Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Conversation suggests there is no evidence climate change was rebranded as climate change. But their flawed effort to refute this argument is evidence the “anti-Greta” Naomi Seibt is having an impact.
There is no evidence that ‘global warming’ was rebranded as ‘climate change’
March 13, 2020 1.14am AEDT
Giulio Corsi
PhD Candidate, University of CambridgeClimate change denial is a moving target. In the past, it consisted of a fully fledged denial of any scientific evidence that the world was warming. More recently, it has evolved into a creative mix of strategies. Deniers today often contradict part of the scientific basis for climate change, while pinning the blame for the rest – anything completely undeniable, even to them – on developing countries, particularly India and China.
Over the past few weeks, a new figure has emerged: Naomi Seibt. Seibt, the so-called anti-Greta Thunberg, a 19-year-old from Münster in Germany, rapidly gained media attention for her call for “climate realism”, claiming that climate change science really is not science at all, and for this reason, there is no need to panic. The young activist immediately caught the eye of the lively US denier scene and was – just months after publishing her first YouTube video – invited to speak at the high-profile Conservative Political Action Conference 2020 (CPAC) and made a member of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank known for its ties to the fossil-fuel industry.
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What was perhaps most interesting, was her use of a recurrent argument on the supposed “historical rebranding” of climate change. The theory goes as follows: in the past, everyone used the term global warming to describe this phenomenon, but seeing that the planet was, in fact, not heating, global warming was “rebranded” to climate change in a sophisticated cover-up.
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On the other hand, newspapers behaved somewhat differently. In both The Guardian and The Times, climate change is generally the most common term, but the two are used interchangeably until 2005 when again we see a breaking point. Despite this, climate change was in use long before any possible rebranding.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/there-is-no-evidence-that-global-warming-was-rebranded-as-climate-change-133213
PHD candidate Giulio Corsi identifies a 2005 breaking point during which use of the phrase “climate change” in the media surged, but does not offer an explanation for this breaking point, other than a vague suggestion that the surge in the use of “climate change” occurred because 2005 was a “a watershed year for climate governance”.
The evidence Corsi overlooks or ignores is an intriguing Climategate email from 2004, an email which suggests the surge in use of the term “climate change” post 2004 was an act of deliberate rebranding.
date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 10:53:26 -0000
from: “Bo Kjellen”
subject: RE: FWD: Abrupt Climate Change
to: “‘Asher Minns'”
Dear Asher, and all, I think this is a real problem, and I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming. But somehow I also feel that one needs to add the dimension of the earth system, and the fact that human beings for the first time ever are able to impact on that system. That is why the IGBP in a recent publication “Global Change and the Earth System” underline that we now live in the anthropocene period. Climate change is one of the central elements of this process, but not the only one: loss of biological diversity, water stress, land degradation with loss of topsoil, etc etc all form part of this – and they are all linked in some way or another. Therefore a central message probably has to be that humans are now interfering with extremely large and heavy global systems, of which we know relatively little: we are in a totally new situation for the human species, and our impact added to all the natural variations that exist risks to unsettle subtle balances and create tensions within the systems which might also lead to “flip-over” effects with short-term consequences that might be very dangerous.And then, the good old precautionary principle must be guiding our effort. During the cold war, enormous resources were put into missiles, airplanes, and other military equipment to check Soviet expansion and make containment policy credible – in the firm hope that all this equipment would never have to be used. And it wasn’t, and nobody complained about the costs. Now, in the face of a different, but clearly distinguishable global threat “more dangerous than terrorism” the cost issue surfaces all the time. Somehow we all need to help in creating an understanding that the threat of global change is real and that we need to develop a new paradigm of looking at the world and the future: this is not just a scientific or technological issue. It involves important philosophical and ethical considerations where some fundamental value systems have to be challenged.
Bo
—–Original Message—–
From: Asher Minns [mailto: redacted] On Behalf Of Asher Minns Sent: 20 February 2004 17:01
To: redacted; redacted
Subject: RE: FWD: Abrupt Climate ChangeIn my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media, which can become public perception. It provides a new story for the old news that is climate change – a story that has been running since 1985/88.
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Read more: Climategate Email 4141.txt
Prominent journalist Andy Revkin who at the time worked for New York Times, was part of the 4141.txt Climategate email chain, see the full climate gate 4141.txt email for details of his involvement in the discussion.
It is an unequivocal fact that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” have both been in use for a long time. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was created in 1988. Giulio Corsi’s absurd suggestion that skeptics claim the phrase “climate change” was invented to replace “global warming” is a fallacious strawman.
