In wintertime, global warming sounds nice. Could climate activists pick a better term?

Monday morning I broke out my winter hat. It didn’t look as good on me as I remembered. Then again, I am a year older. My hair is shorter and a lighter shade of bottled blonde. A summer’s worth of sun damage has stippled my face. The trauma of last year’s snowfall has gouged a deep furrow between my brows.

And now it’s winter. In Boston. Again.

God help me.

Meanwhile, Paris, in a demonstration of resilience and faith, is hosting an international climate summit, a rebuke to ISIS. (Unlike you nihilistic freaks, we actually want our planet to survive.)

Follow all of our coverage of the Paris talks and the global climate crisis

Obama opened the summit with talk of global warming, which, to my frost-nipped Boston ears, sounded kind of nice. I wouldn’t mind if it got a little warmer here, say, like Virginia. I’d put up with stink bugs and kudzu in exchange for less snow.

That’s the trouble. To anyone here in the frigid Northeast, the term global warming is actually appealing. And climate change, though a little less seductive, is a bet we’d willingly take. How much worse could our climate get? It’s freezing in the winter, stifling in the summer, and spring lasts about a day. A change would probably benefit us. Actually, for most of the country, climate change is a pretty good bet. You think they’re afraid of it in the Texas Panhandle or Nebraska? In Biloxi or Buffalo?

No, if the climate change movement wants us to take this destroying-the-planet business seriously, it will have to come up with a racier term for the coming apocalypse, something like nuclear winter.  Now that struck terror in our souls. Two little words that evoked images of bleak, deserted, frozen, and radioactive, landscapes. But what’s the equivalent scary image for climate change? Orlando strip mall summer? Death Vallification?

What the climate change movement needs is a serious rebranding effort. Words matter. And change is not a strong enough word. How about climate collapse? Climate meltdown. Climate chaos. Or let’s go right for the end times. Climaclysm. Climageddon. Climemonium. Or we could say, we’ve entered the dark age of Global Fry, Climisery, Total Climate Fail. Or, for the hypochondriacally inclined, Dysclimia.

The only places in this country where they might actually fear climate change are Santa Barbara and Honolulu. But they’re not paying attention to the climate summit in Paris. They’re too happy, rollerblading and surfing, eating locally sourced pistachios and pineapple, watching the sun set. If you want to get people riled up about the climate, you got to engage them where the climate is miserable, like here in Boston or Minnesota. We are the chronically embittered, snowbound backbone of any activist movement. But first,  you’re going to have to convince us that change is bad.

Because even here in the liberal Northeast, we’re products of American corporate culture. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking change is good, even when it means losing our jobs, chipping away at our savings, forfeiting our retirement. We’ve been taught to embrace change or be labeled pathetic losers.

In the 90s, the age of downsizing and leveraged buyouts, I worked on a marketing campaign where we urged workers to think of change as a series of oncoming waves. We told them to challenge themselves to jump higher and higher. Yes, I produced that crap. I will pay for it in the afterlife.

Speaking of waves, last August, the water in Cape Cod Bay was so warm, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth — yes, those pilgrims, that Plymouth — had to shut down. Environmentalists cited it as proof of global warming, but officials at the power station assured the public, it wasn’t global warming, just a perfect storm of wind and tide, that affected the mix of cold bay water with the hot water the station releases. What? The nuclear power station is spewing hot water into the ocean? Why am I not reassured?

I was on vacation at the time, on nearby Buzzards Bay, where the water was also ridiculously warm.

And guess what? I loved it.

I couldn’t go swimming enough. It was so tropical, that if I ignored the seaweed, sharp rocks, and zero-visibility murk, I could almost pretend I was in the Caribbean. Now that’s somewhere they should fear climate change. 

Louie Cronin is a writer and essayist. She is also an audio engineer for PRI's The World and other shows at WGBH in Boston.