What's up guys, Rosh here, and welcome to All About Climate, a channel which is, well, all about climate. Specifically, climate science. Now, if you're already a subscriber, you're probably used to a slightly different format of video, and you may also have noticed that my upload schedule is, frankly, non-existent.
Now, that's largely because my videos to date have been rather time consuming, and I'm also a massive perfectionist and worry about tiny details which, frankly, no one else cares about. But nonetheless, it's very frustrating because I've got this long list of videos which I want to make, and it just takes ages to make them. So to remedy this, I thought I'd create a series of shorter, less time-intensive videos that I could upload between my more usual content. So, welcome to the first episode of Common Climate Claims, a series in which we look at some of the most common claims made about climate change.
These are the kind of claims which keep cropping up in the comments section of my videos. That's a lot of alliteration. So the argument we're looking at today is the claim that the term global warming was dropped in favour of the term climate change. Now if you've ever interacted with climate sceptics online the chances are you're familiar with this argument, but in case you're not it goes something like this.
Back in the day climate scientists were worried about global warming. Then at some undefined point in the recent past they realised that the planet wasn't warming, and so to save face they changed the term to climate change. Now, you've probably already noticed that there's a second, equally flawed and equally dumb argument embedded within this one.
Kind of dumb-ception, if you will. And that's the claim that the world stopped warming. It didn't.
Like, at all. But I'll be dealing with that claim in a future video. Anyway, clearly this argument is already running into problems and we haven't even addressed the core claim yet. So let's.
Was the term global warming replaced? by climate change. Now, when confronted with this argument, the first thing I do is ask the person making the claim when this transition was supposed to have occurred. For some reason, I've yet to actually get a specific answer.
Which is odd, because if the claim was true, you'd expect climate skeptics to be able to point to a specific period of time when this transition was supposed to have occurred. If you're a skeptic and you've used this argument before, then please let me know in the comments. But I'm not the kind of guy to let someone else's reluctance to help put me off. So I had a look myself.
Generally, the impression I get is that skeptics think that this transition occurred sometime in the mid 2000s. This would make sense since this is also when the pause in global warming was supposed to have occurred. So the term global warming should have fallen out of vogue about 10 years ago. That's the claim, but how do we go about assessing it? Well, obviously we have to look at the scientific literature, and the best place to do that, as any science graduate will painfully remember, is Google Scholar.
If we search for the term global warming, the first result is a book, The Economics of Global Warming, published in 1992. The next result is a scientific report, simply titled Global Warming, published in 2005. So far, this fits the claim that global warming was used until the mid-2000s or so. But then we get to the third search result, the IPCC's report on global warming of 1.5 degrees, which was published, drum roll please, in 2018. Now, I don't know about you, but this seems to slightly undermine the claim that the term global warming is no longer in use. And if we change the search criteria to only look at results published from 2020 onwards, you can see that there are still plenty of examples of the term global warming still in use.
So clearly, global warming is still alive and kicking in academic literature, and even the IPCC, the world's leading body on climate science, is still using it. Which brings me on to the next. glaring flaw with this argument. Every skeptic's boogeyman? The IPCC.
Let's remind ourselves of what IPCC stands for. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It has climate change literally in the name. So when was the IPCC founded?
Was it the mid-2000s, when skeptics claimed that climate change came into fashion, presumably alongside low-rise jeans, floppy fringes, and the glory days of the emo scene? Well, no. It was 1988, the year of power suits, Thatcher and ludicrously large hair.
So clearly, climate change is not a new term. In fact, if we once again look at the literature, we can find the term climate change being used decades ago. For example, one of the most important studies in the history of climate science was Gilbert Plasser's 1956 study, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change.
Climate change, for short. Now, it's worth mentioning here, that climate change and global warming, though often used interchangeably, actually refer to related but separate phenomena. Global warming specifically refers to the long-term increase in average global temperatures, while climate change, in this context, refers to the climatic effects of this warming.
But to get back to the point, a couple of simple Google searches reveal that the term climate change is not a new one, and that the term global warming is still very much in use. In fact, if you look through the literature, you'll find examples of both terms being widely used for decades. So I think we can conclude that this particular myth is well and truly busted. But where did it come from? Well, my guess is that there may have been a shift in terminology from global warming to climate change in the media, which the general public assumed reflected the scientific discourse.
I don't know if that's the case, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. And if you're interested in seeing how poor media coverage of climate science feeds into this kind of misunderstanding, then check out my video on exactly that subject. So that's that.
Claim debunked. What do you guys think? Have you ever come across this argument?
Is it a result of a shift in media terminology? And what other arguments would you like me to cover? Let me know in the comments.
And if you want to see more of my content, then don't forget to like, comment and smash that subscribe button. I really appreciate it. Thanks for watching, and until next time, goodbye.