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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The “Global Warming” concept and that of “Climate Change” are – basically – two separate concepts; conflating the two has been both a cause of the aggressive debate and much of the confusion. That the concept of “human induced, C02 related warming” is, in essence, a valid argument is supportable, However, “Climate Change” should be considered an entirely different argument.
Much of the argument for AGW would be valid only if all other factors involved in climate variability were effectively fixed and stable. This is very much not the case. If, as we may be seeing at the moment, the factors involved in “Climate Change” were significantly larger and more influential than atmospheric gasses, then the AGW argument may be leading us down a very dangerous path.
We have seen the discussion related to the energy budget, and the assumption that lower level temperature rises as a result of AGW concepts while the same factors cause the upper levels cool.
This assumption would imply that the decline in upper level temperatures would roughly parallel the rise in greenhouse gasses. Study of the Thermosphere Climate Index shows clearly that there is no such relationship. Indeed the graph shows exactly where the TCI variation comes from.
Discussions in https://howtheatmosphereworks.wordpress.com/about/solar-activity-and-surface-climate/ and https://howtheatmosphereworks.wordpress.com/ap-index-historical-analysis/ are relevant.
The Conversation is all geared up anyway to present this kind of stuff. That’s their “raison d’etre”
And now, can we believe that Coronavirus is not a dress-rehearsal of how to control a world population to see if it can be manipulated when it comes to CC?
Let logic prevail: If the countries of the world were, on a daily basis, reporting through their major news outlets, reporting on the deaths and contagions of ‘flu, or measles, or chickenpox, we could be worried, very worried. Yet the death-rate from Covid19 is not great, and the symptoms are not that bad, it seems. So why the panic????
According to the WHO the death rate is at least 30x higher than a bad seasonal flu, maybe even higher still if ICU beds run out.
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the U.S. it is to try and cause the recession/depression they have been hoping for since the day Donald Trump was elected. The left doesn’t care about how many people on the bottom of the economic ladder die (ex: the ‘cure’ for ‘climate change’ would kill more people than ‘climate change would) they just want their world view forced on the rest of us.
Because it did not exist a few months ago and no one has any resistance to a new disease.
No one wants to get the flu, let alone one that kills a few percent who get it, and let alone one that leaves many times more to suffer through weeks of awful pneumonia, hooked up to a breathing machine and struggling for breathe in a hospital room or ICU.
But much of the panic is based on shelves being stripped bare by hoarders, plunging financial markets, wealth destruction, threat of recession, shortages of necessities, and uncertainty about what it means or where it is going.
Right here we have had seemingly rational people who have for years rejected alarmism in the case of global warming, engaging in shameless rumor mongering and jackass alarmism themselves.
The people claiming it is just a cold and nothing to worry about are little better.
“it consisted of a fully fledged denial of any scientific evidence that the world was warming”
A perfect example of gas lighting.
Nobody ever denied that the planet has warmed up since the end of the little ice age. What we have been denying is the claim that CO2 was primarily to totally responsible for this warming.
Frank Lutz is responsible for GOP changing their messaging in when he published his memo.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange
Climate Change(s) yes it does, so?. AGW caused by CO2 huh? where is the scientific proof?
Giulio Corsi PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge is another Warmista trying to deny the facts that are as evident as the nose on your face. Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disruption, Climate Crisis, is a clear and deliberate chain of propaganda evolutions as the facts like ‘the ‘Pause’ began biting at their heels.
Rather ironically, they have a link under the caption to get fact based emails, not spin.
Climate alarmists do not scare me nearly as much as they scare some people. Their goal of transforming global society into a socialist paradise is unachievable precisely because it is so unrealistic. Bernie’s plan for the Green New Deal, for instance, would require tripling the US federal budget, and is simply impossible.
My take is that with the end of the Cold War in 1991, they needed a new global existential threat to enflame the public, and global warming fit their needs to a T. Michael Mann’s 1998 hockey stick graph was, pardon the pun, Manna from heaven, and just as Trumpistas have latched on to the miraculous defeat of Hillary, so have the Statist control freaks latched on to Mann and his ilk.
