Classic Eddie.
But I would be happy to! This took me literally 3 minutes:
Looks like Eddie’s right about the frequency of “global warming” vs. “climate change,” according to StoryWrangler, whose data source is the Twitter Firehose API.
However, I vigorously disagree with his interpretation. Climate change better encompasses the wide variety of climactic trials and tribulations that accompany anthropogenic global warming, including sea-level rise destroying urban habitation and coastlines, more destructive tropical storms, extreme drought in the U.S. West, disruption of Atlantic currents, destruction of corals, etc., etc., etc. That’s why the term climate change is used more frequently these days.
Moreover, anthropogenic global warming will be responsible for a 1.5o C. rise in average global temperatures by the year 2040, per the latest and best climate models. Many hundreds of scientists and massive amounts of compute, cross-checked and peer-reviewed, have come to this unfortunate conclusion.
If it were simply a matter of running from a hiatus in warming, that would nicely confirm @Eddie’s biases. However, it would not conform to the actual trends in warming, which has accelerated once again in the past 8 years. I vote for the data-driven explanation rather than a political bias-driven explanation.
Regards,
Chris
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Because you’re in Canada.
It doesn’t matter, Eddie, because you’re pseudonymous, so no one can check the veracity of your claim. Your motives here are painfully obvious–you are a Culture Warrior.
Yet you failed to ask anything of the sort when evaluating Stephen Meyer’s falsehood as a mere “terminological error”:
Signature in the Cell, p. 128:
“A protein within the ribosome known as a peptidyl transferase then catalyzes a polymerization (linking) reaction…”
Why aren’t you following your training in this case?
If Eddie was right, the usage of the term global warming should begin much higher than climate change, then should be flattening or declining inversely proportionally to use of the term climate change, as he has suggested it’s both “new terminology” and a rhetorical trick that arose as a response to the so-called “hiatus” in land surface temperature increases.
If that was really the case, we should see evidence of replacement of one term by the other, and it should begin maybe a few years after 1998 as that is when the period of flattening in land surface temperatures began, and ended in roughly 2013.
But your graph begins in 2010 and measures only tweets, and doesn’t show any decline in the usage of global warming in favor of climate change, rather there just appears to be an overall pick up in the use of climate change, while both terms actually appear to be increasing with use of global warming less so.
But as the link I gave earlier shows, climate change was in use before global warming and was always used to a higher extend.
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I don’t say it originated as a rhetorical move, but it was certainly prudent to make more use of it during the hiatus, and even afterward, given that another hiatus might occur. That way, even in cooler years, one could blame every nasty environmental event whatsoever on the alleged baleful effects of CO2.
Thanks for confirming, using a more extensive data set, what I divined from the unscientific method of smelling the air. Good to know that my linguistic perceptions are not too far removed from reality.
I agree that climate change, being a broader term, can cover important changes beyond mere temperature rises. I have nothing against people saying that climate is changing. Terms such as “the climate crisis”, however, have become freighted with the quasi-superstitious belief that the world’s climate can be significantly altered by the turning of a knob on the wall, that knob being government policies. And the phrase is used to work people up into a kind of hysteria – something that politicians, ideologue, journalists, and academics (who in modern times are no longer shy and tweedy but assertive and ideological) are very good at doing. There are more sober and cautious accounts of climate change and its causes, but those accounts don’t fit in with the crisis narrative that a large portion of the intelligentsia wants to tell. In any case, I’m not here intending to debate such matters of substance. I’m content to have shown that the groupies on BioLogos were BS-ing about the 97% figure, which isn’t even justified by the original source whence it came.
I see an assertion, but I see no evidence.
More importantly, you don’t know what you are talking about. Climate scientists expected fluctuations in the rates of global temperature increases based on observations and models prior to the hiatus, so it is ridiculous to believe that a 10-15 year hiatus would influence the frequency of usage of either “global warming” or “climate change”.
Yes Eddie, this is possible because long-term global warming can initiate detrimental processes that won’t be stopped even if we managed to lower CO2 emissions on a global scale. Rising sea levels due to increased melting of glaciers and others is an obvious example.
