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Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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