What happens when to the global warming advocates when it becomes obvious that the globe is not warming. Simple: change the term.
This is by no means a rigorous analysis, but just a few minutes using the Google News search engine. So hopefully anyone else can re-create the results.
The chart below was developed using Google News: Advanced News Search (for the end or March and April 2008) and Google News: Advanced News Archive Search (for the first part of March 2008 and earlier). For each quarter, beginning in 2000 through what is available through May 2008, I performed searches for the phrases "global warming", "climate change" and both of the phrases together. The numbers from Google News searches are at the end of this post.
Then to get a total of the number of articles that have one phrase or the other or both, add the number of "Global Warming" hits to the number of "Climate Change" hits and subtract the number of hits that contain both.
Next I ploted the percentage of each phrase to the total number of posts. This "normalizes" the data since there are far more news articles posted in 2008 than were posted in 2000.
Note that the percentage of articles that contains both phrases has remained roughly constant at around 15% to 20%. But the number of articles that only used the phrase "global warming" in 2000 was around 55% falling to about 30% recently. Conversely, the percentage of articles that only used the phrase "climate change" in 2000 was about 30%, rising to nearly 60% recently.
Quarter | GW | CC | Both |
1Q-00 | 2190 | 1300 | 368 |
2Q-00 | 2610 | 1560 | 423 |
3Q-00 | 2400 | 1360 | 394 |
4Q-00 | 3520 | 2470 | 1080 |
1Q-01 | 3720 | 2570 | 1190 |
2Q-01 | 6770 | 3810 | 1810 |
3Q-01 | 5030 | 3200 | 1420 |
4Q-01 | 2750 | 2230 | 497 |
1Q-02 | 4070 | 2800 | 1100 |
2Q-02 | 4200 | 2920 | 1130 |
3Q-02 | 5070 | 4090 | 1330 |
4Q-02 | 3920 | 3340 | 1060 |
1Q-03 | 3880 | 2970 | 687 |
2Q-03 | 2980 | 2680 | 565 |
3Q-03 | 3800 | 3320 | 1110 |
4Q-03 | 4440 | 3690 | 1330 |
1Q-04 | 4170 | 3600 | 1160 |
2Q-04 | 5450 | 4690 | 1670 |
3Q-04 | 5660 | 4880 | 1650 |
4Q-04 | 7460 | 6960 | 2500 |
1Q-05 | 7790 | 7700 | 2820 |
2Q-05 | 6990 | 7560 | 2460 |
3Q-05 | 10100 | 9260 | 3400 |
4Q-05 | 9320 | 9750 | 3330 |
1Q-06 | 8600 | 8170 | 1899 |
2Q-06 | 12850 | 10280 | 3650 |
3Q-06 | 13860 | 10780 | 3740 |
4Q-06 | 18110 | 17810 | 6650 |
1Q-07 | 25940 | 23200 | 10210 |
2Q-07 | 26860 | 26300 | 10480 |
3Q-07 | 23030 | 22580 | 8110 |
4Q-07 | 24340 | 32950 | 11050 |
1Q-08 | 43694 | 61116 | 16807 |
2Q-08 | 26721 | 39779 | 10830 |
1 comment:
Very interesting. Its all marketing and PR. Basically the term "global warming" has become obviously inaccurate, even to some of the less aware. Plus many people have started to uncover or at least question the "man-made" global warming hoax.
So the global warming overlords do some some marketing research and change the name to the more palatable "climate change"—it being closer to the truth, although still repeatedly connected (by the media or "environmentalists") to being "man-made" climate change. The name change was no doubt influenced by the Frank Luntz-type PR people.
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