The case for renaming ‘global warming’

The case for renaming ‘global warming’: "What’s in a name? Well, in science, quite a lot: the honour of naming a discovery, or the fame and fortune that might follow from coining a successful new term; perhaps even the ability to influence the future of life on Earth – or at least, life as we in the West have come to enjoy it.
Twenty-five ago, when I was a rookie journalist in this newspaper, I reported on the new story that was “global warming”. Even then it seemed a poor term. Irish people thought “warming” was to be welcomed, not feared. Bring it on, they said, and the quicker the better, swayed by visions of sultry summers and vineyards in Ventry. Only now are we really becoming aware of the storm damage, heatwaves, and diseases that will also come with climate change (more of which anon).
An advantage of making a scientific discovery is that you might get to name it, or have it named after you. George Gabriel Stokes, from Co Sligo, was a great 19th-century scientist. The long list of things named after him is a measure of his many contributions, from Stokes’s conjecture and Stokes’s phenomenon to Stokes’s law of fluorescence (in fact, Stokes also coined the term “fluorescent”)."



'via Blog this'