From viral variants to devastating storms, how names shape the public's reaction to science
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Part of the process of scientific discovery and research is naming things. NGC 244. 39B. NGC 6826. Upquark. Downquark. Strangequark. This is episode two of What's in a Name? In the previous episode, we learned how scientists name species and the controversies that can result from those names.

But names don't just matter to scientists. They can impact all of us. In this episode, we're moving out of the universities and scientific publications where names are chosen and into the public realm where names chosen by scientists meet non-scientists.

I am a nerdy scientist. Like, this public stuff that we are doing was never part of the plan and it does get picked up. So we feel a tremendous responsibility to get it right. What we don't want is to use a naming system that diverts attention to the real need. Well-chosen names can help people to understand scientific concepts or health messages. In emergency situations, they can even save lives.

We're going to hear examples of this in disaster communication and public health. On the other hand, when a naming system goes wrong, it can lead to misunderstandings, stigma and confusion.

In the second half of this episode, we'll consider the language used to talk about climate change, where science meets politics, and names have been used to deliberately introduce uncertainty and confusion. So as part of a strategy to downplay the threat to say it's not that big a deal, we'll just adapt, there's no scientific consensus, you know, we need to do more research, we need to wait and see. But before we come to that, what makes a good name?

This was the height of Hurricane Michael, the epicenter of a monster Category 4 storm. Now here we are looking at Tropical Storm Brett. Behind Brett we have Cindy. Cindy was the newly formed tropical... I'm Charlotte Stollart and I started thinking about this topic in September 2022 at the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. We're keeping a close eye on the tropics where Hurricane Fiona is not the only storm we have

The season started off slowly and now it's picking up significantly. Every year from June to November, the Atlantic coast gets battered by storms that can cause massive damage and sometimes loss of life. A storm is classified as a hurricane if it features winds of 74 miles per hour or higher. Scientists give the strongest storms and hurricanes names like Michael or Fiona, as we've just heard.

The names are a way to distinguish one storm or hurricane from another, making it easier to communicate information like the timing and path of a particular storm. To find out how names are chosen, I called Senior Hurricane Specialist John Kangialosi.

He works at the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Florida. And I caught him at the end of a busy few weeks. A treacherous night ahead for Florida as darkness begins to fall and Hurricane Ian continues its catastrophic rampage. John had been working hard to track the path of a hurricane named Ian. Hurricane Ian hit Florida hard on the 28th of September 2022.

Specialists like John always have a lot to do during hurricane season. But this season was particularly difficult for John because he was worried about his family. His parents, uncles and brother lived in the path of the storm. It's really hard when the storm's aiming your direction or in people that you love and it's hard to stay focused on the job. I would call my mom and dad, I'm like, you need to leave. They're in zone A, which is an evacuation zone that leaves first.

because of flooding. And I tried to explain to them that means we think your house was going to be underwater during the event. So you need to leave for your safety. They wouldn't leave. Ironically, I did an interview on CNN. They were watching at the time. And I basically said the same thing on CNN. And then they said, "Okay, we'll leave." They were saved. They went to a safe location. But their homes were greatly damaged and one of their homes is destroyed. You know, these are just very, very damaging things.

And that's why naming hurricanes matters, because being able to communicate effectively with people living in the path of a storm can save lives. The names are agreed by the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. One name for more or less each letter of the alphabet. This nameless is set for years to come. So if you went on our website, you'll see names that go out for the next six years.

And our job at NHC is to basically say, okay, this storm has met criteria to be called a tropical storm. And we have a set criteria that we follow. And then we would pick the next name on the list. Let's say the next storm that forms has that criteria. The next name on the list is Lisa. How long have you been using this particular naming system?

