When and Why did the term “Global Warming” get replaced with the term “Climate Change”?
Question: When and Why did the term “Global Warming” get replaced with the term “Climate Change”?
Just within the last month or so, I’ve noticed a distinct change in news headlines and article titles from the term “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”. Why has this change occurred and who started it? Did the government or environmentalists begin this or have news agencies all banded together to make the change? Was it noted in the latest IPCC report or something?
Answer:
Answer by Josh
Global Warming didn’t sound scary enough
Because the climate hasn’t changed much since 1999. Global warming really didn’t apply.
Now the term Catastrophic Climate Change is used to cover both warming and cooling, droughts and floods.
Anything now can be attributed to “climate change”
Since the earths climate is never static, it’s always changing, anything the climate does can be blamed on man.
And politicians have a greater ability to “fix” the problem by limiting freedom and raising taxes.
It was changed by the Bush adminstration’s Spin experts… because “Global Warming” sounded too extreme and attributable to carbon extraction…. whereas “Climate Change” sounded more “natural” and less attributable to gov’t administrative policies.
The term climate change has been around for quite a while. And it is not a “replacement”–the two terms refer to different things.
Scientists use the term global warming to refer to the increase in average global temperatures. Climat change refers to the effects of global warming (or any other factor–that’s just that global warming only one that is causing changesat this time) on the general/long term climate patterns.