See 2007 OUP Blog: Compounding Carbon Confusions

http://blog.oup.com/2007/07/carbon/

Compounding Carbon Confusion

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Posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 8:02 am

When carbon-neutral was named The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2006, the choice highlighted how recent efforts to combat climate change have brought forth a whole new class of carbon compounds (the lexical kind of compounds, not the chemical kind!). To be carbon-neutral, you can use a carbon calculator to estimate your household’s carbon footprint. Then you can seek to reduce your own carbon emissions, or you can purchase carbon offsets or carbon credits. Countries can institute carbon taxes, while eco-conscious companies can engage in carbon trading on the carbon market. And maybe someday, if we’re all low-carbon or even zero-carbon, we can live in a post-carbon world.

Putting aside the politics of the global warming debate, lexicographers are particularly interested in how the usage of the word carbon has been expanding in recent years. Not everyone is happy about the carbon boom. Salon’s advice columnist Cary Tennis recently fielded a letter from “Bothered by Bad Buzzwords,” who complained that carbon-neutral and related terms misuse the word carbon. “What I don’t understand is why no one is calling the concept correctly,” the letter-writer grumbled. “Carbon is not carbon dioxide! One is a black solid. One is an odorless, colorless gas. Couldn’t they call it CO₂ neutral?”

The column has generated quite a lot of comments from Salon readers. Some have applauded the letter-writer’s questioning of poorly conceived buzzwords and have offered their own pet peeves. Others take issue with the assumption that the carbon in carbon-neutral is a misnomer for carbon dioxide. Some argue that the term could relate to any of the greenhouse gases containing carbon, including methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Decreasing the amount of carbon-containing gases in the atmosphere requires the “sequestration” of carbon in reservoirs like forests and oceans, often called carbon sinks. That’s why carbon offset programs seek to balance the production of greenhouse gases through the planting of trees and other efforts to help natural sequestration.

So the carbon of carbon-neutral and similar buzzwords doesn’t necessarily have to refer to the “black solid” that we recognize as carbon’s elemental form. Instead, it can refer to the carbon that circulates in various molecular forms in and out of the atmosphere. Nonetheless, it’s true that carbon has increasingly been used as a kind of shorthand for carbon dioxide. The forthcoming Sixth Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary recognizes this new sense of carbon. In addition to providing definitions for the combining forms carbon footprint, carbon-neutral, carbon tax, and carbon trading, the Shorter OED gives an extended sense for the word carbon: “carbon dioxide or other gaseous carbon compounds released into the atmosphere.”

Referring to atmospheric carbon dioxide as carbon is an example of “ellipsis,” the omission of words or parts of words from speech or writing. We’re constantly clipping the language through ellipsis — it’s what allows us to move from “I will see you later” to “See you later” to just plain “Later!” If there’s any potential ambiguity caused by ellipsis, we can usually deal with that by looking at clues from the surrounding context. To take another example involving chemical elements, if a sportscaster says that an Olympic athlete has won gold or silver, we can gather from context that the announcer is talking about medals rather than metals. Similarly, a colloquial reference to someone taking acid is understood to signify LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) rather than some other acidic substance. And peroxide is the common elliptical term for the form of hydrogen peroxide used to bleach hair.

Elliptical usage can sometimes lead to confusion, however. For instance, does a carbon calculator for your carbon footprint measure the amount of carbon your household produces or the amount of carbon dioxide? There’s a big difference, since the molecular weight of CO₂ is about four times that of elemental carbon. As it happens, a carbon footprint typically is calculated in terms of carbon dioxide production, but scientists and government agencies usually measure emissions in terms of carbon units, an estimation that takes into account other organic compounds that contribute to the greenhouse effect. (The New York Times evidently got tripped up by the ambiguity of carbon last year, when it initially reported that a gallon of gasoline emits 11 kilograms of carbon. According to a correction, that’s actually the amount of carbon dioxide produced.)

