When climate needs another name

A few months ago, I was invited to speak to a group of visitors exploring Oman. The conversation took place on a morning sail off the coast of Muscat, the water still in that early flatness before the wind picks up.

Among the small group on board were two American executives in their 70s, and somewhere into the second hour, both made clear they did not believe that climate change was real.

After more than a decade inside climate negotiation rooms, I had heard every variation of the argument. I had not expected to hear it close to home. The instinct was to argue with the data and credentials I have on hand, but I opted to reach for none of it.

My mind went instead to a board I had sat across from years earlier, in another industry, on another coast of the same country. They did not see sustainability as a priority. Returns held their attention.

Oman’s catch was already strong, and certification was the lever that could move it into higher-value export markets, premium buyers, and traceable supply chains. It was a value we had been leaving on the table. The decision moved inside a single meeting, on the strength of an argument that the board had not been asked to consider before.

My mind also went to conversations with ports and maritime authorities, where biodiversity becomes easier to defend when it is connected to carbon, resilience, investor confidence, and the long life of the industries that depend on healthy seas.

In that framing, the wonder of a whale moving through water sits alongside its other accountings: carbon storage, nutrient circulation, fisheries support, ocean health, economic value passing through shipping lanes, whether anyone has decided to count it or not. Around 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide can be held in a single whale over its lifetime; as such, sometimes a number becomes the bridge between awe and action.

Worker welfare folds into the same logic once value becomes the unit of account. So does women’s participation in the economy. The moral case should have been enough, but policy often moves when dignity is translated into productivity, continuity, national competitiveness, and the cost of leaving human potential outside formal economic life.

What I had learned across all of those rooms was that science is rarely the first entry point. What moves a board, a ministry, or a climate denier is value rendered in the unit it already counts. The work, more often than not, is translation.

If ‘climate change’ has become a phrase too loaded for a particular room, the room can still do its work under another name. Most of us, regardless of where we land on the science, already want air worth breathing, food worth eating, water worth protecting, and a way of living that does not bankrupt the systems that sustain it. Once a room agrees on what to build, belief no longer controls whether useful work can begin.

The two Americans on the boat that morning did not change their minds about climate science. We docked with a different conversation underway. They were asking about Oman’s hydrogen corridor, fisheries certification, and how a port lowers its emissions without losing its margin, all without anyone first agreeing on the science. I have come to think of this as one of the more honest parts of climate work.

Some days it feels like victory. Some days it feels like the long compromise of meeting the world as it is. On Omani water that morning, I understood that the name of the door matters less than whether it opens.