Global Warming (或者Climate Change)

今期William Safire (Change machine) 探討這兩個terms的互換(?):

As a phrase, global warming is slowly, inexorably cooling, and if something is not done quickly and on a worldwide basis — hang the cost — the planet will be in the grip of the collocation climate change.

The 50th anniversary of the coinage of both global warming and global climate change came and went with no commemorative rock concerts or scientific Sanhedrins. My earliest citation of both phrases is a report in The Hammond Times (of Indiana) dated Nov. 6, 1957, about California scientists “studying the possibility that this continued pouring forth of waste gases may upset the rather delicate carbon-dioxide balance in the earth’s general atmosphere and that a large-scale global warming, with radical climate changes, may result.” (There must be earlier citations in print, which I welcome from the exicographic Irregulars and will pass along.)

For a time, the phrase global warming dominated the discussion; of late, there has been a surge in usage of climate change. Why is the phrasal competition getting hotter? Not merely the desire to be less judgmental; rather, I think, due to worldwide ensorcelling by the noun change. A Google count shows the latter percentage of change enchantment creeping up to 33 percent against the 66 percent of global warming. (But we may know more after results are in from other states on Tsunami Tuesday.)