So, is it global warming or is it climate change? The director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Anthony Leiserowitz says, “If I had a penny for every time I was asked that,” according to CNN.
Actually, he tells people he uses both terms. “The key thing about terms like this is, they are plastic. Or, well, maybe since we are talking about the environment, we should say words are renewable organic latex or something,” Leiserowitz joked. “Essentially, meaning changes.”
But all joking aside, Leiserowitz and other climate scientists agree on one important thing – No matter what terms people use to describe it, people need to call it something because it is probably the biggest threat to our planet.
The terms can be complicated
By the 1980s, most scientists were using the term “greenhouse effect” to describe what they were seeing on a global scale. “Climactic change” or “climate change” became more popular in the 2000s.
Mike Hulme, is a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge whose work focuses on the way climate change is discussed in public and political conversations. He says, “I think, on one level, climate change is a more accurate description of what is happening to the world weather systems and is a more neutral phrase. Climate change alters the weather system in ways that aren’t limited to temperatures.”
Professor Hume makes a very good point when he says alterations in the weather system are not limited to temperatures, and this is key to why the term “global warming” is used sometimes. Basically, it leads to the same question that arises when people are talking about the weather and climate.
Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere and its short-term variation in minutes to weeks. People generally think of weather as a combination of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, visibility, and wind. In other words, if New York is experiencing a snow storm today, that is a description of the weather.
On the other hand, Climate is the weather of a place averaged over a period of time, often 30 years. So in other words, we could look back over past weather events to see how many times New York has experienced a snowstorm in early March. Let’s examine global warming versus climate change.
What is climate change?
Climate change is a reference to a long-term change, lasting years, decades or centuries, in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth, regardless of the cause. Climate change can be caused by any number of things, such as biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, and volcanic eruptions.
Today, “climate change” is often understood to refer to “anthropogenic climate change.” This phrase means climate change caused by human activity, as opposed to changes resulting from the Earth’s natural processes. One example of a natural process would be a huge volcanic eruption that obscures the sun, causing a global cooling effect.
Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts.
Climate change has also been well-documented, from changing precipitation patterns and sea level rise to migration northward of species normally at home in tropical and sub-tropical regions of the planet. Needless to say, climate change is now used as both a technical description of the process, as well as a noun used to describe the problem.
What is global warming?
In general terms, global warming is a long-term rise in the average surface temperature of the Earth’s climate system due to rising levels of greenhouse gases. Global warming can also be thought of as just one aspect of climate change.
“You could think of global warming as the large macro perspective phenomenon,” said Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science and an affiliated professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University who focuses on climate change. “Climate is more complicated.”
In 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources about climate, he 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.”
It should also be noted that global warming has a lot of science on its side, in the accurate measurements of surface and ocean temperatures worldwide. Many of the observed warming changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in the instrumental temperature record.
It is easy to understand how quite often, the two terms, climate change, and global warming are used interchangeably. The easiest way to separate the two is to remember that climate change refers to the long-term dynamics of change in the Earth’s climate. Global warming is one very important aspect of climate change and one that we can see and feel almost daily.
