There were two main reasons why we started calling Global Warming by the euphemism “Climate Change”. One was that the Bush (Senior) administration’s team at the UN Climate Talks in the run-up to Kyoto didn’t like to use such frightening terms. The other is that plain and simple “warming” doesn’t quite cover it. Yes, average global temperatures are rising steadily, as we all know - there is no scientific disagreement about that. But what is going on underneath the obvious is that there is a lot more energy in the climate system. That means that the weather is wilder and more unpredictable than before - and getting more so every year. It was a good decade or more ago that the IPCC warned us that one result of climate change was

that extreme weather events would become as likely as smaller ones. More energy means more instability and unpredictability. >>See also: What to Learn from Bad Weather The strength of hurricanes, the length of droughts, the temperature of heatwaves, the frequency of floods: these are all going up. The insurance business noticed it first of more or less any industry, and they were warning us at the UNFCCC meetings from early on (along with AOSIS members concerned about sea-level rise). But what is less well-recognised is that it is just as likely that we’ll have extreme blizzard or low temperatures because of changing weather patterns due to climate change. Read more of this story »

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Cold Snap: Yes, it’s Global Warming