It appears that I was trying to correct a misconception you do not actually hold. I've seen apparently well meaning people claim that "global warming" was rebranded "climate change" by Frank Luntz to make it sound less scary, while both terms have been in widespread use among scientists since before the issue became widely known among the public.
I don't think it's true to say that the rebranding to "climate change" came from the right.
It came from academics who realized that saying "global warming" was confusing to people when the climate swung wildly from unusually hot to unusually cold. It takes some time and a willing listener to explain that "warming" means increased energy in the climate system, and therefore more dramatic swings between hot and cold weather.
Saying "global warming" also does nothing to communicate things like change in precipitation patterns.
Using the phrase "climate change" does a much better job of encompassing these phenomenon.
It's no longer called global warming because it's too easy for deniers to say, "Look, it's cold! Polar vortex! Therefore it's not happening!" The new terminology is supported by climate scientists to avoid giving the deniers a strawman to argue.
Worth noting that it's always been called climate change, and global warming was a term preferred by deniers to sew confusion and deniability.
> Yet the most interesting findings come from looking at data from the Heartland Institute. In fact, the thinktank used the two terms with roughly the same frequency until 2013, when we finally see a decoupling as the use of global warming dropped while the use of climate change remained constant.
> This shows that “global warming” was widely used by climate change deniers over this 30-year period. Perhaps this is because the phrase is relatively specific, which allowed them to contrast it with simple arguments like saying that the planet cannot be warming as it’s cold outside.
Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may cause cooling in other areas.
If people were to accept the phrase "climate change", perhaps it would help end comments like "scientists say the earth is getting hotter... why have our winters been extra cold?"
In my opinion naming it global warming was the biggest mistake. People hear it‘s getting hotter, don‘t see this effect and „don‘t believe in it“. Events like this is another point why people don‘t believe in global warming, they see very cold weather outside where this is very untypical and say global warming is bullshit.
It should have only been named climate change, drastic wheather change or something incorporating your naming of shifting wheather patterns.
> The name change from "global warming" to "climate change" was, to my mind, less about science and more about a marketing effort to deal with the fact the temperatures had plateaued over the last 10-20
Someone that can say that the term have changed from global warming to climate change is because has an agenda because it is false.
> We've moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" language
Presumably because during winter certain people would point at a freak snowstorm and say "so much for global warming!" to try to minimise it (tbh they still do). Temperature rising has a few more side-effects than just your winter being milder by 1-2C, I think using a different term is entirely appropriate
Oh great, now we are back to "Global Warming". For years that label was not working because many areas were experiencing record low temperatures which kind of made the "Global Warming" advocates all look a bit silly. Thus the term "Climate Change" was introduced because after all who can argue against the fact that the climate is changing! I am on the fence as far as "Global Warming" is concerned but even I must admit that the climate is changing - the fact that the climate has always changed and always will seems to be besides the point.
Now we have a warm year and back we go to "Global Warming". Really hard sometimes to take these people seriously.
Actually not true, the phrase 'climate change' has been coined more than half a century ago. The idea that there was a rebranding of the phenomenon is false beyond doubt, and actually hurtful to the process of acknowledging we have a big problem.
The crucial aspect you're missing is from the latter half of the skepticalscience.com link I posted above. Here is the particular graph that shows usage of "global warming" vs "climate change":
Both terms were in common usage, with "climate change" existing before "global warming". It's not "rebranding" to realize that of the various terms in common usage, one of them is more accurate. "climate change" started rising relatively in popularity around 1994 after being roughly equal to "global warming", a decade before Watts' conspiracy theories.
Anthony Watts dances around understanding here, and writes "It is an unequivocal fact that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” have both been in use for a long time." So he agrees with the link I posted above. The PDF doesn't disagree, much as he'd like it to. Saying "climate change might be a better labelling than global warming" isn't saying "therefore we should rebrand it". It's agreeing that "climate change" is better than "global warming", but then detailing why "climate change" doesn't even capture everything going on.
That's honestly just a bad title. The article can be summed up however by the last sentence: "Rebranding a complex issue that most people think has already been rebranded ...". In other words, it disagrees with you: there was no rebranding from "global warming" to "climate change".
Holdren is saying why "global warming" isn't a great term. He's not arguing for a rebranding, he's pointing out why it stopped being as popular of a term 15 years prior to his speech. He does argue for rebranding to "global climate disruption", but that's irrelevant to your claim about "global warming" vs "climate change".
This is a rebranding, from "climate change" to "climate crisis". We can argue about whether it's a good change, but it's irrelevant to your claim about "global warming" vs "climate change".
Almost all of the answers there point out that it's a myth, agreeing with the skepticalscience.com link I posted above. The few answers that try to push that myth are diatribes that don't cite any supporting evidence.
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