Contrary to popular belief, the terms "climate change" and "global warming" are not interchangeable. Social media and news platforms are filled with the term "Global Warming" as a synonym for climate change. However, these terms refer to two completely different things.
Global warming describes the long-term trend of rising average global temperatures related to the natural climate's fluctuations (below).
For the past 5 billion years, the natural climate has oscillated between warm periods and ice ages. In order to understand the difference between natural global warming and anthropogenic climate change, you must take into consideration the changes in radiative forcing and how it affects Earth's natural systems. For example, changes in the atmosphere, vegetation, ice/snow, ocean chemistry and ocean heat content overturn cycles.
Climate change is a broader term that relates to the anthropogenic change in global or regional climate patterns, attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases produced by the increased use of fossil fuels. In simpler terms, climate change is the way humans are destroying natural systems in order to maintain technological and economic relevance by burning fossil fuels (below).
Climate change also differs from global warming because it encompasses effects other than the warming global temperature. Since I'm restricted by a word count, I will only list a few of the most detrimental effects of climate change: Increased average temperatures, temperature extremes, increased severity of hurricanes and other extreme weather events, melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, an increase in disease-causing pathogens, more droughts and heat waves, increased rates of erosion, and higher death rates in humans and animals.
The reality is that you can call it whatever you want, and I'm never going to know. If you choose to use the outdated and scientifically wrong term, I can't do anything about it. I could write 10,000 articles about climate change, and not influence one person. Whatever you decide to call it, it is real, and if we don't do something to reverse it soon, we can only hope that Mars is ready to take on more than 7 billion people.
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