It was "Inadvertent climate modification" first, then global cooling as we have discussed previously. When that ship sailed, it became global warming. that ship sailed and it became climate change. a generic term that can be pinned on either direction of change.
Before the end of time ALOT of people are going to wake up and find it to be for the most part,a farce created to make some people rich. just like Y2K and covid.
Well Grok helped me out.
So there was another phrase before global cooling,
The sequence you mentioned is a common way people describe the evolution of popular terms for human-caused changes to Earth's climate, but it's not entirely accurate historically.
Global cooling was never a dominant or consensus scientific term for impending human-driven climate shifts. It gained some media attention in the 1970s (e.g., a few articles speculating about aerosol pollution or natural cycles leading to cooling or even an "imminent ice age"), but peer-reviewed scientific literature at the time overwhelmingly focused on the risks of greenhouse warming from CO₂ and other gases. The idea of a broad scientific consensus on global cooling in the 1970s is largely a myth, as reviews of the literature show warming concerns dominated even then.
Global warming emerged as a specific term in scientific contexts earlier than often claimed. It appeared sporadically as far back as the late 19th/early 20th century in limited uses, more notably in 1961 and 1969 papers, and prominently in 1975 when geochemist Wallace Broecker titled a Science article "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" It became widely popularized in the late 1980s, especially after James Hansen's 1988 congressional testimony.
Climate change (or "climatic change") has long been a broader, more neutral term referring to any shifts in climate patterns, whether natural or human-influenced. It predates the others in general usage and was used alongside "global warming" in many scientific contexts.
Before "global cooling" (which was a short-lived, mostly media-driven phrase in the mid-1970s), there wasn't a single catchy popular phrase equivalent to today's terms for human-induced large-scale climate disruption. Earlier scientific discussions of potential anthropogenic (human-caused) effects used more technical or descriptive language, such as:
"Inadvertent climate modification" — This was the common phrase in studies from the 1960s and early 1970s (and even in the 1979 Charney Report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences) when referring to human impacts like CO₂ emissions altering the climate.
Greenhouse effect or discussions of CO₂-induced warming — Going back further, Svante Arrhenius in 1896 quantitatively predicted warming from doubled CO₂ levels (though without a snappy overarching term). Earlier still, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, ideas were framed around the greenhouse effect (term coined around 1901) or simply human emissions changing Earth's energy balance/climate.
Before the mid-20th century, when anthropogenic climate change became a serious scientific topic, discussions were mostly about natural climate variability — such as ice ages, glacial/interglacial cycles, or long-term cooling trends over geological time (e.g., the overall Cenozoic cooling trend leading to ice sheets). There was no equivalent popular phrase for human-driven global-scale change because the idea itself was only emerging in the late 19th century.
In summary, the progression wasn't a straight line of renamed doomsday predictions (cooling → warming → change). Instead, scientific understanding built steadily toward human-caused warming as the primary concern, while popular/media terms shifted for various reasons (including efforts to communicate broader impacts like sea level rise, extreme weather, etc., beyond just temperature rise). "Inadvertent climate modification" is the closest predecessor term to "global cooling" in discussions of human influence before the 1970s media focus on cooling possibilities.
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