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Deciphering Climate Terms: Global Warming vs Climate Change
Seth Combs & Eric Pasewalk
April 10, 2024
Sponsored by Emerald Ecovations
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Table of Contents
Climate Change vs Global Warming
"The pen is mightier than the sword"
Words matter. Sometimes, we take for granted the impact words can have.
Yet, there’s one man who understands the power of words better than most - Frank Luntz. He built a living by finding the right terms to influence the masses for financial gains, political advantage, and global influence.
As a communications strategist and pollster who worked on behalf of the Republican and Democratic Parties for decades, Luntz has been instrumental in changing terms for the benefit of his clients.
You may not know Luntz, but you will know some of his work. He helped drive the change from “Estate Tax” to the “Death Tax” and “Drilling for Oil” to “Exploring for Energy.”
He was also at the helm in replacing “Global Warming” with “Climate Change” (not a term he invented). In 2001, The Guardian reported on a 2001 memo from Luntz during the Bush administration:
The memo, by the leading Republican consultant Frank Luntz, concedes the party has "lost the environmental communications battle" and urges its politicians to encourage the public in the view that there is no scientific consensus on the dangers of greenhouse gases.
"The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science," Mr Luntz writes in the memo, obtained by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based campaigning organization.
"Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.
"Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."
The phrase "global warming" should be abandoned in favor of "climate change", Mr Luntz says, and the party should describe its policies as "conservationist" instead of "environmentalist", because "most people" think environmentalists are "extremists" who indulge in "some pretty bizarre behavior... that turns off many voters".
It goes on to state:
The phrase "global warming" appeared frequently in President Bush's speeches in 2001, but decreased to almost nothing during 2002, when the memo was produced.
As Luntz knew, replacing Global Warming with Climate Change would have an impact on the psyche of the public and lessen the magnitude of the issue in their minds.
It worked. And eighteen years later (2019), Luntz would return to Washington DC to speak with an ad-hoc Senate Democratic climate panel, where he stated:
“I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz told an ad-hoc Senate Democratic climate panel. “I don’t want credit. I don’t want blame. Just stop using something that I wrote 18 years ago because it’s not accurate today.”
Today, most have settled into Climate Change while others push for the use of terms, such as Climate Crisis, Climate Catastrophe, Climate Emergency, and there’s even a petition to change it to Atmospheric Carbon Poisoning.
Whatever the term you use, we need to take steps and action now towards a sustainable future.
California is Outsourcing Pollution
Shipping documents indicate the soil was contaminated with DDT, an insecticide the federal Environmental Protection Agency banned decades ago, and that research has linked to premature births, cancer, and environmental harms.
The Brawley dirt was so toxic to California, that state regulation labeled it a hazardous waste. That meant it would need to go to a disposal facility specially designed to handle dangerous material – a site with more precautions than a regular landfill to make sure the contaminants couldn’t leach into groundwater or pollute the air.
At least, that would have been the requirement if the waste stayed in California. But it didn’t.
Instead, the trucks – carrying nearly 1,500 tons of California hazardous waste – rumbled just over the Arizona border to the La Paz County Landfill, a municipal solid waste dump several miles from the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ reservation. The journey is a familiar one for California’s toxics. Since 2010, nearly half of California’s hazardous waste has left the Golden State, according to figures the state released last summer.
Fossil Fuel & Cement Producers Make Up The Majority of Carbon Emissions
The vast majority of carbon dioxide emissions comes from a very small group of producers of fossil fuels and cement – with just 57 entities accounting for a whopping 80% of the total between 2016 and 2022.
That’s the findings of a report released last week by the think tank InfluenceMap based on the CarbonMajors database.
The single biggest culprit: China for its coal production, accounting for 25.8% of total global emissions. Among companies, the top three emitters were all state-owned entities:
Saudi Aramco (which accounted for 4.8% of the global emissions)
Russia’s energy giant Gazprom (3.3%)
State-owned Coal India (3.0%)
Publicly traded companies were lower on the list. The top three culprits there, not surprisingly, were oil giants Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP, each with just over 1% of the global total.
One of the most shocking parts of the report: Many companies expanded production – and emitted more CO2 – since the U.N. Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 to curb climate change. Emissions from fossil fuels reached a peak in 2022 that was approximately 5% higher than in 2015.
5 Million Dead Livestock in Mongolia This Year - What Lies Ahead
When Mongolia’s extreme weather killed 700,000 livestock in 2018, it was a record. This year, that number is 5.2 million — and could soon quadruple.
In Mongolia , where nearly a third of the population still lives as nomadic herders, a winter so cold that livestock either freeze to death or starve as snow and ice make grazing impossible is called a “dzud.”
These extreme seasons used to come once a decade. With climate change destabilizing the landlocked Asian country’s weather pattern, the dzud has haunted Mongolia for six of the last 10 years.
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