We can see the word carbon moving in all sorts of new directions these days. The head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital has been quoted as saying, “Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall.” That’s carbon in the sense of carbon trading, extended to refer to the emerging “emissions market” in general. Meanwhile, an organization called CarbonSense has issued a “carbon challenge” to foster “carbon leadership,” “carbon literacy,” and the discussion of “carbon issues.” No doubt about it, the semantic explosion of carbon is anything but elemental.

Ben Zimmer is an editor at Oxford University Press and a true word junkie. Once a week he surfaces from his dictionaries to write this column. Check out his “words of the week” on our main page (center column) or by clicking here.

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http://blog.oup.com/2007/12/carbon_summer/

From “Nuclear Winter” to “Carbon Summer”

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Posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 7:54 am

When Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise awareness about man-made climate change, his acceptance speech featured a new word, or rather a new sense of an old word, that Oxford lexicographers have been watching closely: carbon, in the sense of “carbon dioxide or other gaseous carbon compounds released into the atmosphere.” As I wrote back in July, this extended sense of carbon can be found in all sorts of novel lexical compounds: carbon-neutral (2006 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year), carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon trading, and so forth. In his speech, Gore introduced another compound into the mix: carbon summer.

“More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a ‘nuclear winter,’” Gore said. “Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent ‘carbon summer.’”

Nuclear winter, the model for carbon summer, was introduced into public discourse in 1983, when a team of scientists including Richard Turco and Carl Sagan published a landmark article in the journal Science. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is actually a newspaper column by Sagan from a couple of months earlier, previewing the team’s findings. Sagan described scenarios of nuclear war involving detonations from 100 to 5000 megatons. Even the 100-megaton scenario, Sagan wrote, “would ignite thousands of fires, and the smoke from these fires alone would be enough to generate an epoch of cold and dark almost as severe as in the 5000 megaton case.” This “epoch of cold and dark” was dubbed nuclear winter by Turco’s team. Though the research findings were the subject of much dispute about the mixing of science and politics, nuclear winter remained a potent image throughout the US-Soviet standoff of the 1980s.

The public acceptance of the nuclear winter concept more than twenty years ago now helps to shape the discussion of climate change, with the equivalent scenario of carbon summer suggested by scientists investigating possible “tipping points” for a massive, irreversible global meltdown. Gore was not, in fact, the first to come up with the expression carbon summer. It turned up in a June 29, 1988 hearing held by the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on “Technologies for Remediating Global Warming.” During the hearing, Dr. Erik Storm of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made the exact same parallel to nuclear winter: “I think that the discussion and possibility of a nuclear winter truly raised the concern of the effects of nuclear war to a global concern. I personally believe that that was a significant factor in the discussion that has led to the first real nuclear arms reduction.” Dr. Storm continued, “I’d like to hope that the prospect and discussion of what one might call ‘carbon summer’ will also stimulate action, action on a very broad international level.”

There was evidently not much media attention paid to the testimony of Dr. Storm (quite an appropriate name for a climate change expert, by the way). Gore’s high-profile speech in Oslo, on the other hand, has a vastly greater chance of popularizing carbon summer as an environmental buzzword. By now we’re much more used to hearing carbon used in various combining forms related to the emission of greenhouse gases. In his Nobel speech, Gore used carbon in two other such contexts. First, he suggested that “the innovators who will … invent an engine that’s carbon-negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo.” Carbon-negative goes carbon-neutral one better, implying that a fuel source can “sequester” more carbon dioxide than it releases into the atmosphere (for instance, with biofuels that transfer carbon dioxide back into the soil). Later in the speech, Gore stressed that “we need to put a price on carbon – with a CO₂ tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively.” Here carbon is understood as shorthand for the pollution of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which could be curtailed by the implementation of a tax on major polluters.

Regardless of whether one agrees with Gore’s stance on climate change and how to ameliorate it, it’s clear that carbon “really has taken on a new meaning,” as Shorter Oxford English Dictionary editor Angus Stevenson recently told The Guardian. Gore might be a trendsetter in this semantic expansion, but it will take the rest of us carbon-based life forms to set the path for the future of carbon.