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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to consider that the oil industry may have made a mistake by reframing “global warming” as “climate change”.

Harder for people to see events like this as part of “global warning” while it is more understandable as a consequence of “climate change”

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I thought we were told to make a distinction between "climate" and "the weather"...

But nobody told us there’s no link at all between these two.

Only to entertain the delusion that most people have when they hear the word "weather": that it doesn't involve anything outside a 1 cm buffer around them. When you gain even a tiny understanding of how the atmosphere works at a planetary scale, that misapprehension vanishes.

For some reason, we only get told to make this distinction when the weather in question is exceptionally cold, never when it's exceptionally warm.

The way I think of global warming is just that the atmosphere as a whole is containing more energy. If this idea is translated to simple and easy to understand mathematical models, wild behavior results as a direct outcome.

The simplest version of this is the period-doubling bifuration:

    X(n+1) = r * Xn * (1 - Xn)

"r" is the amount of energy in the system (i.e., heat in the atmosphere) and Xn is the severity of the behavior. The insight is that while the "severity" naturally goes up as the "energy" goes up, once you get to a certain point, the severity goes both well above and below the "natural" level in unpredictable ways. In other words, a more energetic atmosphere leads to both much hotter and colder days.

The Lorenz attractor was described in a very similar way, related to turbulence and temperature gradients. It's not weather or climate, but I do find it a useful analogy.

Where is the scientific proof that this isolated weather event is climate change?

Just like you cannot claim that one day of bad weather refutes global warming you also cannot claim that an isolated event is climate change. It takes time to prove that.

Getting tired of everyone spouting off about climate change every time bad weather occurs. It's just as anti-science as denial.

I want to have this comment tattooed on my forehead.

This is a common argument encouraged by the fossil fuel industry but it's not that simple. Climate science operates on a longer time scale so there isn't a single “We did it – Exxon, et al.” note to find but what you can talk about are the probabilities shifting (100 year floods become 20 year floods, etc.) and that tends to happen after most major events. For example, two noteworthy weather events this summer:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/pacific-northwest-he... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/europes-july-floods-...

In this case, what I'd look at is whether this event is in line with what the climate scientists have been saying for decades, namely that we'd see more volatility and extreme weather events. This is especially compatible with predictions for the mid-Atlantic region which have called for more big snow events despite generally less snow on average. No, it's not definitive enough that you could use it in a criminal case but it tells anyone that cares to expect higher insurance rates, taxes, etc.

You guys are talking past each other. It's (mildly) dishonest to point at any one event and say "this is global warming". It's entirely accurate to point at a single event and say "if it weren't for global warming, there would be a 1% this happened, but with global warming, it's a 10% chance".

It's like the Swiss cheese theory of accidents: accidents don't happen because one guy wasn't paying attention, they happen because one guy wasn't paying attention AND because the guy who was supposed to supervise him was off AND because the manager hadn't thought to call someone else in AND because the system designers forgot to add a rule for this AND the regulators because they forgot to require ...

There's a fine line to thread here. On one side, you're lying if you say that global warming was the sole, isolated cause of this. On the other side, you're criminally irresponsible if you forget to mention the fact global warming certainly was an important contributory cause.

  > Where is the scientific proof that this isolated weather event is climate change?

There is no evidence that this event is climate change.

However, this is not an isolated event. Do you not remember Texas' snowstorm last year? These "freak, isolated" events are becoming more and more frequent. That is climate change.

Why are you comparing Texas weather to Virginia?

>the oil industry [...] reframing “global warming” as “climate change”.

source? The wikipedia section on it is surprisingly scant on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology, and a search for "global warming climate change" on google doesn't reveal much either.

The man you're replying to is so prolific that if there isn't a citation (and there are) then his comment would become the citation.

It wasn't "the oil industry", but climate activists who, during a period when the earth wasn't warming starting around 1998, decided to reframe it as "climate change" in order to maintain the sense of crisis.

And it scientifically makes sense to call it this.

While the planet overall is warming, the extra energy in the system can actually make colder in some places.

For example, by enabling stronger storm systems to push arctic air farther south than previously.

What about the snow in Miami then? (Jan 19, 1977)

Err, no, though I wasn’t completely accurate either, as Luntz came up with it after he’d stopped being a lobbyist for a while in order to join the Bush White House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz

There are various articles and interviews with him on this topic. Layoff has an excellent discussion of the topic too.

Luntz did not "come up" with it. By 2003 -- when Luntz started pushing for this term, all the green groups were already using it. The inflection was point was 1998. You can see this in the google n-gram data or just do a time-boxed google search. Every single green group switched to "climate change" by 2001, two years before Luntz started talking about it.

It's not that global warming isn't happening, it's that the effects aren't just a blanket 'warming.' Increased warming in one area can affect weather patterns that result in extreme weather (or even cooling!) in another. Climate change is a more understandable term for the layperson.

Both terms have been in use since the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology

Yes, both terms existed since the 19th Century, but the concerted push on branding dates to the late 90s by green groups which began to discourage the phrase "global warming" and replace it with "climate change".

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22climate+cha...

That's my recollection as well. There was a conservative meme in the late 90s/early 2000s about "Huh...it's cold during summer...how's that for global warming?", and I feel like "climate change" is a result of climate activist groups realizing global warming is a bad/confusing descriptor. I also recall in the early 2000s there was an attempt to get "global weirding" to replace "global warming" among activist communities, also seemingly in direct response to the conservative meme above.

That's correct. The idea that a Republican pollster like Frank Luntz is actually in control of climate messaging is not a serious claim, and I'm really confused why people are clinging to the idea that either the Republicans or "Oil Companies" are the ones responsible for the switch. That's bad history.

Obviously when you realize that there is critical mass of dense people you want to use phrase that is more clear.

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