Is it more appropriate to use the term "global warming" or "climate change"?
Of course, like anything, it's complicated. For a bit of history lesson on the terms there is a great post on the NASA Global Climate Change blog.
Hmmm... Does it sound to you like Grandia is backing away from the term "global warming?" It sure does to your humble correspondent. However, Grandia can't quite give up the global warming ghost although he seems to be now making moves in that direction:
So the question is this: When writing or commenting online do you use the technically correct term or the one that will likely garner you the most visits?
Ask a public opinion researcher and they'll say use "global warming" all the time. Ask a scientist or policy wonk and they'll no doubt recommend the appropriate technical use.
I tend towards using the term global warming. But I am torn between being technically correct and getting the most eye-balls on a story.
So what do you think the answer is?
For many in the media the answer is to use "climate change" with greater frequency. In fact, it wouldn't be at all surprising if the Huffington Post renames its Global Warming page to "Climate Change" to spare themselves further humiliation as the climate continues cooling. In fact, this cooling trend is becoming so noticeable that we may soon face a new problem: global cooling alarmism. Yes, the alarm bells already are beginning to shift in the direction of global cooling as you can see in this article in The Australian:
THE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that October in the US was marked by 63 record snowfalls and 115 lowest-ever temperatures.
Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change.
Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?
...using several fundamentally different mathematical techniques and many different data sets, seven scientists all forecast that climatic cooling will occur during the first decades of the 21st century. Temperature records confirm that cooling is under way, the length and intensity of which remains unknown.
Yet in spite of this, governments across the world - egged on by irrational, deep Green lobbying - have for years been using their financial muscle and other powers of persuasion to introduce carbon dioxide taxation systems. For example, the federal Labor government recently spent $13.9 million on climate change advertising on prime time television and in national newspapers and magazines.
...Introduction of a carbon dioxide tax to prevent (imaginary) warming, euphemistically disguised as an emissions trading scheme, is a politician's, ticket clipper's and mafia chief's dream. All will welcome a new source of income based on an invisible, colourless, odourless, tasteless and often unmeasurable gas. No commodity changes hands during its trading, and should carbon dioxide emissions actually decrease because of the existence of a carbon dioxide market (which is highly unlikely), the odds are that it will have no measurable effect on climate anyway. Nonetheless, the glistening pot of gold which beckons to be mined from the innocent public is proving nigh irresistible, and it is going to need a strong taxpayer revolt to stop it in Australia.
The present global financial crisis should be inducing politicians not to squander money on non-solutions to non-problems. Yet to support their plans for emissions taxation Western governments, including ours, are still propagating scientifically juvenile greenhouse propaganda underpinned only by circumstantial evidence and GCM computer gamesmanship.
Perhaps a reassessment will finally occur when two-metre thick ice develops again on Father Thames at London Bridge, or when cooling causes massive crop failure in the world's granary belts.
Note to the Australian and Pravda which also warned of this new threat: Don't fall prey to global cooling alarmism such as happened in the 1970s when Newsweek featured that dire problem on its magazine cover.
