Climate change or climate justice? The problem isn’t just in the facts, but in the words.

“Climate change will not bring about the end of humanity.”
That’s what Bill Gates said a few days ago, sparking a wave of reactions. Not only from activists and environmentalists, but also from many scientists, who expressed concern about the tone of such simplifications.
Gates’s statement doesn’t deny climate change — it normalizes it. It shifts the issue into a managerial dimension, as if “managing” the crisis were enough to reduce it to a technical problem.
As if it were no longer a political or moral question, but merely an engineering one.

And yet, it’s not only the language of the rich that’s problematic.
It is also, often, the language of science.
A language that, though necessary, remains locked within categories, parameters, and metrics that most people can’t decipher.
Science, in its effort to be neutral and precise, often speaks an exclusive language — one that divides those who know from those who listen.
When climate discourse moves only through graphs, percentages, and predictive models, what reaches the public is a mixture of anxiety and detachment.
It’s not ignorance, but a failure of translation: a communicative breakdown that leaves ordinary people outside the conversation, spectators of a changing world they no longer have the words to describe.

As a result, people end up believing or not believing in climate change as if it were a matter of faith, not of reality.
Technical language becomes a barrier: those who don’t understand it feel excluded; those who master it use it as a form of power.
Public debate turns into a clash between “alarmists” and “skeptics,” two poles that feed off each other — both incapable of recognizing the complexity of the problem.

Shifting the climate issue onto political and economic terrain has made things even more fragile: any scientific claim not translated into human language automatically becomes partisan.
People perceive it as ideological, as a position rather than an explanation.
In this way, science loses its role as mediator and gets dragged into the arena of opinion, where everything is worth as much as its opposite.
The debate flattens out, the word “truth” loses depth, and the climate crisis becomes a backdrop onto which everyone projects their own political convictions.

Nor has it gone any better when, in an attempt to fill that gap, we tried to turn the climate crisis into a personal narrative.
In recent years, books, films, installations, and campaigns have tried to give the climate a human face. But again, the narrating voice often remains one of privilege: writers, artists, influencers, scholars telling the story of their “ecological awakening” from the comfort of a good education, a stable home, a secure passport.
The narrated pain becomes aesthetic, almost poetic, and in that process it loses part of its political force.
We don’t need more enlightened confessions: we need ordinary voices, people who talk about the climate the way they talk about groceries, about work, about the weather that really changes their days.
The story of the climate crisis shouldn’t move us to tears — it should move us toward each other.

Meanwhile, reality marches on.
Wildfires, migration, desertification, energy poverty.
All things that don’t need formulas to be explained, because they are lived — in bodies, in homes, in electricity bills.
And this is where the deepest fracture opens: between those who endure the crisis and those who study it, between those who talk about it and those who live through it.
Language, once again, becomes the dividing line between knowledge and understanding.

That’s why it’s urgent to shift our focus:
from climate change to climate justice.

The first is a measurable phenomenon; the second is a matter of fairness, of rights, of shared responsibility.
Climate change concerns the atmosphere; climate justice concerns society. It doesn’t speak in numbers but in relationships: who can adapt and who cannot, who disappears first, who is forced to move, who remains unheard.

Climate justice is the attempt to bring the crisis back to earth — to make it a human issue again.
It’s a change in grammar: from “how much CO₂ we emit” to “who can afford to pollute,” from “how hot the planet will get” to “who will pay the price for that heat.”
In other words, it shifts the conversation from what to who.
And that shift, seemingly semantic, is in fact political.

Because the climate doesn’t change on its own — it changes with us.
And not all of us have the same margin for survival.
Communities already living at the margins — geographically, economically, or socially — are the first to be hit and the last to be heard.
Where scientific language measures, climate justice listens.
Where science explains, justice asks: who is responsible, who is protected, who is sacrificed.

Words matter.
And perhaps this is what Gates’s statements — and those of many other men of economic power — continue to ignore.
It’s not enough to say that “humanity will not end.” We must ask: which part of humanity will not end?
Who will have access to the technology to protect themselves, who will be able to migrate, who will be able to afford not to worry.

Science is necessary, but it’s not enough.
Nor is literature, if it cannot get its hands dirty with reality.
We need a language that doesn’t exclude, that doesn’t revel in its own sensitivity, but that can turn data into empathy, numbers into collective choices, stories into relationships.
Only then will we truly understand — not just the climate, but the world we’re building.

To speak of climate justice is to recognize that the ecological crisis is not only environmental: it is also social, cultural, and linguistic.
Because if science cannot be translated, and storytelling cannot be shared, they do not change the world — they only describe it from afar.