Not recording significant positive or recording negative GMSTs for five years doesn’t mean heat isn’t being trapped in our atmosphere. GMST measurements typically ignore other parts of the climate system like the oceans and upper atmosphere. Not surprisingly, during the hiatus the temperature of the oceans rose
and when we consider the total energy uptake of the entire climate system, we see that the climate system warmed during the hiatus and not pause or slow down.
You don’t what you are talking about.
Thanks for strawmanning the entire field of climatology.
Ignorant talk from someone with a poor understanding of basic climate science. Go see those “university professors of climate science” to brush up your knowledge.
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That’s just not true Eddie. You are quite obviously meaning to leave the impression that the use of the term climate change instead of global warming is a rhetorical move that began as a direct response to the “hiatus” in the global warming trend.
This whole thing is you saying exactly that.
Let’s see what you wrote up above:
Ah okay, so it’s continued use is also just a rhetorical trick.
“Alleged”. Good one. No evidence that the C=O bond (or any other carbon bonds from human activities) absorbs in the infrared spectrum right?
Uhh, looks like methane and O=C=O strongly absorb infrared radiation. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
They are clearly removed from reality. Given how misinformation spreads and human cognitive biases, I honestly doubt you ever had any real sense or experience of how much the two terms have been used, as this is simply just another silly myth being perpetuated in the denialist bubble.
In reality you’re more likely to have just picked up this talking point from some denialist blog or website you frequent and then confabulated that it fits with your “experience”.
Wow how reasonable of you. Next you’ll demonstrate your inspirational degree of open-mindedness by also agreeing, at least for the sake of discussion, that a rise in temperature means it likely gets warmer.
But the effects of CO2 is merely alleged, of course.
A is due to B is due to C, and so on. Simple logical principle.
Since it follows logically that if global warming causes climate change(and it does), and since the current global warming trend is caused almost exclusively by carbon emissions from the human burning of fossil fuels(and it is) (from https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf)
…then a reduction in the use of fossil fuels will cause a reduction in carbon emissions (doh!), and then since the carbon content of the atmosphere means a reduction in trapped heat, it follows there is less global warming, and then less climate change.
By subsidizing production and investment in sustainable energy technologies(in the same way coal and oil still is and has been for decades), climate-friendly energy solutions have already become economically viable. Private manufacturing companies can then sell their sustainable-energy producing technologies at a profit, and employ people in the manufacturing and maintenance of those technologies, just like fossil-fuel companies do. The “quasi-superstitious belief” is a concrete empirical reality occurring all around you already.
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There was no 15-year hiatus, only claims based on misleadingly cherry-picked data beginning with the exceptionally high temperatures measured in 1998, and ending before the effect of that single point was diminished.
That the data is cherry-picked can be made clear by plotting many such periods of data and showing all the 15-year period trend lines, and noting that one of the trend lines must be the shallowest even if there is no hiatus, just ‘noisy’ data, so picking that particular 15-year period is the mathematical equivalent of quote-mining.
Another way of demonstrating the ‘hiatus’ is merely an artefact is to roll a dice 30 times, add 1 to the first roll, 2 to the second roll, 3 to the third roll etc, and plot the results. There’ll be sections in that plot where there is a flat or even downward trend due to the dice rolls, but that doesn’t mean you stopped incrementing the added values.
All this becomes clear to anyone who examines data rather than opinions.
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There’s also the facts that
(i) the term “climate change” wasn’t pushed by climate scientists at all, but by conservative American politicians who thought it sounded less scary than “global warming”, and
(ii) this happened in 2003, long before the data used to pretend there was a ‘hiatus’ was even collected.
Eddie is talking rot as usual.
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You want to leave it with you proposing something for which you have no evidence, which no-one else agrees with, and for which there are other explanations which are backed by evidence?
I wouldn’t do that, because I don’t cling on to falsehoods by shutting my eyes and sticking my head in a sand-box.
You clearly do.
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@Eddie didn’t actually quote the bolded text, for reasons that will quickly become clear:
@Rumraket nailed that one.