But the 2004 Climategate email is evidence that there was a public rebranding effort. Prominent scientists, climate communicators and journalists were privately worried the phrase “global warming” was causing PR problems, so they agreed to start using the phrase “climate change” instead. The result, unsurprisingly, was a surge in media use of the phrase “climate change”.
I would love to know how Giulio Corsi, a Cambridge educated PHD candidate text mining expert, managed to overlook historical evidence which contradicts his claims. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for an answer.
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These people are just without shame.
From the article: “Climate change denial is a moving target. In the past, it consisted of a fully fledged denial of any scientific evidence that the world was warming.”
Wrong! I can’t think of any skeptic that has denied the world is currently warming. What skeptics question is where this warmth originates. Alarmists say the warmth comes from CO2. Skeptics say there is no evidence that CO2 is warming the Earth’s atmosphere enough to cause the climate to do anything other than what it always does.
Skeptics aren’t denying the world is warming, they are denying that the alarmists have the answer for why it is warming. CO2 or Mother Nature? Skeptics say it is Mother Nature until proven otherwise. It was Mother Nature before humans came along, and as far as we can tell, it is still Mother Nature controlling Earth’s atmosphere.
Alarmists say the Earth’s climate is being changed by CO2 but there is no evidence to support this contention. The onus is on the alarmists to prove their assertions, and they haven’t done so, not even close.
That struck me too. The author denies that the warmunists rebranded and then without any evidence states categorically that skeptical arguments are vague and shifting. For the ten years or so that I have been skeptical of AGW, the skeptical arguments have been essentially the same. What I have noticed is an inability of the true believers to hear and/or understand the arguments. Just look at what they call us – “Climate Change Deniers” when in fact we are the ones who insist that climate is constantly changing.
BCBill: My thoughts on being called a ‘Climate Denier’ tend towards letting it pass. This is based on 1: They do it to make us defend the position, knowing full well that our logic is fine, but on the assumption that it will drive us barmy to argue it; and 2: They do it to give themselves some kind of cover that what they argue for has a certain (if unfounded) structure in logic.
The thing is, let them hurl their insults. They have no value in logic, let alone as an insult: far too juvenile (how dare they!); then only if they hit a soft spot. That makes no dent in the argument. And the fact that it comes from a trainee PhD student shows that the trainee is more in need of the education than we are.
In the end, the alarmists really had to – needed to – move the ‘argument’ from ‘AGW’ to ‘CC’, because they needed to scare the populace (Alinsky 101): AGW can easily be argued as being subjective; CC can be made to be only argued objectively (oh sure) – and can then be extrapolated to, ‘crisis’ and then, ’emergency’. They (think they) know the way to move minds. Why else have they latched on to the formative minds of our young and developed such a propagandist approach to the need to ‘persuade’ them?
My five-year-old grandson’s teacher has already, in a few short months, managed to get him to pronounce ‘h’ as ‘haitch’ (my teacher – back in the day – instilled in us that a headache required an aspirate – and an aspirin – but an ‘h’ did not). I doubt he (my grandson’s teacher will have much difficulty in making him believe in man-made climate-change. God help him if he does (the teacher, that is) as I shall make him aware of what a ‘denier’ is worth.
I could go on… but her indoors…. 🙂
Tom, I have to raise my hand. I am a skeptic (I prefer climate realist) and I claim there is no abnormal warming. 2019 was the second coldest year on record per NOAA’s TMAX records, and the organic larger trend is down, both over the Holocene and currently since 2012.
A number of years ago when the term global warming was being rebranded, many were thinking of interesting names to call it other than climate change. Somebody on WUWT suggested the term global rambunctiousness. I always thought this was a good term.
Somebody on WUWT also suggested the theme song for the climate activist movement should be Oh Susanna. This song seems to cover all climate properties these activists could blame on climate change.
Your timing is off. The rebranding discussed in this article was long before that.
From the article: “What was perhaps most interesting, was her use of a recurrent argument on the supposed “historical rebranding” of climate change. The theory goes as follows: in the past, everyone used the term global warming to describe this phenomenon, but seeing that the planet was, in fact, not heating, global warming was “rebranded” to climate change in a sophisticated cover-up.”
I don’t think I would describe it as a “sophisticated cover-up”, rather it was more like “monkey see, monkey do”.
The facts are, and I was there and read all these studies and comments down through the years from the Global Cooling fears in the 1970’s, to when it started to fade and Global Warming took its place as the climate started to warm from the 1980’s.
From the 1980’s most climate scientists referred to the phenomenon as “Global Warming” (leaving out the “Human-caused for the most part, like they do today) and over time more and more of them started referring to it as “Climate Change” until now climate change is the universal usage (still leaving out the Human-caused part which they want to be assumed, as though there can be no doubt about what they are referring to even when they leave out the “human-caused”).
