FALSE: GLOBAL WARMING WASN’T RENAMED CLIMATE CHANGE
Written by Odhiambo Shem on January 31, 2023
A twitter post claiming that global warming was renamed climate change since the earth wasn’t warming is false.
“Remember their embarrassment when ‘global warming’ was the thing while the earth was experiencing the lowest temperatures ever? They then renamed it Climate Change and blamed farting cows while at the same time chemtrailing the skies to make their scientific prophecies come true,” states the claim.
Both climate change and global warming have been used since at least the 1970s and have different meanings. Climate change refers to long-term changes such as temperature, wind patterns as well as precipitation.
Source: Skeptical Science
However, global warming is just a single aspect of climate change according to the United States Geological Survey. USGS states that global warming refers to the rise in global temperatures mainly due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Source: Skeptical Science
According to a report published by the National Academies of Science in 2005, the term climate change is preferred in the scientific community is because it helps in conveying that there are changes in addition to rising temperatures.
History.com states that the term global warming appeared for the first time in the year 1975 in a paper titled “Climatic change: are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?”
As much as the scientific community may have twisted from global warming to climate change in the mid 2000s, there is no clear evidence to affirm that it was as a result of the earth not getting hotter, since according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, human activities have led to the increase in the global average temperature by 1.8 degrees since the pre-industrial error and is currently increasing by approximately 3.6 degrees per decade.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, earth’s average temperature has risen by about 1.8 degrees.
Source: NOAA
We looked into this claim stating that global warming was renamed climate change since the earth wasn’t warming and found it to be false.
This fact-check was produced by Sky 106.1 FM with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, International Fact-Checking Network, and African Fact Checking Alliance network.
