‘Global warming’ or ‘climate change’?

At the beginning of the home page’s Perspective on Climate Change I wrote (in 2015) as follows:

I have written a large number of essays on ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ (AGW) and its later sister ‘climate change’, a term which came into use in about 2004, when dedicated Climate Botherers could see that warming was refusing to rise as it had done, while carbon dioxide accumulations in the atmosphere were indeed rising as they had done.

A couple of commenters took exception to my statement that there had been a shift in the use of these terms at that time. On re-reading (and after the fuss) I agree that I might have expressed myself more precisely — perhaps to the effect that I felt there had been a greater use of the term ‘climate change’ from about that time. I had indeed noticed such a shift, as did others. But of course, as commenters said, ‘climate change’ was in the title of the IPCC, and had been used in some scientific papers even before the the establishment of that body.  I was pretty sure that I had come across a reference to the presumed cause of the change in usage, but I could not instantly find it. I said that I would return to the subject when I could locate it. That has taken me a few weeks, as I went through hundreds of essays looking for it, alas without finding exactly what I wanted.

The two terms still float around in discussion as though they were more or less synonymous. They’re not, of course, since ‘climate change’ has a much wider reference. Apparently Tacitus, the Roman historian, is the first person to have used the latter term, and he was writing in 114 AD. According to NASA, James Hansen is to be given the credit for the widespread use of ‘global warming’ after 1988.

[G]lobal warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: “global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming.” Hansen’s testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded.

Almost certainly, my reference in 2015 to the change from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ was connected to the discussion following a post by Judith Curry a year earlier, which you can read here. What is fascinating about her essay, going back to it now, is that it was arguing a reverse change — that by 2014 the use of ‘climate change’ seemed to have failed, and that the general discussion in the media and elsewhere, was returning to ‘global warming’. It was all based on a pair of public opinion polls, which suggested that people seemed to be more scared by ‘global warming’ than by ‘climate change’. The Guardian reported that Barack Obama, scientists and campaigners have all looked at how to engage Americans more powerfully on the environment. Now researchers have come up with one critical piece of advice: do say “global warming”, don’t say “climate change”. The science writer for Time put it this way rather earlier:  global warming generated more alarming associations, causing survey respondents to think of disasters like melting ice, coastal flooding and extreme weather, while “climate change” generated more banal associations with generation weather patterns.

Of course, that was ten years after the change that I had noted and referred to. The only link that I could find at about that time was,  paradoxically, the opposite of what I had remembered. Not only could I find no links that led me to originators of the change within the orthodoxy, but also the one link that was squarely on target had the Bush administration as the originator! The Guardian, which of course is never wrong about anything, was given a confidential memorandum from a consultant, Frank Luntz, to the Bush administration. The newspaper said that 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 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”.

Yet, in my mind I saw (that is, I fancy that I saw) a link to a statement from somewhere in the orthodoxy to the effect that the debate should abandon ‘global warming’ and stick to ‘climate change’. Indeed, by 2014 my view was that this was widely accepted, at least in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, if only because SkepticalScience had devoted an essay to why there hadn’t been such a change. Perhaps I got it from this comment on Judith Curry’s essay:

Skiphil | June 1, 2014 at 2:51 pm |
It was all “global warming” until nature proved uncooperative with the hysterical meme…. so then “climate change” came into vogue because almost any event, cold or hot, stormy or calm, etc. could be recklessly lumped under “climate change”…. a category so broad and so consistent with all of the natural record that it proved itself…

Perhaps there was a bit of this one as well:

andywest2012 | June 1, 2014 at 3:22 pm |
The whole point about either the terms Global Warming or Climate Change is that they *both* achieved prominence because their narrative success trumped any veracity they might convey. Although (many) conscious minds contributed to their introduction, over so very many minds the process is not itself conscious. But the terms were never meant to contain any truth, if I can put it that way. The very fact that folks can consider reintroducing a term simply because it evokes (via emotion) more action… demonstrates the point.

Or this one:

GaryM | June 1, 2014 at 4:50 pm |

The issue has never been what conservatives called CAGW. The issue has been the manipulation of the language by progressive politicians, media and “scientists.” THEY started adopting the term “climate change” as a defense to the “pause” and divergence of the GCMs from reality.

It’s all a bit of a muddle, isn’t it. You can see there was a sharp increase in the use of ‘climate change’ from the beginning of the new century in the following graph, which comes from SkepticalScience, because I couldn’t capture the original from my computer screen. The data come from Google Scholar, which tracks the use of the terms largely in the scientific community. If you go to Google Books, which covers the more general field, you get a less marked increase at the same time, with climate change also the more important of the two terms. Try as I have done, I can’t get later data than about 2008. I don’t know why.

I don’t expect to have to write about the use of these terms again. I am satisfied that I was more or less right in perceiving an increase in the usage of ‘climate change’ as against ‘global warming’ early in the century. I ought to have expressed what I came to write more clearly, which would have saved me a lot of work. I will leave to others the search for any tantalising evidence about whether those in the orthodox camp thought they needed a better term than ‘global warming’, when plainly the sharp rise in global temperature had fallen away, though the rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide had continued onward and upward in an unchanged way.

But it would be ironic if both sides in the American climate debate had decided to change to the same phrase, but for contrary reasons!