So it's actually been done since the 1950s and it was done as a communication tool. It was never viewed because it would make the meteorology any easier. It was done so that the public perception would be easier. And part of the reason it was done that way is because we used to use just latitude longitude points, you know, locations, but the storms change location. And then you have to understand sometimes we'll have five storms out in the basins at the same time. So it's very hard to,

to communicate hurricane at this location, hurricane at that location. People are generally better and relate better when there's assigned names and they know that I need to worry about that one, not all of them, for example, just as a good way to communicate with people to get messages out about these really impactful weather events. Right. I mean, and it sounds like it's a system that's working well. I mean, you've been using the same system for 70 years now. Has it been tweaked at all?

Really, not tremendously, first. I mean, the only thing that's been changed is, you know, variety in the ethnicities of the names and making sure it's male, female. Gaston, for example, sort of a French background name, right? Or we had, like, Alex, an English name. And then there are plenty of Hispanic names, like we had Joaquin several years ago that was traditionally, or Juan. Now, it doesn't always work out that Gaston is going to hit Martinique, for example, but there's just no way to know that ahead of time.

But we generally pick ethnic backgrounds to really appeal to the audiences and locations that see tropical systems. That's the whole point of it. And also one thing that's been changed a couple of decades now, though, is that we retire names for sensitivity purposes. So, for example, Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans is retired. Hurricane Sandy that affected the New York area is retired.

so that those names don't come back up because there's this sort of perception and attachment, truly attachment, because hurricanes disrupt people's lives so tremendously. Do you ever get people complaining that you've used their name to name a particularly destructive hurricane? Yeah, nobody really wants their name attached to a disaster, at least nobody reasonable. You know, we know that the benefits outweigh any negatives because the message has become clearer.

And that's important. Like while we had Ian going on, there were other storms out there. We had Fiona that was hitting Canada. We had Gaston that was near the Azores. We had Madeline out near Mexico. And imagine if we couldn't communicate that, hey, in Florida, you need to worry about Ian. So this just made it very easy to say Ian is the one you want. Ian is the one you want to worry about.

Giving storms names helped scientists like John to warn communities that might live in the path of a storm, as he did when Hurricane Ian was heading towards his home state of Florida.

Before reaching Florida, Hurricane Ian ploughed a path of destruction through the Caribbean. John's collaborators there also sent out warnings. Hurricanes don't care about country borders, so it's important to have a system that works for multiple countries and in different languages. This is true of infectious diseases too, as we're all painfully aware because a few years ago we lived through a global pandemic.

Let's get right to our top story, the expanding outbreak of the deadly coronavirus. Look at the map. What started in China has now spread to Europe, Australia and the United States. As the coronavirus spread from country to country, scientists and governments needed to coordinate their responses and quickly convey important health information in different languages. And as the virus spread, it changed, it mutated.

Scientists around the world began to identify different variants of the virus. They followed their standard naming system and called the variants things like B.1.1.7 and B.1.3.5.1, based on changes to their genetic code and how they were related to each other. I asked health communication expert Michael Mackett how these names went down with the general public.

the way all the variants for COVID were named, or it was, you know, letter dot number dot number dot number. And there's, I'm sure, very good reasons the researchers are calling things by those names so they can be on the same page. But that is absolutely impossible for normal people to keep track of. I mean, normal people are not reading medical journal articles. And so as much as it's important to be kind of medically precise and have the language that advances science for researchers and professionals,

When that translates to the public, it's really important that we have names that kind of also make sense, I would argue, to the general public, because they're the ones who ultimately are affected by the diseases, we have to communicate with them. And so it's an important part of I think being kind of clear with all publics who might it might matter for.

In order to avoid the confusing letter number number naming system, some newsreaders and politicians started to call variants after the place where they were first identified. Barnet in North London, N3 postcodes are going to be offered enhanced COVID-19 vaccines.

testing after the South African variant of COVID-19 was found in Barnet. It's going to start tomorrow. The Kent variant is the UK's first identified mutant strain. It is highly transmissible and the cause behind the UK is... So we have the Kent variant, the South African variant and so on.

