Recently, I overheard a conversation in a cafe where someone described their toast as “awesome”. I felt myself bristle. Not because the toast wasn’t good – I didn’t taste it – but because I remember a time when “awesome” meant something that inspired awe: towering mountains, the vastness of the night sky, the haunting song of a humpback whale. Now it’s being used to describe breakfast.
“Fantastic” has met the same fate, shedding its fantastical origins to become a synonym for “great”. Meanwhile “literally” has been so thoroughly abused that it can now mean something that is, quite literally, not literal.
Linguists call this “semantic bleaching”: the gradual erosion of a word’s original meaning through overuse. Which got me thinking about another word we hear with increasing frequency: “unprecedented”, the go-to adjective in reporting about the climate crisis. In recent months, I’ve read about unprecedented heat, unprecedented rain, unprecedented drought and unprecedented wildfires. Batten down the hatches: reports suggest that the current El Niño is going to be – you guessed it – unprecedented.
The dictionary definition hasn’t changed. “Unprecedented” still means something that has never happened before – and all the events described above have indeed represented a ratcheting up of the severity of heat, drought, rain and fire. But the word is being used so often, it feels as though it’s losing its punch. The extraordinary is starting to sound ordinary, the unprecedented almost routine.
And yet, there is nothing ordinary about what is happening. Britain has just experienced its hottest summer on record, beating the previous record set only last year. When climate-related records keep being smashed, it raises a question: what do we actually find remarkable?
In a study analysing more than 2bn weather-related social-media posts, Frances Moore from the University of California, Davis, and colleagues found that when it comes to temperature, remarkability changes with repeated exposure. Unprecedented temperatures feel less remarkable when we’ve experienced similar ones in the previous few years. We don’t make judgments based on historical precedents or childhood memories, but on what we’ve lived through recently. In other words, something can be historically unprecedented but psychologically precedented.
This means our yardstick for what counts as normal or remarkable is constantly changing. Ecologists call this “shifting baseline syndrome”. This was originally described in the context of fisheries, when Daniel Pauly noted that successive generations of fisheries scientists accepted increasingly depleted fish populations as their baseline. We now realise that the phenomenon is widespread, applying not just to biodiversity loss, but to pollution, environmental degradation and the climate crisis.
But Moore’s study contained a twist. Although extreme temperatures became less remarkable with repeated exposure, the negative feelings they provoked didn’t fade. We may stop finding unprecedented temperatures remarkable, but that doesn’t mean we find them tolerable. We’re not necessarily becoming blase about the climate crisis. We can still recognise that something is unpleasant without realising how unusual it is.
You have probably heard the parable of the boiling frog. When the unfortunate amphibian is placed in a pot of slowly warming water, it supposedly fails to notice the gradual rise in temperature and stays put until it croaks. So, here we all are, bobbing around in our family-size Le Creusets, marvelling at how balmy the water feels, as we complain that we’re starting to poach.
And that’s the dangerous bit. If extreme temperatures become familiar, we may be less likely to recognise just how extraordinary they are. What once would have seemed remarkable becomes just another hot summer, another flooded street, another crop failure. The baseline shifts, and with it our sense of what needs fixing. If the water feels normal, we may be less likely to demand that the heat be turned down.
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Which brings us back to the frog. As it turns out, the old parable gets it completely wrong. No healthy frog would sit idly in a warming pan of water. They feel the heat and respond to it. When the temperature crosses a threshold, they hop out. So, maybe that’s the question we should be asking ourselves. If we can no longer recognise how remarkable these uncomfortable temperatures are, what will it take for us to do what the frog does: respond to the heat?
One place to start is with the words we use to describe what is happening. “Awesome” became ordinary because we kept using it for ordinary things – such as warm bread and marmalade. Climate extremes are different: the events themselves haven’t become ordinary, even if our experience of them is becoming more familiar. “Unprecedented” is in danger of becoming a synonym for “really extreme”. It shouldn’t. The word tells us that we have crossed into territory humanity has never experienced before. It’s important we retain that historical meaning.
Perhaps one of the most unsettling things about a heating world is not that unprecedented weather keeps happening. It’s that “unprecedented” is beginning to sound like a perfectly normal thing to say.
