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Didn't we have to rebrand "global warming" as "climate change" because the warming part turned out to be difficult to observe?

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Not exactly. Increases in average temperature are very easy to measure, [0] for a nice visualization.

The change was done to highlight the fact that the consequences are not just higher temperatures but also include, for example, an increased frequency in wild fires, droughts, and other extreme weather events.

[0]: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/300/video-climate...

And here the plot up to August 2023:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005100/a005161/GISTEM...

No. It was 'rebranded' because you have senators bringing in snowballs as a claim that global warming didn't exist because the common avenue for denying global warming is to point to the current weather.

Also because warming can increase the volatility of the weather regionally - for example, messing up the polar vortex caused surprising cold weather in parts of the United States even though the planet was overall warmer.

A lot of people would like to complacently react “oh, I’ll just turn the AC up” rather than acknowledge that it’ll mean dealing with worse storms, etc.

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