Over the past three years, the number of believers in anthropogenic global warming has been on a steady decline, while the number of believers in natural planetary warming and cooling cycle has been on a steady incline. The shrinking pool of people who still swear by Al Gore's Hollywood version of the climate trend is especially populated with journalists and politicians who refuse admit they were wrong and consider any science debunking manmade global warming.
As the numbers fail each year to match Gore's wild predictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form any logical support for Gore's gloom and doom global warming scenarios. To rectify the situation, the global warming community has quietly rebranded its cause as 'climate change,' which allows activists to push an environmental agenda without the threat of the earth's temperature not rising with it.
Following one of the coldest winters in history earlier this year, warmists are struggling to defend an ever imposing doom that global warming might in fact be an entirely natural phenomenon.
As Marc Morano reiterated Thursday at the sixth annual International Conference on Climate Change (or the 'Climate Denier Conference,' as the Washington Post would call it), warmists believe 'any weather event is proof of the theory,' whether it be snowfalls in April or hurricanes in November. In a world in which we can rarely predict ten-day forecasts accurately, it is astounding that such a large community still props up Gore's fabricated data and charts as explanations for every catastrophic weather event that occurs.
The shift away from the global warming rhetoric has actually come quite ironically. As Todd Myers of the Washington Policy Institute points out, the 'climate change' term was originally used by President George W. Bush in 2002. Of course, Bush was quickly lambasted by left-wing media for the move away from 'global warming.' One such hit came from the UK's Guardian:
The US Republican party is changing tactics on the environment, avoiding "frightening" phrases such as global warming, after a confidential party memo warned that it is the domestic issue on which George Bush is most vulnerable.
The memo, by the leading Republican consultant Frank Luntz, concedes the party has "lost the environmental communications battle" and urges its politicians to encourage the public in the view that there is no scientific consensus on the dangers of greenhouse gases.
[...]
The phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favour of "climate change", Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as "conservationist" instead of "environmentalist", because "most people" think environmentalists are "extremists" who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behaviour... that turns off many voters".
Today, though, the same people who criticized Bush for his coining of the 'climate change' term are now flocking to the buzz phrase to pretend they were right all along, that heavy winters, too, can be a result of global warming.
A study released earlier this year might explain the newly warm embrace of the term 'climate change,' which proved that skepticism of global warming drops to much lower levels when it is called 'climate change.' While the latter is traditionally understood to mean the climate change that occurs during natural cycles of warming and cooling, liberals have warped it be synonymous with global warming, enabling them to push the same environmental agenda under a more widely accepted moniker. According to the authors of the study,
Republicans were less likely to endorse that the phenomenon is real when it was referred to as “global warming” (44.0%) rather than “climate change” (60.2%), whereas Democrats were unaffected by question wording (86.9% vs. 86.4%). As a result, the partisan divide on the issue dropped from 42.9 percentage points under a “global warming” frame to 26.2 percentage points under a “climate change” frame.
As the lead author of the study, Dr. Jonathon Schuldt, explained, 'wording matters.'
Wording does matter, as the crumbling global warming debate has become emblazoned with a new vocabulary masking the same relentless green message, using the trendiest language to morph the science to their agenda. While the term 'global warming' failed as a catch-all, the term 'climate change' can be used as a convenient excuse to explain any weather pattern environmentalists want to blame on human activity and to impose ever more burdensome environmental regulation on us.
