Sometime in the early 2000s—no one knows exactly when—“climate change” overthrew “global warming” in a lexical coup d’état. The deposed term had been in power since 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen’s historic congressional testimony made “global warming” a household term. Hansen paired it with “greenhouse effect” (over a century old by then but languishing in obscurity), a mutual signal boost that fired the world’s imagination for approximately one hot minute.
“Global warming” was an undeniable improvement over its predecessor, “inadvertent climate modification,” but in the end, it proved too narrow minded for the twenty-first century. The image of a uniformly heating planet failed to evoke the full range of climate impacts coming down the pike. Earth wasn’t just warming; it was also getting wetter in some spots, drier in others, stormier almost everywhere, and even, in some places, colder.
