Terms are coined because they are useful. You could always call something "that term you get by looking at the difference between net radiation from cloudy and clear skies", but that doesn't work well in an equation. Call it cloud radiative forcing then abbreviate it "CRF" and you can write down a fairly simple looking equation.
I really think you have a weird view of the world, to see something suspicious even in the terminology of the subject.
EDIT: Your "Additional Details" are just showing that you've gone way off the deep end. I've always strongly disagreed with your beliefs and your attitude, but you have drifted into tinfoil hat territory with this question. If you are a heavy marijuana smoker, perhaps you need to back off from it. I'm not sure what the science says, but there's lots of anecdotal connection with paranoid behavior.
Physics has coined lots of terms, so why would you expect a sub-branch of it to be any different? One of the things I remember from my undergraduate physics training was the Jabberwockian statement "The polhode rolls without slipping on the herpolhode lying in the invariable plane." Ever hear of a polhode before? Or a herpolhode? How about the invariable plane? They'll all be part of the next big conspiracy to come out of physics, pretty soon everybody will be coughing up money to the government to pay for their polhodes.
The term came up a lot in my biogeography / environmental ecology class a lot.
It's a basic concept in the field, for which a term was needed.
Something that changes a climate system (or some other similar system) can be either a forcing--something that can change on its own--or a feedback--something that changes when another factor changes.
For example, except in the very short term, atmospheric water vapor can *only* be a feedback, it can't be a forcing. That's because if there's more water vapor than there "should" be, some of it will fall as precipitation until there's no longer an excess, and if there's less than there "should" be, more will evaporate if there is any water vapor available. So, though atmospheric water vapor causes warming, you can't really cause more warming by spraying more water in the air.
And some things are purely forcings, and not feedbacks. Changes in solar input will change atmospheric heat content, but will not in any way be *changed* by atmospheric heat content.
And, of course, some things, like CO2, can be both a forcing and a feedback.
Frequently, we drew little diagrams, with bubbles and arrows, to figure out the elements of a complex system, and figure out whether a given system or system element was a positive or negative feedback. A given element would be something like (A)--(+)-->(B) (increases in A increase B, decreases in A decrease B), or (A)--(-)-->(B) (increases in A decrease B, or vice versa). Any time you have (A)--->(B)--->(A), or a longer chain such as A->B->C->D->A, you have a feedback loop. Cancel the negatives, and if you have a negative left over you have a negative loop; if you don't, you have a positive one.
But, when you're talking about this, it's useful to be able to distinguish something that is a potential "input" to cause change in the system, and what merely reacts to other parts of the system.
So, to sum up my babbling... it may be a term of art coined in environmental and/or climate science, but only because a word was needed to cover an important concept.
edit:
See my babbling.
a new term was needed because the concept came up a lot. The same reason that any specialty field may need terms that aren't in the general field it's a subset of.
And the reason to distinguish CO2 from water vapor is because, well, there was a need to distinguish things that could change the system on their own vs things that could only change the system in reaction to other changes.
A crude analogy here.
Someone's walking along with a very heavy backpack. The backpack doesn't unbalance them, it's in line with their center of gravity. Then, someone shoves them. They faceplant, in part because of the backpack, because once they start to fall, it is no longer over their center of gravity and starts to unbalance them further.
The backpack is a feedback. It could not, by itself, make the person fall. But, once they started to fall, it made the fall worse.
The shove is a forcing. It made them fall.
And it's useful to be able to distinguish between the cause (the shove) and the contributing factor (the backpack), when trying to figure out why the person fell.
Similarly, it's useful to be able to distinguish between the initial cause of a climate change (CO2), and the contributing factors (such as water vapor feedbacks) when you want to predict what the system will do next.
If you search the string "climate forcing" on ACS SciFinder you find the first use of the term as entered that shows up is in:
Modeling the climatic response to orbital variations, Imbrie J; Imbrie J Z, Science (1980), 207(4434), 943-53.
If you look for "radiative forcing" instead, the earliest citation is from 1985:
Sensitivities of the radiative forcing due to large loadings of smoke and dust aerosols, Ramaswamy, V.; Kiehl, J. T., Journal of Geophysical Research, [Atmospheres] (1985), 90(D3), 5597-613
Similarly, searching for "solar forcing" returns this as the earliest use in a climate context:
The "little ice age": northern hemisphere average observations and model calculations, Robock A., Science (1979), 206(4425), 1402-4.
Hansen started publishing on Earth's climate in the late 70's, and his first paper explicitly on the greenhouse effect here was in 1981. I suppose it's possible that Hansen originated the use, but I think it's unlikely. It probably came about as climate physicists recognized they needed a way to distinguish the radiative impacts of things like CO2 from things like water vapor.
edit: I forgot to mention you might want to run those searches on Google Scholar. GS is better at pulling in obscure things, like a conference proceedings or meeting report where possibly a bunch of scientists got together and defined some terminology, like GHRSST did for all of the different sea-surface temperature estimates.
edit: You are mentally ill (seriously, I mean there is something wrong with your brain to the point you should seek help from a psychiatrist) if you see collusion and conspiracy in how scientists define terms.
In climate science, radiative forcing is defined as the difference between radiant energy received by the earth and energy radiated back to space. Typically, radiative forcing is quantified at the tropopause in units of watts per square meter of earth's surface. A positive forcing (more incoming energy) warms the system, while negative forcing (more outgoing energy) cools it. Causes of radiative forcing include changes in insolation (incident solar radiation) and in concentrations of radiatively active gases and aerosols.
How does the term 'radiative forcing agent' sound like to you? Perhaps you would approve of the use of forcing in that context. Or even 'Climate Forcing Agent'?
I've had the same thought as you, Ottawa Mike.
When people use physics terms in incorrectly it is confusing to people who know what those terms actually mean.
Climate scientists, on average, are not the brightest scientists. At one time it was because climate science was an unprestigious field, often attracting physicists who were not able to do other fields in physics. Now, ironically, it often attracts people who go into it because it is a hot (no pun intended) field. It is much like nuclear physics, which was barely physics--it was more like chemistry in that one used cookbook methods rather than dealing with fundamental laws--attracted pompous jerks after it became a hot field after the atomic bomb.
I like you do not like the word, it implies a source of heat of which it is not, I suspect they just needed something that sounded more, hmm forceful
My question above is actually a statement. In that statement, "forcing" is a noun. I've always had trouble with that having never recalled that use in any of my physics courses.
It's obvious forcing is used as a verb in physics and even as an adjective in math (e.g. a forcing function in a differential equation). But I just don't see it used as a noun in science. I've tried Googling variations and the only "forcing" nouns that come up are in climate science.
This leads me to believe that somebody in climate science coined the term. I suspect perhaps James Hansen.
Does anybody have any insight into this? And if it was indeed coined in climate science, why do you think that was necessary?
