Let's Call It 'Climate Disruption,' White House Science Adviser Suggests (Again)

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "First there was 'global warming.' Then many researchers suggested 'climate change' was a better term. Now, White House science adviser John Holdren is renewing his call for a new nomenclature to describe the end result of dumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into Earth's atmosphere: 'global climate disruption.'"

Comments

I gotta better name

[fustakrakich]

Pollution.

The simple goal should be to spew as little as possible, regardless of the potential issues.

Re:I gotta better name

[KermodeBear]

What? Don't throw junk into the environment? What is this madness?!

On a serious note, that's what it should really come down to. Don't toss junk into the environment, whatever it is. We should always be trying to reduce the amount of pollutants we produce. You can even find trace amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs in our water supply.

There's reasonable steps that society can - and does - take to reduce pollutants, but there's still a lot of things we could be doing more about. Plastics, for example. So much is packaged in giant wads of hard plastic or shrink wrapped plastic. Is it really necessary to keep piling this crap into our landfills? What is wrong with packaging something in paper or paperboard with a bit of natural glue to hold it shut?

Thats a good name

[egarland]

Global warming was always a terrible name because the imagery was all wrong.

Global climate change is more accurate, but still nebulous.

Climate disruption evokes a more accurate picture of what seems to be happening. I personally liked the name "Santa's revenge" from this winter's breakdown of the polar vortex. Melt the north pole, and you'll all get a taste of the cold!

Fourth options

[wjcofkc]

I'm fine with calling it any of those things. But it would be better to settle on globally unified measures to do something about it like we did with the hole in the Ozone Layer (remember that?), or else we may eventually have to call it a fourth option: Global Suicide.

Re:nuclear

[Trepidity]

Seems sensible to me. Replacing coal plants with nuclear has a lot of other benefits, too.

Re:Eh?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

You missed the global cooling scare of the 80s, don't forget that one. Back then we were headed for another ice age.

That was never actually a thing, except in the media:

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, i.e., a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. (source)

Peer-reviewed scientific literature overwhelmingly referred to warming, even back then:

A survey of peer reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 show that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total). Significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming (Peterson 2008). (source)

Re:Shut Up

[Immerman]

A lot of the global warming "solutions" proposed by a politicians may well be exploitative power grabs, but that's true of a lot of *everything* they propose. That doesn't mean the problem isn't real, just that they're power-hungry bastards trying to exploit a very real problem for personal gain.
The way I see it there are two possibilities :
(A) There's a global conspiracy of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of climate researchers to "manufacture" a story of one of the largest crisis our species has ever faced for the benefit of political power grabs.
(B) The problem is real, but a lot of scientifically illiterate politicians and social action groups around the globe are more interested in creating non-solutions that serve their own ends than actually addressing the problem efficiently.

Love the civility

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny though that you guys never seem to be upset by all the money "big oil" spends on "green" stuff.

Your bigger intellectual problem, however, is that when government funds the stuff you like it does it by stealing money from MY wallet at gunpoint. When "Big Oil" spends money, it takes that money from its own bank accounts. The greenie complaint about "Big Oil" getting subsidies is a scam - oil companies do not get subsidies (money taken, by force, from others and given to them) they just get the same type of tax breaks that other businesses get (i.e. they are not taxed on some of their income because it is acknowledged that this money is being put back into the activity as a cost and is not a profit). Most "green" companies, on the other hand, get ACTUAL subsidies - government takes money from some people and gives it to those "green" companies to fool people into thinking those activities are efficient and cost-effective or cost-competative - ACTUAL subsidies like this should NEVER occur in a "free market" because they encourage sub-optimal economic activity.