But naming the variant like this was problematic too. I think there's probably two big reasons for that. And one is that if you're saying something is the country X variant, it might make some people think it's limited to country X. And so, oh, I'm in the United States and that's not going to affect me because it's way over there where that variant is named for.

it also can put a lot of stigma on countries for absolutely no reason because it is going to spread everywhere. And so it's the idea of naming a disease after where it was found just broadly is not a good plan for, I think, both those reasons. In June 2020, the World Health Organization decided a new naming system was needed.

After months of deliberation, finally, in May the following year, they announced it. World Health Organization just came up with a new naming system for COVID-19 variants. Now the variant that originated in the UK will be known as the Alpha variant. The variant out of South Africa is the Beta variant. The Delta variant is the one from India. And the variant out of Brazil is now known as the Gamma variant.

The organization's COVID technical lead tweeted this week that no country should be stigmatized for detecting and reporting variants. The COVID technical lead mentioned in that news report is epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove. Maria chaired the naming committee at the WHO's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

I called her to ask why they chose Greek letters, alpha, beta and so on, and why it took a while to make that decision. There were lots of different ideas and I think I...

I potentially aggravated my teams a bit because I thought this would be a really simple thing to do. We considered coming up with random words, which would be two syllables long that didn't mean anything. You know, they weren't linked to a location. They weren't linked to a name. They weren't linked to anything. And it would just be two syllables that would come together.

Unfortunately, when we came up with the list of those two syllables, they were either acronyms for companies or they actually turned out to be the names of some small town somewhere or they were last names or whatever.

Then we went to three syllables. Same problem. Then we went to four syllables and I went back to the team. I said, forget it. There's no way I'm going to use these four syllables. We considered the, you know, the Foxtrot Charlie kind of alphabet, but that didn't work because it was quite military.

And then we ended up going back to the Greek lettering system to kind of simplify it. But it took longer than we had anticipated because there were so many considerations. What we didn't want is to inadvertently have names that would stigmatize others. I'm going to pause Maria for just a moment because at more or less the same time as Maria and her team were deciding to go ahead and use the Greek alphabet...

Across the Atlantic at the National Hurricane Centre, John's boss was making the opposite decision. As we already heard from John, hurricane forecasters choose names alphabetically from a pre-agreed list, going through the alphabet from A to W, missing out X, Y and Z, because there aren't a lot of names beginning with those letters.

But what happens if we exhaust the alphabetical list? And that's happened a few times. Like in 2020, it was a truly awful hurricane season where we had so many storms, we went through the entire alphabet. And the backup plan is if all the names are exhausted for that given year, we use the Greek alphabet. Literally alpha, beta, delta, epsilon, the Greek letters. And that was confusing to people.

especially a lot of our audience because they don't understand Hurricane Beta, for example, or Tropical Storm Epsilon. These names just weren't popular with people, confusing. And then also we said, well, what if a storm is very consequential? We had a Hurricane Zeta hit New Orleans and caused a lot of damage and it was going to be considered to be retired. But then we're like, this is strange. We're going to retire a letter? You know, it's not what we intended.

So our director at the time at the Hurricane Center, through the World Meteorological Organization, decided, let's get rid of that. That's confusing. And we have a supplemental name list that just sits there in case we need it. And that's sort of our backup plan today.

I was interested to hear that you'd stopped using the Greek alphabet because almost at the same time, the WHO decided to use the Greek alphabet to name COVID variants, you know, for communicating with the public.

Right. Yeah, we thought it is a bit ironic, actually. We thought it was a poor communication tool because we realized that people definitely resonate with names. We all have names. They make sense. And, you know, it's just easy to communicate and not so much with Greek letters because most of the countries we're speaking to don't use that alphabet.

So there's not a lot of familiarity with it. We're dealing with things that affect people's lives. So we really want the messaging to be as clear as possible. And there's no reason to make it any more complicated than it needs to be.

The Greek alphabet didn't work well for hurricanes. Was it better for communicating variants of the coronavirus? Back to Maria. I have to say, I was really kind of astounded by how well it was picked up by the media and how quickly people used alpha and beta, gamma, delta, omicron. But it works really, really well. My parents know the names of these, you know, these variants. And so that was helpful.

