Grumpy Editor predicts headline writers --- who relish short words and phrases --- won’t like this expanded identification being pushed by John Holdren, White House science adviser: Use "global climate disruption" rather than the simpler and briefer "global warming.”
Holdren, who directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, feels the long-used global warming term (or alternate “climate change”) oversimplifies the atmospheric problem and makes it seem less dangerous.
He tells an audience in Oslo, Norway that global warming is a "dangerous misnomer" for something far more complicated than a rise in temperature.
Commenting on the newly-hatched phrase, Republican pollster Adam Geller says folks in Washington are “trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff."
Geller also notes Democrats refer to the Bush tax cuts as "middle-class tax cuts.”
Changing the reference to climate change likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions, says Geller, adding, "global warming" makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there's a snowstorm.
The push for a three-word “warming” term isn’t new.
Three years ago, Holdren suggested an almost similar phrase, "global climatic disruption."
Well before that, early studies on humans vs. climate came up with the mouthful “inadvertent climate modification."
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