Joe Romm, the Founding Editor of ClimateProgress.org, speaks with a participant at the 2014 American Meteorological Society Summer Policy Colloquium. Romm spoke on a panel at the science communications workshop hosted by AGU on June 5 as part of the Colloquium. Photo by Mary Catherine Adams, AGU.

By Mary Catherine Adams

“There is no more important element in the technique of rhetoric than the continual employment of the best possible word,” Winston Churchill said in his “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.”

Joe Romm, the Founding Editor of ClimateProgress.org and Chief Science Advisor for the Showtime TV series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” shares more of Churchill’s thoughts on using plain language, along with George Orwell’s “six simple rules for writing with clarity” and climate communicator Susan Joy Hassol’s take on jargon in his 19 June blog post “Words Matter When Talking Global Warming: The ‘Good Anthropocene’ Debate.”

Romm spoke recently at two American Geophysical Union (AGU) communications workshops about this topic: the 2014 AGU Science Policy Conference this Monday and an AGU communications workshop as part of the American Meteorological Society’s Summer Policy Colloquium on 5 June.

In his latest blog post, he reflects on his speaker roles and on a recent use of the word “Anthropocene” – a word he images Orwell and Churchill would frown upon. Read Romm’s post on ClimateProgress.org.

– Mary Catherine Adams, AGU Public Information Specialist