Claim: Climate scientists are being censored

[Ann K]

View attachment 65782
https://xkcd.com/2889

I was taught about Arrhenius and climate change in, I believe, seventh grade. That would have been in the middle of the 1950s, so that would make it closer to Arrhenius on your timeline than it is to the present day. It seems to me that to deny global warming is to deny physics itself.

 

[FatPhil]

I was taught about Arrhenius and climate change in, I believe, seventh grade. That would have been in the middle of the 1950s, so that would make it closer to Arrhenius on your timeline than it is to the present day. It seems to me that to deny global warming is to deny physics itself.

You got me curious about when certain terminology kicked off in popularity, so ran off to google ngrams:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...1950&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

One thing that's interesting to me is that I'm sure I've heard a "first they called it 'global warming', and then they changed it to 'climate change' when the 'warming' stopped"-type narrative from the murkier side of the debate, and yet this scrape of terminology that was actually in use over the years says quite the opposite - 'climate change' looks like it has always been ahead. The existence of this as a top StartPage search result for ``changed global warming climate change'' implies I'm not completely hallucinating, but alas WP doesn't let me view their pages to get the full skinny:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...arming-to-climate-change-because-its-cooling/
Debunking the claim 'they' changed 'global warming' to 'climate ...

Jan 29, 2018 ... "They" changed the term "global warming" to "climate change" because the planet is not warming is an oft-repeated talking point of those, ...

 

[Mendel]

You got me curious about when certain terminology kicked off in popularity, so ran off to google ngrams:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...1950&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

The 2005 boost ought to be due to the Kyoto protocol coming into effect.

The rise from 1985 is the start of the digital age?

 

[FatPhil]

The 2005 boost ought to be due to the Kyoto protocol coming into effect.

The rise from 1985 is the start of the digital age?

2005 makes sense, yes. However, as these are % rather than absolute counts, I don't think it's clear that there's a digital media connection, as everything else would have shot up too, so the ratios remain the same. This is borne out by the suggestion my g/f just made to me over lunch, namely that the first "greenhouse ..." phrase she heard (midwest US) was "greenhouse effect":

She also reminded me that I can work around WP's blocks by using lower tech, so here's a quote from my above link:

No matter the reality, Trump has now twice uttered this falsehood. In 2013, he
tweeted: "They changed the name from 'global warming' to 'climate change' after the
term global warming just wasn't working (it was too cold)!"

Then, in an interview with Piers Morgan last week, when asked about his belief in
climate change, he responded: "There is a cooling, and there is a heating, and I
mean, look it used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming. . . .
That wasn't working too well, because it was getting too cold all over the place."

Trump apparently missed the joint NOAA and NASA news release earlier this month that
showed the four warmest years on record have occurred in the past four years. "The
planet is warming remarkably uniformly," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, told reporters.

 

[Alien Chess Fiend]

One thing that's interesting to me is that I'm sure I've heard a "first they called it 'global warming', and then they changed it to 'climate change' when the 'warming' stopped"-type narrative from the murkier side of the debate, and yet this scrape of terminology that was actually in use over the years says quite the opposite - 'climate change' looks like it has always been ahead.

RealClimate had an article on the first use of "Global Warming" in a paper:

On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper "Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?" in the journal Science. That appears to be the first use of the term "global warming" in the scientific literature

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/happy-35th-birthday-global-warming/

Also used the term "climate change" in the same paper:

If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climate change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide.

Skeptical Science has more on the name change talking point:

In the past, global warming and climate change were both in regular use. For example, the landmark 1956 paper that summed up all the accumulated knowledge of the past 100 years was called, "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change". So both terms have been around for ages.
[...]
Step forward Republican advisor and strategist Frank Luntz. Here's the background. In 2002, prior to the midterms, the G.W. Bush administration - not exactly famous for its environmental track-record - sought advice on policy communication. Regarding the climate, Luntz commented thus:

"The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science."

Uh-oh. Look out, reality ahead. Evasive action required! Luntz went on to advise:

"The terminology in the upcoming environmental debate needs refinement, starting with "global warming" and ending with "environmentalism." It's time for us to start talking about "climate change" instead of global warming and "conservation" instead of preservation".

The briefing went on to justify the suggested changes:

""Climate change" is less frightening than "global warming." As one focus group participant noted, climate change "sounds like you're going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale." While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

So there you have it. The only recorded political move to emphasise the term, 'climate change', over 'global warming' was to try and make the latter feel a bit cuddly to prospective Republican voters in 2002.

https://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm

 

[FatPhil]

So there you have it. The only recorded political move to emphasise the term, 'climate change', over 'global warming' was to try and make the latter feel a bit cuddly to prospective Republican voters in 2002.

That ties in with this slightly enigmatic paragraph, which I didn't include from the WP article:

This claim is demonstrably incorrect, never mind that it's unclear who "they" are.

So it appears that what started out an accusation was actually a confession.

 

[Mendel]

So it appears that what started out an accusation was actually a confession.

"We did that to make it sound less dangerous", one generation later, morphs to "they did that because it actually is less dangerous". Mission success!

And that's why language use is part of propaganda.