction and global collapse.

3. Click here for why carbon capture and other new technologies can not save us in time, and we must focus on reducing all global fossil fuel use now.

4. Learn more about the story behind this nonprofit organization's mission and why this petition must go worldwide and be presented to politicians all over the world by clicking here.