First it was Global Cooling, then it was predominantly Global Warming and now its almost totally Climate Change. Those are the facts.
They are no longer restricting themselves to climate. There is a ” Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (GCRI) http://www.czechglobe.cz/en/“. For some strange reason, Global Change is not as catchy as Climate Change.
Is it not galling, to hear some snot-nosed punk have the gall to call someone who is simply recounting recent well documented and real time events, a ‘theory’?
The whole thought process of this miseducated child is faulty, rooted in a lifetime of being fed incoherent propaganda in school, and guided by an inane reliance on meme-ology for his pseudo-scientific ideations.
He has no idea what he is talking about, and neither do many of the commenters on this thread.
His entire world view is shaped by a filtered and miniscule awareness of reality, and reinforced by the leftist echo chamber he has inhabited his whole life.
Anything he never heard in a class from a left wing zealot professor, or promulgated by the game news MSM, simply did not happen in his mind…it is a conspiracy theory.
Only this mind set could conceive of recent conversations, that he knows nothing about, as a “theory”, rather than what they are…recent conversations that he knows nothing about.
Perhaps most galling is someone getting a PhD by making simplistic generalizations regarding an entire planet full of people he has never met.
He makes the old style Archie Bunker-type bigots, with their simple-minded prejudicial racist tropes, that were in the process of dying off when I was a kid, seem by comparison like broad-minded philanthropes, with nuanced opinions based on careful analysis by the well read and widely travelled.
There is no evidence that ‘global warming’ was rebranded as ‘climate change’
Huh? Moot point because “They” have rebranded it as “The Climate Crisis”
Here’s the source:
Transforming the media’s coverage of the climate crisis
Columbia Journalism Review
Why did they feel a need to perform this “scientific” exercise?
There was a beloved horticulturalist who was on the radio every week. He was prominent at industry events. Any academics who did any industry outreach at all knew the guy on a first name basis. So, if you did horticulture within 200 miles of where I am, you have to know the guy’s name. In spite of that, I met a horticulture professor who had no clue who he was. She was a pure academic who did zero outreach. Her ivory tower had very thick walls.
So, there’s the chance that the PhD candidate was just oblivious.
On the other hand, I’m betting he was operating more like a lawyer than an academic. As Dr. Mann has amply demonstrated, the big bucks don’t go to scrupulous academics.
Was the horticulturalist Duncan Hargrave? He was brilliant.
My bet it was Jerry Baker?
More like a change in emphasis.
But how is this ever the topic of a PhD study ? !!
More like junk tabloid journalism.
Surely it’s climate catastrophe now? The warmists are getting desperate.
They should, of course, be using the proper terminology..
Climate Variability.
Perhaps Mr Corsi could do a second PhD on how ‘climate change’ came to be rebranded.
“Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment
From now, house style guide recommends terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment
The first thing I would note is that it is amazing what you can now do to get a PhD. If this is an example of what people are now able to do to get a PhD it rather undermines the status of a PhD.
The second thing I would note is that the oversight of a candidate for a PhD is not exactly the most careful.
The third thing is that academic standards at the University of Cambridge seem to have plummeted to the same level as the University of Knotty Ash.
For anyone not familiar with the world-renowed University of Knotty Ash:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8479694.stm
Clear as the nose on your face . . . the reasons that “global warming” WAS rebranded to “climate change”:
AGW/CAGW alarmists needed the public to panic over the following whenever and wherever they occur
— hurricanes and tornadoes
— changes in polar jet steam/polar vortex (needed to account for extreme cold events)
— floods
— droughts
— ocean “acidification”
— deforestation/desertification (actually just the opposite has happened over the last 40 years)
— species extinction
— worldwide hunger
— disease spread/epidemics/pandemics.
You see, global warming itself and related global SLR was happening at just too slow of a pace to keep most people on Earth—especially politicians—concerned, and thus funding and publicity for AGW/CAGW alarmists was drying up after some 40 or so years. The alarmists desperately needed things that were much more immediate in order to maintain their funding, societal standing and power.
AOC and Greta Thunberg are evidence that this rebranding has been successful to an extraordinary degree.
Gordon,
All of these effects are based on the belief that maximum temps are going up and the Earth is going to turn into a cinder – all based on the *average* temperature going up. And an AVERAGE doesn’t tell you if the maximum temps are going up or if the minimum temps are going up. It is an UNFOUNDED assumption by the media, politicians, AGW alarmists, and even many climate scientists that the average going up means the maximum temps are going up.
Minimum temps going up fit the observables on Earth far better than maximum temps going up – fewer hurricanes/tornadoes, fewer droughts, more green growth, record grain harvests year after year, longer growing seasons, and on and on and on!
