Ha! Ha! Just look at Elizabeth's answer. That is a typical greenie response, meant to influence the naive. Just look at the answer. The planet is getting warmer but that doesn't mean everywhere. Hello Elizabeth! The planet is everywhere. The planet is everyplace.
Quote by Steven Guilbeault, Canadian environemental journalist and Greenpeace member: "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter."
So in direct answer to the question, it is just pure gobbledegook. Even the UN-IPCC is vague in its description. "Climate Change is a change in the climate." Ha! Ha! Now doesn't that tell you a lot. Even a competent grade school teacher wouldn't accept that as a valid answer. Yet a great amount of legislation has been enacted with only that as a definition. It is like the bogeyman. No one can describe what he looks like or what door to knock on to find him at home or what he eats, but all the naive are afraid of him.
Joseph Goebbels,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Climate Change is just one often repeated lie that has the simple minded scared to death.
The ambiguity of the subject is always good for a con artist, and environmental issues is no exception.
In the paper today I read 2 articles. One was about fish eating ducks dying because of all the ice in the northeast due to horrendous winter. The other article claimed that northeast is so war that chickadees from south are creeping northward. Someone is lying or it is getting warmer/colder at the same time. Too weird to understand.
The short answer to your question is "The earth is getting warmer" (and as a result climates are changing)
Remember that the earth has warmed and cooled far more in the last 4.54 billion years most of which, no humans were around. Only in the last 200 years or so of homo sapiens 200,000 years of existence, have we been dumping CO2 in the atmosphere. This additional 40% of CO2 has increases the heat retention capacity of the earth and this additional energy causes climates to change. 97.1% of the science papers that do mention "global warming" and/or "climate change" agree that human activity is causing global warming. [1]
And just like there are only a few expert scientist who question the science that the age of the earth is more then 6000 years old, there are only a few expert scientist who question that increasing CO2 by 40% causes a detectable amount of warming.
Climate change is a generic term that could be warming or cooling. It could also be changes in precipitation. Global warming is more specific.
Elizabeth
Some places getting warmer and others getting colder happens all the time and has almost certainly always been happening. It happened during the Medieval Warm Period and in 1934.
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/...
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/ar...
Could include either or both. Climate change refers to any long-term trends or shifts in climate. Climate is the average weather over at least 30 years.
See: http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Climate/...
Depends whether the person talking is an anti-science liar who denies the proven science, or not.
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...
“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpine...
“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”
http://www.physics.fsu.edu/awards/NAS/
“The Academy membership is composed of approximately 2,100 members and 380 foreign associates, of whom nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/...
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument...
It is getting warmer but so many people think it's getting cooler just because it is cold where they live.
The *planet* is getting warmer.
That doesn't mean *everywhere* on earth necessarily gets warmer. Some places might get colder.
This is a good question. Apparently the alarmists came to realize that many folks were not quite buying the AGW hypothesis...and that there were problems with their climate models (and observable data)..so they pragmatically shifted to a "fall-back position" of "Climate Change," which has no precise meaning. This is mostly dogma, not science.
liberals don't believe in summer or winter anymore...its either global warming or global cooling,if pressed on the subject they'll scream "CLIMATE CHANGE" , and run away to avoid any further embarrassment
It means whatever fits at the moment.
It is supposed to mean warming, but also to include precipitation.
However it is not happening
