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It's not a clear cut thing, but there was definitely a period when "Global Warming" was the popular phrase, as a result of being promoted by scientists talking

It's not a clear cut thing, but there was definitely a period when "Global Warming" was the popular phrase, as a result of being promoted by scientists talking about public policy. http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-climate-change http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-war... "But global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming." So it looks like his memory was just fine on that topic.

phaemon 12y ago
His memory was when the phrase "global warming" became "untenable and changed to "climate change"". That's what's wrong. The phrase "Climate Change" was not introduced late on because there was some problem with "global warming". It's been in use from the start. If he'd said "unfashionable" rather than "untenable" then he'd have been closer to the mark.
phaemon 12y ago
This did pique my curiosity, so I had a look at Google Ngram viewer which gave: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=global+warming%2Cclimate+change&year_start=1960&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cglobal%20warming%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cclimate%20change%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=global+warming... It looks from that like the two phrases were equally popular till 1994, when "Climate Change" suddenly took off. There was never a point where "Global Warming" was significantly more popular. Do you know of any other places I can check this?