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Comment by Guest42 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a little disappointed it got renamed as “climate change” because that phrase doesn’t have the same level of urgency to it although it is technically more accurate.

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I imagine it's partly because because skeptics would have a field day any time it snowed a lot or was less warm than normal and say "so much for global warming!". It might sound obvious and silly to us, but a simple folksy sort of observational logic defeating the so called experts can be quite persuasive and validating :(

Decades ago, I was saying the same thing in the opposite direction when backers of global warming were saying, "look how hot it is." I'm talking the 80's when I said it was a terrible argument, because all it takes is a cold day to refute it...and here we are.

I seem to get downvoted every time I mention this, as apparently people want to forget global warming was ever bolstered by, "look how hot it is" and they would prefer to just now ridicule people for the same errors their side was guilty of for literally decades.

So yes, the event is real. Ridiculing opponents for making the same argument with the same temporary data points isn't winning anything.

It really is not the same though. "Every year we not only see hotter maximum spot temperatures, but new hottest average month records, glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate and there is strong evidence linking that to human activity" is not the same as "Winter has arrived yet again, take that, science nerds!".

I think most people don't care because they can't change anything. What exactly do you want a penny pinching working class family to do? Cut back consumption? Easy for people who have loads more money to say. Not so easy for people who break laws just to survive economically, socially, and culturally. Nobody wants to be a schizoid living in a dungeon alone but saving the planet. Coupled with excessive spending habits of morons who can't balance a single transaction in a register make for jealousy or FOMO in many groups of people who suddenly become aware they're gonna die and all they did was live day to day instead of enjoying it.

It is true that an individual can live as carbon-neutral and eco-friendly as possible without making nary a dent on global warming. However it is also true that all of these individuals have the power to elect people who can to do something. One very simple example I can think of that happened in recent history was Trump pulling the US out of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change mitigation. If the public at large were educated on the subject, there would be widespread outrage and a lot of pressure NOT to do this - but his base leaned heavily climate-change-sceptic so it was A-OK (bonus: it really triggered the libs which would go down well even with Trump fans who are undecided on climate change). Now, would that agreement alone fix everything and arrest climate change? Probably not, but getting the world to agree on something was one step in the right direction.

It used to be called "pollution". Reframing the topic as global warming or climate change was a dedicated effort to soften the language and introduce room for doubt. I mean, everyone agrees that pollution sounds bad and is bad and we should stop doing it. But by calling it climate change, suddenly there's now an avenue to challenge its legitimacy, and shift attention onto the ideological debates. Meanwhile, as everyone is distracted, industry gets a free pass to continue polluting with zero consequences.

Eh, it's not the same thing as pollution. Pollution to me invokes the process where you invent something unnatural and dump it into the environment, such as tetrachloroethylene. Whereas putting CO2 in the atmosphere is a completely normal natural process, and the amount we've added has "only" about doubled the usual concentration. It's categorically different because unlike TCE, which will kill you on the spot if you drink it, the downsides of CO2 are not instantly obvious.

The problem is that the average voter will not understand that distinction. They will be persuaded to vote against environmental protections because of the doubt cast on "climate change". My original point was about the framing of the debate in the public sphere. In an effort to be pedantically correct, we've handed the opposition the upper hand by allowing them to reframe the debate away from the scary word of pollution.

In perhaps colourful terms - Crap in a river and it's polluted for those downstream. This, for me, captures the essence of the issue - It's not pollution until you are the one downstream.

Pollution is not just about the what, but also about how much. One cup of water is good for you, but if you drink 10 liters of water on the spot you might die. and that's not even close to doubling the amount of water in your body.

That's an interesting angle, it's funny because I thought it was the other way round - that it was changed to be more persuasive. I guess "climate change" also opens it up to the argument that even skeptics are in agreement that climate changes naturally, so they can brush aside evidence with "hey we don't disagree but it's a natural process and there's some doubt over whether humans are responsible" :-/

Love this.

I have never failed to convince anyone in my midwest sphere of influence (midwest, know far right and far left folks) that ‘pollution’ needs to be dealt with.

You can replace ‘climate change’ in an essay with pollution and dramatically simplify changing peoples mind.

they're not the same thing at all. Green house gases include CO2 and water vapor for example. GHGs are not pollutants at all, and pollutants don't cause global warming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental... -- the EPA can regulate CO2 because it is a pollutant, according to the Supreme Court.

The problem was re-framed because western industry mostly stopped belching obvious pollution and that framing of the problem did not resonate with western voters who could see that the rivers and sky were cleaner than they'd ever been. It used to be that smog was a feature of weekly weather in urban areas and if your dog jumped in a river 50mi downstream of a textile factory you'd know what color they were making the day before. By the 90s that kind of stuff was cleaned up a ton.

Not everything you don't like is the result of the evil other guys.

"Pollution" used to refer to spillage of a different sort: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=pollution

The modern sense of "environmental contamination" in common parlance dates largely to the early 1960s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pollution&year...

My choice name is "Global Pollution Epidemic"

I think it really captures what the the problem is, rather then making it some concept that seems abstract and immovable to the average person. Lots of people deny climate change, almost no one denies that humans pollute a lot.

People don't see effects of any pollution that isn't particulates or perhaps deadly spew into potable water. So it is as dead on arrival as global warming. "But the air is clean here!"

Climate change sounds too neutral. It should've been called climate destruction or such, but the name was picked by Big Oil.

Seeing the (end) effects doesn't matter. Everyone sees pollution directly, whether the simple knowledge that the sea of cars on the freeway in front of them is burning gas, or just seeing litter all over the place. "Pollution" is a tangible thing everyone experiences.

Telling people there is a pollutions epidemic, that is something they can immediately relate too. It doesn't matter that the smoke stack they drive past every day is just water vapor, they hear "pollution epidemic", they see what they interpret as pollution, their brain tells them "yeah, this is real".

Remember this phrasing isn't for educated or knowledgeable people, it's for common folk who don't put much thought into anything.

I'm strongly in favor of prioritizing technical accuracy over perceived urgency. when people realize the sky isn't falling quite as fast as implied by the terminology, they grow cynical.

I always thought that global warming was a poor name. I remember adult s when I was young in the 90s dismissing it saying warmer summers would be great.

There are scientific papers from the 1950s which refer to CO2 induced climate change -- using the phrase "climate change."

Yeah, that was precisely the point.

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