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Comment by czep | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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" :-/

"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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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