The problem they have made for themselves is that while the threat of nuclear winter was always potential, the climate is real and measurable, and they have been wrong for 20 years. When their models can’t even predict that previous 20 years, the public can mostly see right through them, and all they really get, aside from the scaredy-cats who need safe spaces with puppies and coloring books, is the long time Sierra Club crowd and gullible people who think chemistry is dangerous and sign petitions to ban dihydrogen monoxide. Unfortunately, because climate is real and measurable, it won’t be more than a few years before they’ve worn out their adoring public and have to find a new global existential threat. Maybe it will be global cooling, maybe it will be ET signals, maybe it will be asteroids whizzing by. But it won’t be global warming, and if it is global cooling, they will have too much egg on their faces to be credible, besides which, the solution is a lot cheaper than anything they want.
Yes, they can do some damage politically. But they are not the e
Felix, I agree that the recent cooldown is tearing their project apart. They are getting desperate, and going for emotional blackmail.
It is likely the cooling will bottom out in about fifteen years, and temps will upswing again, all normal parts of the 35-year rocking motion. Hopefully, thirty-five years of cooldown, measured (as you pointed out), will have wrecked their chance to reignite Alarmism.
Goodness knows what the next gambit will be.
This is a good news article.
The 19 year old has them rattled.(Anti Greta).
It is time for a rebranding anyway.
Climate Change is so milquetoast.
A meaningless expression.
As intelligent as stating “Water wet” as a profundity.
Climate Change?
Of course it does..and?
Let us use Calamitous Climate.
As in The Cult of Calamitous Climate.
As this perfectly expresses the hysteria of the “concerned Ones”.
Who are so concerned that they willfully ignore all known history and the scientific method.
“Oh Susanna” is their theme song, but they are too ignorant of our past to even know of this fine ditty.
And the Emperor’s New Clothes is their instruction manual,but that too is unknown to the marks.
This stampede into hysteria ,in this case,was fully manufactured by our Bureaus and their media wing.
But all stampedes must end.
The Herd is tired.
“Climate change” is such a broad term that it is innocuous. It would be like calling growth in children “height change.” It just doesn’t signify anything unusual or dire, and that’s why Climate Emergency is the new preferred term. But that one ain’t going to work either, because the word “emergency” suggests an event that is sudden, dramatic and harmful, when climate change is happening so slowly that it is imperceptible from decade to decade. Recall what the weather was like where you live in 2000. Now, has it changed in any way that you would notice in the last twenty years? No. If I wasn’t reading accounts of how badly the climate has changed in the last twenty years, I wouldn’t have noticed any changes on my own.
I love (in a perverse way) those websites that tell good and concerned and wise people how to talk to people who deny climate change. Mostly they say, make it personal. You can’t make it personal in Edmonton, because nobody here has has been personally harmed by climate change so far.
Who was this ‘Nick’ in the opening sentence of the climategate email, the man proposing the relabelling discussed. Well, there are a couple of ‘Nicks’ mentioned in other climategate emails. I would make this one the leading candidate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Nuttall
Climategate email 0848679780
The Guardian changed its reporting of environmental matters to make them more scary.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment
Evidence of Revision is a documentary well worth watching. In the fifth episode, the Jonestown Massacre is revealed as a CIA mind control experiment gone horribly wrong. Following that coverage, at 55:00, there is an exploration of mind control over the population in general. About five minutes further, 59:54, Frank Lutz is introduced as the most successful person at “importing the techniques and philosophy of market research into politics.” His clients were some of the most prominent Republican politicians of the time, including the mayoral campaign of Rudolph Giuliani (1993), and his collaboration with Gingrich on the “Contract with America” which ushered in a Republican revolution in Congress. Lutz is shown working with a focus group for a Florida utility company seeking public support for how it is regulated with respect to the environment. The documentary then goes on to show his successes by changing “estate tax” to “death tax”, by admonishing the Republican party to change “tax cuts” to “tax relief”, to replace the “war in Iraq” with the “war on terror”, and to speak of “climate change”, not “global warming.” The Republicans, the documentary explains, then began to use the term “climate change” almost exclusively.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/evidence-of-revision/