Yeah, I mean, I also have that memory of these names very quickly going into general use. The only slight difficulty I remember is in how to pronounce Omicron or Omicron. I can remember lots of different versions of that. Oh, my gosh. That day that I had to say that Omicron was classified, the WHO considered this a variant of concern upon advice from the technical advisory group.

I remember writing it down and I remember saying it for the first time. And someone came to me afterwards and said, is that how you pronounce it? I said, oh my gosh, did I, did I, did I just globally announce Omicron and then pronounce it wrong? But we, we, we had gone back and forth and there are different ways to, to pronounce it. But,

I am a nerdy scientist. Like this public stuff that we are doing was never part of the plan. So to have that responsibility to do that is a privilege and it's an honor, but people do listen. Like they are waiting for us to say these things and it does get picked up. So we feel a tremendous responsibility to get it right. What we don't want is to use a naming system that's

That diverts attention to the real need. What we are trying to do with this naming is a way that we can communicate about something that is quite complicated and very, very detailed and be able to articulate to everyone about what it means.

And being lost in the B117 and the, you know, we weren't able to get to the part of what does it mean for you and how do you keep yourself safe? We were just lost in this sort of alphabet soup.

So that's what we were trying to do in taking some ownership of the naming of itself so that we could get to the part, the so what factor. The scientific names remain and they still remain to this day. And I think that's really important. We were never aiming to change the scientific naming structure. It was really for general public. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this issue of needing to find a sensible name for a disease or its variants to our attention.

But this wasn't the first time the WHO had to grapple with this question. There are many examples from recent history of disease names causing problems. In the past, HIV was known as Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Virus, a name that stigmatised a group of people and could be misleading since actually anyone can get HIV.

In 2015, several years before the coronavirus pandemic, the WHO published a set of best practices for naming diseases. WHO strongly encouraged scientists, national authorities, the national and international media and other stakeholders to follow the best practices set out in this document when naming a human disease. The idea is to avoid stigmatising names that refer to particular animals, groups of people or places.

The name chosen for a disease matters because it can either help officials to convey important health information or if badly chosen it can confuse people and stigmatize communities or countries. As well as conveying information for the communities at risk it's also important that individuals and governments take action. For example washing hands with soap or staying home to prevent the spread of disease.

the language we use can encourage or discourage that action. Is this also true in other areas of science communication? I was interested in how the language we use to talk about climate change influences our understanding and perhaps our willingness to act. So I called Naomi Oreskes, a professor in the history of science at Harvard University.

She's spent 20 years thinking about the ways that climate change is presented to the public. Or should I say global warming? I remember at school in the 90s learning about global warming and the greenhouse effect.

but I don't remember hearing the phrase climate change. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. And I've studied this history. So it's true, in the 80s and 90s, people were mostly talking about global warming. Some scientists, like the World Meteorological Association, had talked a bit about climate change because of the recognition that increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would warm the climate as a whole, but that overall warming would manifest itself in many different ways

which could include in some areas increased rainfall and other areas decreased rainfall. So there were some scientists who did use the term climate change. But you're right that in general, most people talked about global warming because that was the large scale phenomenon. And one of the really sad things about this whole space is the way naming and labeling

So far on this podcast, we've heard how scientists and policymakers have changed and chosen names in an effort to communicate more clearly and to minimize confusion or stigma. But here is a case where a group of politicians set out to use language to do the opposite, to downplay and throw into doubt the scientific consensus.

So one of the things that we know, and we showed in our own research, was that in the early 2000s, the Republican Party in the United States, led by pollster Frank Luntz, we know who did this because he wrote documents that we've seen, advised Republican candidates running for public office not to talk about global warming, but to talk about climate change instead.

Because he said, and this was his words, because climate change was a lot less frightening. So as part of a strategy to downplay the threat to say it's not that big a deal, we'll just adapt. There's no scientific consensus. You know, we need to do more research. We need to wait and see. And they were extremely effective.

