Our Vocabulary Is Adapting to a Hotter Planet

Discussions of climate change began even before Broecker’s paper, without any of the white-hot rhetoric that has characterized much of our approach to the issue since. In 1973, a team of environmental scientists published a paper in MIT Press under the title “Study of Man’s Impact on Climate.” They labeled that impact “inadvertent climate modification.” The phrasing, while accurate enough, never caught on. NexisLexis counts just 11 uses of the term from 1968 to 2023, with the earliest occurring on Feb. 9, 1988, on a PBS program about math and science education. “The first test when you’re speaking in a scientific voice is: Is it accurate? Does it encapsulate the science?” says Jamieson. Inadvertent climate change might do a good enough job of that, but it also may have come before its time. In 1971, the public wasn’t yet feeling the effects of climate change, and nobody was looking for a new term to describe something they didn’t know existed in the first place. Read more: The Language Of Climate Change Just Changed in a Major Way Next up was Broecker’s “global warming” formulation—and it too got off to a slow start. There were just two citations of it in the media in the 1973 to 1978 window, and two from 1978 to 1983. As temperatures rose in the mid-to-late ‘80s use of the term crept up—to 301 uses from 1983 to 1988. Then everything changed. On June 23, 1988, NASA ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate Source Type: news