I will maintain my stance that heating/cooling degree-days, based on the integral of the 24 hour day rather than some kind of max and min temperature average, would be a far better subject for climate scientists to study and would provide a far better base for projecting future impacts of climate.
But this will never happen because the panic spending by governments would quickly dry up!
I notice they’re not discussing the Guardian’s hysterical re-branding of all-things climate-catastrophe.
Global warming is now ‘global HEATING’. (An outrageous exaggeration for around 1C warming over more than 150 years)
Climate change is now a ‘climate EMERGENCY, CRISIS or even BREAKDOWN. Give me f****** strength.
This was all done because neither ‘global warming’ nor ‘climate change’ were gaining enough traction or – more pertinently, scaring enough of the masses or the children. Hence the egregious re-brand.
This re-brand is on the bottom of the Guardian’s environment home page.
I think we need even more rebranding. Global heating? Pah! Try Global roasting! Global scorching!
Climate “crises” just isn’t strong enough, either. What are you? Some kind of Denier? Look out the window! It’s clear we’re undergoing a Climate Holocaust!
Yes, yes, yes, we’ve heard it a million times before. You’re NOT propagandizing. You’re NOT trying to brainwash us. You’re NOT even editorializing. You are ONLY giving us the exact, objective, unvarnished truth, using science… and computer climate models. AND if we don’t give up fossil fuels right now, all animal and plant life will die, the oceans will turn to acid, dogs and cats will be living together.
Dumbasses.
Maybe “Carbon Terrorism” will catch on?
Being used together doesn’t mean rebranding didn’t take place. It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t mean one word leaves the lexicon entirely.
How stupid are these people?
I read the original article and the graphs quite clearly showed the change in terminology around 2005. The only point they supported was that ‘climate change’ was in use beforehand. Not really a big deal – especially now the Guardian has now changed to ‘global heating’.
Naomi Seibt also explains the bogus 97% of scientist survey the best and simplest way possible, and actually understands it. (The John Cook survey).
I didn’t see a link (anywhere in the article) to this great interview. She gets more and more focused with her common sense and free thinking every new interview I see from her. This is also where she states that climate change rather than global warming is just a marketing & propaganda tool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmWGunMPayA
-JPP
“…she states that climate change rather than global warming is just a marketing & propaganda tool…”
Actually, I saw that in one of her other interviews…
JPP
From the article: “I would love to know how Giulio Corsi, a Cambridge educated PHD candidate text mining expert, managed to overlook historical evidence which contradicts his claims. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for an answer.”
Good question. All the author would have to do is read through the Science News publications from 1974 to the present. It documents quite well how the language was used, from Global Cooling to Global Warming to Climate Change and how it changed.
The use of Climate Change evolved over time and as you point out there was a concerted effort in 2005 to make climate change the official term, because, as you pointed out, the alarmists felt they had a PR problem with using Global Warming all the time, like when there is three feet of snow in Buffalo.
Using “google trends” from here:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Global%20warming
You can see clearly that global warming was prominent in the first half of this graph.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Climate%20change
And climate change becoming more common in the link above in the second half of the graph.
The app will allow you to download csv data of both curves to allow better plotting….
It’s actually fun watching people trying desperately to make the claim the climate has to be static (variable only for seasonal changes) and declaring it’s our fault that it’s changing. Yet they can’t account for the past climate changes in the geological record.
When you point out much of the US was under a thick layer of year-round ice, a mere 18 thousand years ago, they’ll “argue” that humans have only been farming for 10. Or if you point out temperatures were far hotter, and CO2 levels far higher, throughout most of the planet’s 4+ billion year history, they’ll bring up the fact that humans have only been around 250,000 years.
It’s almost impossible to argue with these people. The non-sequitors they come up with are gob-smacking.
“Giulio Corsi, a Cambridge educated PHD candidate text mining expert,”
A PhD for this highschool research! I’ve noted before, the explosion in PhDs in non scholarly subjects has destroyed formerly prestigious Universities like this one, Cambridge, where Sir Isaac Newton once held the Chair in Mathematics. I fear Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and others in this bracket may have to be written off during the Great Reckoning after this global dumbing down is over. I believe creating new strong exclusive institutions one or a few at a time is the only way to right the ship of academia. Reforming would be too onerous a task.
I think Anthony’s article about Gaslighting is appropiate here. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/14/the-11-gaslighting-characteristics-of-the-climate-debate/
Cooling… warming… change. A progressive (e.g. catastrophic) processs. Undeniable. Unfalsifiable.
Fortunately, the effects are observable, reproducible, and measurable, which mitigates the spread of the sociopolitical contagion.
Perturbations are weather, not climate change, unless it’s a progressive (i.e. monotonic) process, which would be catastrophic.