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I was just thinking that I need to get back to Benbecula, an island shot through with a large number of tiny lakes and ponds near sea level, some of which already interact with the sea at high tide, before the whole damned thing goes under. There is, at least, the one hill which provides a lovely prospect on the whole thing, and perhaps one day that’ll be all that’s left. The rest of it will join such places as Doggerland, and one day be lost even to memory.
I’d like to thank the person, whoever it was, who flagged the post above with the offensive language. I could see the original post in my e-mail, and was going to reply, but since it has been flagged and concealed, I no longer have to. (The post contained not only offensive language but also hyperbole; I won’t bother replying to the hyperbole either.)
When tempers flare to the point where university professors unashamedly use offensive language in a public space, I think it’s time to close down this thread. I suggest this to any moderator who is reading.
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Someone who is very well qualified to examine “data rather than opinions” is Judith Curry, a climate scientist with something like 150-180 published peer-reviewed papers. (How many climate science papers have you published, Roy?) She has an article on the definition of “hiatus” and whether particular periods of time qualify as proper examples of a hiatus:
I’m not here to debate the details of such discussions, as the area is not my field, but this article might be one of several that it would be useful for some people here to read.
Note that a throwaway, parenthetical remark of mine about a hiatus has now become a cause for a new, off-topic argument, which is typical of conversational behavior here. Yet it could be argued that Roy’s cranky objection is not entirely off-topic. It is, in a way, relevant to the topic of “consensus science”, for those who have argued against AGW on the basis of a hiatus have argued as if the existence of a hiatus were the consensus of climate scientists (the debate being only over how to interpret the hiatus, not over whether or not there was one), but some people here are shouting, “No, no, it was never the consensus that there was a hiatus!” That is, they want to debate whether or not a view that is supposedly a ‘consensus’ view really is a consensus view.
And that’s exactly what I was doing when I complained about people who said that “97% of scientists believe that over 90% of global warming is caused by the human emission of CO2.” I wasn’t arguing about whether or not the belief about the causality of CO2 was correct; I was only arguing about the correctness of the assertion that 97% of “scientists” had in fact championed that view. I’ve now demonstrated, by the unbreakable rules of arithmetic (97% of 1/3 plus 53% of the remaining 2/3 does not produce 97%, but something more in the range of 66%), that the study which originated the 97% number (which then proceeded to infect public discourse like one of Dawkins’s “memes”), does not support the 97% number. That is, I have demonstrated that the statement endorsed by BioLogos groupies was not a correct representation of the “consensus view” even of climate scientists, let alone of “scientists” in general. That’s all I set out to demonstrate.
The take-home lesson is that before people engage in rancorous debates over whether a supposed “consensus view” is good or bad science, right or wrong, etc., they should take the time make sure they understand exactly what the “consensus view” is supposed to be, and should trace back claims about a “consensus view” to their ultimate source. The well-trained scholar or scientist, if he or she has intellectual and academic integrity, would do this instinctively, but scholars, scientists, hangers-on, groupies, journalists, elected officials, bloggers, commenters on origins sites, etc. who are politically motivated will not bother to do this, as such investigations require time, research, and critical analysis, and they might end up revealing that the supposed “consensus” either never existed, or was not what it had been represented to be.
There are nuances in US politics? 
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Particularly hard-to-get nuances, to most Europeans at least. 
And I’d like to thank the person who allowed it back in its very slightly edited form.
So now you can reply to it! How fortunate!
It’s all batshit insane to us non-US North Americans as well.
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I hope that those who are not Americans will also realize that it is batshit insane to most decent and educated Americans, too.
But here at PS you do have a window into what is one of its primary drivers: a deep cultural rift which has developed between traditional commitment to Western and Enlightenment values on the one hand and an oppositional culture that is anti-science and illiberal on the other. Every time a hillbilly swoons over his copy of Darwin’s Doubt, the divide deepens just a little bit, because this is one of the fronts in that war.
To the rest of the world: my deepest apologies. Some of us over here really are trying.
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