Report: Many Find 'Global Warming' More Threatening Than 'Climate Change'

May 28 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Matthew Sturdevant The Hartford Courant

A Yale report says American feel more personally threatened by "global warming" than by "climate change."

And no wonder.

"Global warming" makes Americans think of melting glaciers, coastal flooding, a hole in the ozone layer and worldwide catastrophe, says the report, released Tuesday.

But "global warming," more than "climate change," also inspires a greater willingness in people to take action and get their political leaders to do something about it, the report said.

The report, "What's In a Name: Global Warming Versus Climate Change," investigates the different meanings the two terms carry for different people.

Technically, global warming is the increase in Earth's average surface temperature since the Industrial Revolution while climate change is long-term changes to Earth's climate including variations in temperature, precipitation and wind patterns over many decades or longer, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

"Most of us deal with the world not through dictionary definitions, but through the connotative meanings of these words," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

In general, the report says, "global warming" carries more negative associations and generates a greater sense of urgency to respond than does "climate change."

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication analyzed three studies. The first was a look at Google searches from 2004 to 2014, which found that Americans more often use the term "global warming" than "climate change" in their searches.

The second study was a national survey that found Americans are equally familiar with both terms but are four times more likely to say they have heard "global warming" than "climate change" in public discourse and twice as likely to say they personally use the term "global warming."

The third study gauged people's top-of-mind associations with each term and also the degree to which people are engaged by each term.

"Climatic change" was first used in a paper in 1956 by physicist Gilbert N. Plass, and "global warming" was first used in 1975 by Columbia University professor Wallace Broecker.

Interest in the subject -- no matter what you call it -- has waxed and waned over the years, Leiserowitz said.

"The scientific community had been talking and, frankly, warning about this issue, climate change and global warming, as early as the 1950s," Leiserowitz said.

Scientists have more often used climate change than global warming in peer-reviewed articles for more than four decades, the Yale analysis shows.

The topic didn't take off in public conversation until June 1988, when James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a U.S. Senate committee that pollution caused a greenhouse effect that was causing record-breaking high temperatures, Leiserowitz said.

"The media took that testimony and ran with it, and so it became kind of this explosion of public understanding and awareness and, frankly, engagement," he said.

Google searches for either "climate change" or "global warming" peaked in 2007, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore were jointly given the Nobel Peace Prize. In February 2007, Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award for best documentary feature.

The largest spike in Google searches for "global warming" occurred just after Earth Day in April 2007, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide to protect human health.

"And then you see this dramatic decline in public searches as well as media reporting," Leiserowitz said. "Newspaper coverage drops by about two-thirds. Nightly network news coverage drops 90 percent, and really it bottoms out in about 2010. And that's coincident with a whole bunch of things: the economy, clearly, kind of dwarfs everything else during that period."

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