Is it global warming or climate change?
Some people use “global warming” and “climate change” interchangeably, while others insist on saying it one way or the other. Both terms are usually meant to describe the increasingly negative impact human activity has on our planet’s atmosphere and environment.
So which one is right? Does it matter?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website has a potentially helpful sidebar titled: Climate Change or Global Warming?. It says the term “climate change” is preferred because it encompasses the full range of changes in the climate, in addition to rising temperature.
Global warming is simply the increase in the atmosphere’s temperature that has been measured since the mid-20th century. But the rising levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that we’ve created are causing other changes in the Earth’s climate. Stronger storms in some parts of the world, and drought in others, are also connected to human damage of the environment.
This is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change use the phrase “climate change” in its name and work. The U.N.’s definition is:
“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
While “climate change” is more descriptive and all-encompassing, “global warming” seems to have been around longer and has caught the public imagination.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry for global warming dates the phrase to 1969 and defines it as: “an increase in the earth’s atmospheric and oceanic temperatures widely predicted to occur due to an increase in the greenhouse effect resulting especially from pollution.”
The History of Climate Change Science site notes that much of the early work on the topic focused on rising world temperatures. A publicized statistic in 1967 said “average temperatures might rise a few degrees within the next century.”
In 1988 — the hottest summer on record until then — scientists’ claims about climate change gained public attention. The connection between heat and the climate was well-established, so the words “global warming” caught on easily.
The hugely influential movie, An Inconvenient Truth helped burn the words “global warming” into people’s brains even further. And yet the man behind the movie, Al Gore, has a new nonprofit group called We Can Solve It that uses the term “climate change” and “global warming” in equal measure.
Whichever words you say, the effects are the same: We’re harming our atmosphere, and we have to reduce our CO2 emissions to stop the problem. You can start by measuring your personal carbon footprint and making small changes that, when we all take part, will have a positive effect.