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I’d like to know if it’s okay to use exacerbating as an adjective in the following sentence:

“The exacerbating climate crisis calls immediate action.”

user142130
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In general, yes. My mind immediately sprang toward the collocation "exacerbating factors," for instance. See this post for more on what exactly is happening syntactically (although the vast majority of English speakers would only know such things experientially, not academically).

For your particular sentence, though, I might recommend "worsening." Exacerbating makes it sound like the climate crisis is doing the exacerbating, not that the climate crisis is being exacerbated (e.g. by human industry), which is what I think you meant. Also, "calls for," not simply "calls."

Feryll
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    I agree. I checked a couple of dictionaries and neither showed an intransitive sense for exacacerbate. – Jack O'Flaherty Aug 16 '21 at 02:00
  • Agreed. "exacerbated" would also work, as that removes the agency from the climate crisis. – gotube Aug 16 '21 at 02:06
  • @gotube "exacerbated" to me would imply that there was a perfective action that made the crisis worse, i.e. a singular instance at which it became worse, rather than the imperfective progressive action implied by "worsening" – Tristan Aug 16 '21 at 11:26
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    The contents of this answer are good (upvoted accordingly), but I'd suggest redrafting it, as at the moment it reads like "yes, but actually, no" which is not ideal especially if someone is only skimreading... – Muzer Aug 16 '21 at 11:51
  • Upvoted for the suggestion of "worsening". To my American English ear, that sounds like the best fit of what the OP is trying to describe. – Nate Barbettini Aug 16 '21 at 16:15
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I say "no". We'd know what you mean, but it's odd-sounding.

Since "exacerbate" is a transitive verb, it needs a direct object ("climate change"):

CO2 and methane emissions are exacerbating climate change. Therefore, the worsening climate crisis calls immediate action.

RonJohn
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The word exacerbating can be used as an adjective in many contexts, such as, “the exacerbating circumstances.”

However, as a native speaker of American English, I would not say, “*The exacerbating climate crisis.” It sounds wrong to me. I think this might be because you use exacerbating to modify the thing that is making something worse, not the thing that is getting worse. So, you would say, “the exacerbating factor of the crime,” or “the exacerbating decision for the climate crisis,” not “*the exacerbating crime” or “*the exacerbating climate crisis.”

You might instead say worsening, deteriorating, accelerating, compounding, growing, burgeoning, etc. These all have slightly-different connotations, and worsening is the one that’s least likely to go wrong.

Davislor
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