I hate being right all the time

More than 20 years ago, when I was working in a museum with a natural history department, the staff had a not-so-serious lunchtime riff going about global warming; after a couple of snowstorms. The natural history curator explained exactly what is in this item, that the changes were likely to cause more disruptive winter weather as well as warmer summers.

"Then why do you insist on calling it global warming?" I asked. I put my PR puke hat on and said, "people tend to be literal-minded. If you say warming, they're going to expect beach days in winter, not blizzards. Call it global climate change." The curator acknowledged the truth of that, but stuck to the idea that warming being the culprit, then warming was the correct term. Talk about literal-minded!

So here we are, almost a quarter-century later, with serious scientists finally speaking about global climate change. But that horse left the barn so long ago that it's now damn near impossible to catch up with the misconception. Climate science, in this sense, created its own opposition by sticking to a term which is literally correct in a narrow sense, but which does not cover all the consequences of radical climate change. This sort of thing is OK in casual conversation, but it doesn't cut it in scientific monographs.

Too late: Instead of spending the next 20 years making more substantive progress toward containing and mediating climate change's effects, you'll spend much of that time trying to roll public attitudes over from "warming" to "change." Such is the power of the ill-chosen word.