Forget Global Warming And Climate Change, Call It 'Climate Disruption'

People have learned to cope with change by thinking it's not all bad, but climate change is all bad, according to a climate scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who says it's time to replace the term climate change, itself a replacement for global warming, with a new term: climate disruption.
"Positive mental attitude is a really wonderful way to deal with change," research meteorologist Doug Sisterson told about 200 people at the University of Chicago's International House Tuesday night. "We've learned that we want to be optimists and have a positive mental attitude, and the way we deal with that is by thinking 'Not all change is bad.' Well, talking about climate change, it's not good. So maybe it's wrong to portray climate change with a positive mental attitude.
"Maybe we should start talking about climate disruption, because the things I'm talking about would seem to be highly disruptive. And so maybe the better way to characterize what's happening with these extreme weather events is to think of it as climate disruption. Maybe it more accurately represents the journey we are about to be embarking upon."
Sisterson is not the first to propose adopting the term climate disruption. John Holdren, the senior advisor to President Obama on science and technology issues, proposed the term global climate disruption in 2007, in 2010 and again last year.
“I’ve always thought that the phrase ‘global warming’ was something of a misnomer," Holdren said last year at the annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in Washington, D.C., "because it suggests that the phenomenon is something that is uniform around the world, that it’s all about temperature, and that it’s gradual.”
Tuesday night, Sisterson said it's hard to talk to people about global warming when the effects of a warmer planetary average may include colder colds.
"We've been talking about global warming, but as you can see on a global scale increased greenhouse gases lead to a warmer planet on average, but it really doesn't tell the whole picture. Because it's complicated. In fact, temperature itself is probably not the biggest thing that we're going to have to worry about about global warming," he said.
"We expect to see changes in precipitation patterns and sea-level rise that will have much greater impact to humans and our animal friends and biodiversity than the temperature alone. As a matter of fact, we're pretty sure that we're going to see increased weather extremes. Perhaps you're noticing some of them as well."
Climate disruption edges closer to a term originally used by climate scientists in the earliest studies of human impacts on climate—inadvertent climate modification—with perhaps slightly more elegance. But there's little sign that Holdren's efforts and Sisterson's more recent efforts have had much effect, even on the organizations they represent.
A Google search of Argonne's website, anl.gov, finds six references to climate disruption compared to 1,930 mentions of climate change. Worldwide, Google finds 236,000 references to climate disruption and 107 million references to climate change.
According to Google Trends, climate change only recently caught up with global warming as the preferred term in searches worldwide. NASA and other public agencies may have helped tip the scales by preferring climate change in official reports.
Sisterson has worked with 5,000 climate scientists who have used the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, which he manages. He is also something of a climate-science evangelist. He has appeared on a TEDx Talk, in a video, and he co-authored a book with molecular scientist Seth B. Darling called "How to Change Minds About Our Changing Climate," which he said provides scientific evidence to debunk the 15 most common arguments made by climate deniers.
"There are various ways to concern yourself with getting the message out," Sisterson said Tuesday night, an event that was part of Argonne's public lecture series, Argonne OutLoud. (The full video of his talk is available here.)
"We used to lobby Congress, and we used to lobby lobbyists. And scientists now would say the best thing we can do is lobby the public—lobby you. If we can be clear about the science we're doing, communicate science-based evidence to you, you are our best advocates."
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