If a rebrand will help the activist cause, who really cares about rigour in the scientific discipline?
One of the more distinguishing aspects of the global warming frenzy is the playful manner in which its adherents approach language. Whenever they feel the need to rearrange the terms of debate, counter the emergence of “inconvenient” facts, or simply put a whole new banner on the crusade, neither shame nor consistency offers any brake to their innovations.
Should the world, the weather, their most central projections “present” in any manner that doesn’t accord with their most pious predispositions, then they simply rename the whole thing. In the beginning it was always the fight against Global Warming — capital G, capital W.
But Global Warming proved an unaccommodating brand. When snow in all its abundant white purity continued to fall where snow was no longer meant to fall, when glaciers failed to move and melt at the speeds Global Warming had promised they would, when temperatures dropped to chilling Antarctic levels in places where Global Warming prophets had projected the growth of palm trees, even the sages of the IPCC realized it was time to change the window display, and put a new face on the failing campaign.
Hence the birth of Climate Change, a term so generously elastic and gorgeously tautological that it could fit all occasions, even to the contradiction of the principles of the “science” it was purported to designate. Cold, hot, moist or dry — there was no condition that could not be stuffed under Climate Change, no random spurt of headline-making weather, local storm or global current that could not be folded neatly under its wonderfully wide-winged umbrella.
The press were lenient with the change. They did not seem to wish to point out the obvious — that the radical renaming of the “greatest threat to the planet” might spell or at least hint that there may have been something wrong with the central presumptions of the whole scheme.
For the rest of this article: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-whats-in-a-name-with-climate-change-a-lot-of-reckless-misuse