And as you just said, people started talking much more about climate change than global warming. Now, I don't think this was entirely because of what Republicans did. I think Republicans, for political reasons, want to talk about climate change, not global warming. But scientists, for scientific reasons, say, well, actually, when you think about it, we actually like that term better. And so I think those two forces together led to the situation where we did start referring much more to climate change and much less to global warming.

That's really interesting. Thank you. The Republicans, they were doing that because they were very consciously trying to change the way that the public understood the phenomenon. Correct. And did they succeed? Do we know? Well, I think we do have good evidence to say that it did have an effect, because if you go back to the mid 1990s and the early 2000s, there was a lot of political support

In the United States for Action on Climate Change, polls showed that a majority of Americans believe climate change, global warming was real. And particularly after Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, came out, there was a lot of public conversation about the need for action. And we know, again, from the documentary evidence, that this caused a great deal of concern. And there was strategizing on the part of the administration itself.

and the fossil fuel industry to prevent action on climate change. They knew that if they could persuade the American people that the science wasn't settled, that we just needed to do more research, it would weaken support for action. And that is, in fact, what happened. So I think it is plausible to conclude that their efforts had

and largely had the effect they wanted, which was to delay meaningful action on climate change, and to what is now, using a deliberate change in vocabulary, the climate crisis. The climate crisis. In recent years, there's been a change in language again. Alongside the well-used phrase climate change, I've been hearing climate emergency, climate crisis, and climate breakdown.

In 2019, the Guardian newspaper published an article announcing that it had updated its style guide and was now encouraging its journalists to use these terms instead of climate change.

The article was written by Damien Carrington. Over the phone from London, he told me about the decision. So in, I think it was May 2019, after a fair amount of internal discussion, The Guardian decided it was going to change its style guide. And for people not familiar with newspapers and style guides, style guides are the sort of recommended preferred terms, spellings, that kind of thing.

And so we changed a number of terms relating to environmental problems. The most high profile was rather than climate change, we preferred the terms climate crisis or climate emergency instead of global warming. We preferred global heating. So we didn't ban the use of the words, but we said these were the preferred terms that people should use.

And what was The Guardian's reasoning for changing terms like climate change, which are very well understood? Yeah, there was sort of a couple of things. One was about being a bit more precise. So, for example, Richard Betts at the Met Office had said that global heating was a better term than global warming. And we felt kind of warming sounds quite pleasant, actually.

You like to warm yourself after a cold walk in the winter or something like that, you know, whereas heating felt a bit more appropriate to what's actually happening in the world, which is that, you know, very scary levels of heat are being added to the atmosphere and the oceans. And in terms of climate change, again, climate change felt like a rather neutral term in our sense in that I don't think...

Many people think now that climate change is going to be beneficial overall, so we felt climate emergency or climate crisis was a better reflection of the reality, I suppose. What were you hoping to achieve by changing the names? I mean, what impact did you hope that would have on readers of The Guardian?

Well, we hoped that it would make it clearer to them the seriousness of the situation that we were in in relation to climate crisis and climate emergency. They both sound like bad situations. So it was about clarity and it was about seriousness. And it's several years since your style guide was updated. Have you noticed that this new way of writing about the environment is having an impact on readers?

Yeah, I mean, it'd be hard to sort of distinguish the use of the terms from actually just the kind of continued reporting and science and events in the world. You know, certainly I think our readers are even more worried now about these things than they were before. And I think, you know, the changing language hopefully played some part in that.

Naomi Oreskes agrees that it's hard to know what impact a change in language might have had on public understanding. It's not that hard to find out what people think. It's very hard to find out why they think what they think and even more difficult to figure out how specific language or specific arguments have structured their thinking.

Interestingly, while some journalists, activists and politicians have started talking about the climate emergency or climate crisis, many scientists and scientific publications continue to use the phrase climate change. Damien again. What I do know is, I mean, I had a brief scientific career. I did about four years of postdoc in geology and geology.

