> but the 800-pound gorilla in the room is climate change. Where I live, winters are 4.5 degrees warmer.

The George W. Bush administration (e.g. via Frank Luntz) advocated for the term "climate change" because Republican strategists wanted to leverage perceived uncertainty about global warming as much as possible.[0]

This is a PR effort that seems to have largely succeeded (both in adoption and its goals) and it's unfortunate that when we are literally talking about warming we adopt a term that is less precise; you are talking about global warming here.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.c...