A Sunday opinion piece in The New York Times shows the politically correct way of saying global warming is about to change from “climate chaos” to “climate whiplash.”
This latest change will be the fourth major terminology shift if it catches on.
Use of the term “global warming” peaked in 2007 before slowly declining as the phrase was replaced by “climate change.” Global warming is the more readily understood and clearer term.
However, analysis of Gallup poll results implies the public may interpret global warming as narrowly referring to warmer temperatures on Earth’s surface, making the phrase falsifiable by cold weather. Changing the name of global warming can significantly alter the responses of people to polling. For example, climate change polls much better than global warming, as shown in the Gallup poll below. Changing the name alone boosts support from independents by 7 percent.
The use of “climate change” peaked in late 2009, but the term is still broadly used by many media outlets. Many left-wing media outlets and environmental groups changed their descriptions from “climate change” to “climate disruption,” which peaked in 2014. Climate disruption implies a more serious problem than “climate change.”
Finally, the politically correct way of saying global warming changed from “climate disruption” to the new/old phrase “climate chaos” in May of 2014 when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius claimed “[w]e have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”
Yale University even published an academic study about how each politically correct phrase for global warming alters how the issue polls.
Ironically, the COP 21 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris began 565 days after Fabius declared we only had 500 days to avert “climate chaos.” “Climate chaos” has remained the politically correct description of global warming ever since, despite its failure to materialize.
The New York Times opinion piece uses the term “climate whiplash” to describe the long-term outcomes of global warming, including potential cooling that could occur thousands of years from now. It claims that, in thousands of years, the cooling predicted to follow global warming will cause species adapted to deal with global warming to go extinct.
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