For years, President Donald Trump has denied the science behind global warming. Since the start of his second term, however, his administration has leaned less on climate denial and more on what might be called climate dismissal: diminishing, ridiculing or rejecting the idea that climate change is worth any effort to study or try to slow.

They’ve engaged in what Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University, calls “frame warfare”—dramatically recasting the words used to describe a topic in an attempt to change people’s perceptions. Whether the evidence for global warming is called “unequivocal,” as scientists and governments agree that it is, or “crap,” as the US defense secretary has called it, can shape a listener’s likelihood to take action or obstruct it.

Here we decode the latest verbiage. “Future generations should not be expected to forfeit the American Dream to foot the bill of ambiguous climate threats,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement.

“Beautiful, clean coal.” —Donald Trump

US coal consumption has plummeted in the 21st century, and its cost advantage has withered against energy sources like wind and solar. Yet Trump has repeatedly used this timeworn slogan, most recently in an executive order that seeks to revive the ailing US coal industry.

There’s never been a consistent definition of “clean coal,” a term the US government has used since the 1980s and the subject of an industry ad campaign in the 2000s. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush said they supported it during the 2000 presidential election campaign, though Gore later compared the notion of “clean coal” to that of healthy cigarettes. On top of carbon emissions, US coal plants produce air pollutants that can cause heart and respiratory diseases. After Trump relaxed rules on coal-fired power in his first term, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated the changes could lead to 1,400 more deaths a year by 2030. Still, the old talking point has stuck. That’s no accident, says Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University who studies propaganda. After hearing it enough times, “whenever you think of coal, you think of ‘beautiful, clean coal.’ Repetition is key to the strategy of propaganda.”

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” —Lee Zeldin

Scientists, including those who study Earth’s climate, follow a rigorous empirical process to arrive at their conclusions. Describing climate change as a “religion,” as EPA Administrator Zeldin did when announcing a slate of regulatory rollbacks in March, undercuts that methodology and implies that studying or caring about climate change is a matter of zealotry.

“What they’re trying to do is undermine people’s trust in scientists,” says Genevieve Guenther, author of The Language of Climate Politics.

“The Department of Defense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” —Pete Hegseth

“We’re not doing climate change crud anymore.” —Brooke Rollins

Defense Secretary Hegseth and Agriculture Secretary Rollins used similar terms on the social media platform X and when speaking to Fox Business, respectively. Their message is clear: Government climate programs are a distraction at odds with their agencies’ missions. This approach sidesteps outright denial, a position that’s become harder to hold in light of overwhelming scientific evidence and supercharged weather disasters. Dismissal, on the other hand, is “a way of saying, ‘It’s beneath our contempt. We don’t even have to debate this—we’ll just call it crap,’” Mercieca says.

“We are not going to [bankrupt] ourselves chasing a climate extremism ideology.” —Doug Burgum

Interior Secretary Burgum’s comment draws a line between the administration and its supporters on the one side and “extreme” ideologues on the other. But with the Trump administration exiting the Paris climate accord, proposing billions of dollars in cuts to science and nixing regulations designed to fight pollution, the charge of extremism could easily go the other way. “The pot calling the kettle black may be the oldest rhetorical trick in the book,” says Ed Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

“I am a climate realist.” —Chris Wright

Energy Secretary Wright’s words at a speech in March sound neutral enough. That helps Wright connect with a different target audience, Guenther said: business executives, some of whom are skittish about the administration’s policies. Indeed, his climate realist line was delivered at the energy industry confab CERAWeek.

Yet Wright, the former chief executive officer of fracking giant Liberty Energy, has also disputed that climate change is a crisis. He’s argued that carbon emissions are a “trade-off” of rising living standards, while calling fossil fuels “essential to improving the wealth, health and lives of all human beings.” In the same speech, he described the climate policies of former President Joe Biden as “irrational.”

Wright’s rhetoric isn’t “about convincing people climate change doesn’t exist,” says Jennifer Jacquet, a University of Miami environmental scientist and expert in climate denial strategies. Instead, this brand of realism downplays the costs of climate change to promote fossil-fuel-friendly policies: It’s “leaning into an anti-regulatory stance,” Jacquet says.