The way science is conducted does lend itself to understatement, if I can put it that way, in that there's this great...

responsibility to be super objective and over claiming anything relating to your results is the kind of worst crime you can commit. So I think climate change being a fairly neutral term in that it can change in a number of directions was probably quite apt for that scientific world.

Scientists, who are in many respects very brilliant people, are sometimes not very brilliant when it comes to choice of language. And so I think a lot of scientists confuse objectivity with

with neutrality, which it is not, and they also confuse it with being dispassionate, which is a different thing. But I can approach a problem objectively, see what the scientific evidence says, and say, oh my god, millions of people are going to die if we don't do something about this. And it's not just legitimate, it's actually appropriate to have an emotional reaction. The way that scientists talk and write about climate change matters because their language filters through to public discourse.

One of the arguments I've made about language is that scientists began talking about global warming and climate change as something in the future, because when this conversation first developed in the 1950s and 60s, it was a prediction about the future. And so future tense and conditionals like could and would were appropriate. But that language had a kind of anchoring effect. So fast forward to the 2000s, climate change is underway. The scientific evidence is clear.

the IPCC has said that global warming is unequivocal. And yet one observed that many scientists were still talking about climate change in the future tense. So I and others have argued, stop using the future tense. This is happening now. Use the present tense. And that turned out to be really hard for scientists because they were so used to talking about it as something in the future. Let's switch back to disease naming for a moment.

When the WHO declared a pandemic in March 2020, they were trying to convey the urgency of the situation. They hoped that the use of the term pandemic would signal that this is an emergency and so people need to change their behaviour and stay home. They also called it a health emergency. I'm declaring a public health emergency of international concern.

over the global outbreak of novel coronavirus. Could using the word emergency to talk about the Earth's climate have a similar effect, spurring individuals and governments to act?

Does the idea of a climate emergency ring true? So an emergency has a sense of this immediacy. And I think 20 years ago or 15 years ago, it wasn't appropriate to talk about the climate emergency, except that there was always this underlying problem. If we wait until we know for sure, it will be too late to stop.

And this has always been the difficulty about the climate situation, that if you wait for it to be an emergency, a great deal of irreversible damage would already have occurred. And that is where we are now. So we are now in a case where it is an emergency, where people are being hurt, where there is imminent peril. And yet, I think for a lot of people, it still doesn't have the feeling of an emergency. I think some of it is because we haven't been talking about it for so long.

And then I guess one additional final point is that when we think about emergencies, most of the time we think about something that is rapidly moving. And so we don't actually expect the emergency to last forever.

Yeah.

Yeah, it sounds like we don't have a simple word or a neat phrase that can sum up this situation and easily communicate it to people. This kind of slow motion car crash. Exactly. I mean, I've in my own mind and in some things I've written, I've been thinking of this for years. It's a slow motion train wreck.

Would that be a better phrase than climate emergency? Does a slow motion train wreck convey the climate situation more clearly?

Ultimately, the tricky thing about naming scientific phenomena is that the world is extremely complex. Scientists seek to understand these complexities. Names are shorthand for all the details and nuances that scientists work with and write down in scientific papers. But most people don't work with those details and don't have time to read research papers to understand the details.

Names like climate change, climate emergency, Hurricane Ian and Omicron. They're helpful because they provide a quick way to talk about complex scientific phenomena. If poorly chosen, they can be misunderstood or worse, lead to stigma. But well-chosen names help us communicate scientific ideas to everyone. They can even save lives.

Episode two of What's in a Name was written and produced by me, Charlotte Stoddart, with production help from Benjamin Thompson and Noah Baker. With thanks also to Benedict Stoddart for a reading.

music by Premium Audio via Pond5 and Richard Smithson via Triple Scoop Music. For a full list of references, head over to the show notes on the Nature Podcast website. Look out for episode three soon, when we'll hear how names given to concepts in physics literally changed the direction of research.

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