Global Warming or Climate Change: Which is It?

October 28, 2016 – Since these two terms get bandied about interchangeably it is time to understand the difference. They do not mean the same things.

Global warming describes the phenomena of rising mean average temperatures observed over the last several decades. It is not necessarily attributed to human impact. The term was first associated with climate change when it appeared in a scientific paper published in 1975. This was also the first time the term climate change was introduced. The term global warming became the predominant one related to changing climate in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, used it when reporting to Congress stating, “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.”

Now climate change is much more than global warming. In the human context it refers to the total impact of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and oceans of the planet and looks at changes to wind patterns, ocean currents, precipitation and storm frequency as well as temperatures.

Climate change explains cold as well as warm. For example the polar vortex that impacted North America and Europe in past winters is an intensification of the impact of climate change on wind currents. The winter of 2014/15 when the Northeast of the United States and Canada experienced extreme cold is associated with destabilization of the normal wind pattern of the Jet Stream. The dominant upper atmosphere wind current weakened and became wavy with the condition persisting for weeks. Instead of a strong flow from west to east, it meandered in a wavy pattern that wandered from north to south and even split in two. In 2015/16, the El Nino in the Pacific reversed the impact of the polar vortex leading to a much milder winter in the same areas of North America.

Whether the term global warming or climate change gets used, today, most of us see them as interchangeable. But neither term got mentioned much when the American Presidential debates ran in the last two months. No moderators asked about the subject or used the terms in any of their questions. Some argue that this lack of coverage was entirely consistent with American polling on the subject of national priorities where climate change or global warming don’t make it into the top 10. In fact in recent polls Americans who perceive global warming and climate change as a serious threat declined to only 57% of those surveyed. Americans who said they were worried about climate change – up 9% to 64% from 55% in 2015.

So if the media isn’t asking does it reflect the same degree of complacency found in the public? Not really. In this case considering the United States has signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015, it would have been appropriate to ask the candidates how they intended to meet the target carbon reductions promised by the current government of the United States.