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Climate change, not global warming

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-09 07:48

"Climate change", not "global warming" or "global cooling", is the right term to explain the unstable and worsening global climate caused by rising temperatures, says an article in China Business News. Excerpts:

Exceptionally intense cold waves have numbed people in the UK, Poland, northeastern United States and northern China this winter.

The mercury in these places has dropped to the lowest point in decades in these places. The cold spell also sparked rumors of "global cooling" as opposed to "global warming".

Britain's Daily Mail even used a headline: "The mini ice age starts here" to show how severe the cold wave was.

People who had just read and watched the deliberations at the Copenhagen climate conference were confused about who to believe on and who to blame for the drastically changing climate.

The term, "global warming", though easier to understand, creates in people's mind a much simpler scenario than the complex affair of climate change.

Some people even confuse "weather" with "climate", and vice versa. According to NASA, weather is the state of atmosphere over a short period, and climate is about the same thing over a much longer period - it could be anything between one and 10 million years.

So the news people get about temperatures, humidity, rain, snow and storm every day is weather news. That means the recent cold weather in many places cannot be taken as cooling climate.

Mojib Latif, who was quoted by the Daily Mail, in support of its global cooling hypothesis, rejects the story by saying that he was surprised to see his words being used to challenge the nature of global warming.

In fact, the Latif statement that the Mail misused was about average changes in the past 100 years. It should not have been used out of context.

Another incorrect news published by the Mail was the one quoting the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) as having said that Arctic summer sea ice had expanded up to 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent of the total ice in the Arctic had disintegrated. But netizens found the data to be contrary to information on the NSIDC's website.

As an English proverb says, the devil is in the detail.

We can see how these details went wrong when the Mail quoted a scientist's statement and used scientific data. But despite everything we cannot afford to ignore the details of climate change, which is an unprecedented challenge to human existence. We cannot and should not cast a blind eye on our future generations.

(China Daily 02/09/2010 page9)