Global Warming vs. Climate Change: When Did Terminology Change?

People often use "global warming" and "climate change" interchangeably, despite that the two terms have very different meanings because CO2 is permanently changing our atmosphere.

The first use of the phrase “global warming” was in 1975, according to NASA, which is when a man named Wallace Broecker published a paper titled “Climate Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” 

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Broeker postulated that a cooling trend would “give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide,” which became known as Broeker’s warning. Scientists predicted that the temperature of the planet would soar higher than it had in a thousand years.

Broeker’s analysis got people thinking about global warming and climate change. The most important thing about Broeker’s prediction of global warming is the idea that humans are causing permanent climate change, according to NASA. To this day, people still consider this controversial. 

In 1979, another analysis of the effects of human CO2 production was published in a document commonly called the Charney Report. It was officially called "Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A scientific Assessment."

The 22-page report concluded that continued CO2 production would continue to cause changes in the earth’s atmosphere. The report used the phrase “global warming” to refer to increases in the earth’s temperature near the surface and the term “climate change” to refer to many other changes caused specifically by CO2 emissions.

NASA scientific journals still use these definitions for the phrases. "Global warming" entered the our vocabularies in 1988 after a NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about the climate and the effects of greenhouse gases.

His testimony was the first widespread understanding that warming was not a natural phenomenon. The New York Times reported that higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution.

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• Climate Change vs. Global Warming: How Politics Created a New Term
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