Murdoch tabloid leads charge as big freeze persists – could the mayor please do something about the weather?
It snowed two weeks ago in New York. Since then, the temperature has barely risen above freezing – a temperature science naturally dictates is necessary to melt snow and ice.
But science isn’t enough for some US political critics, however, who have instead blamed Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new socialist mayor, for the snow not having melted and still clogging up some of the city’s streets.
The New York Post, the rightwing tabloid and a frequent Mamdani critic, has led the charge. This week the newspaper claimed that “slushy streets” were “ruining travel for everyone”.
The only benefit of “climate change” over “global warming” is that it does not suggest it will get warmer everywhere, though in turn it fails to communicate that the global annual temperature is steadily increasing.
And worse yet, the change in terminology suggests a retreat from a prior position, allowing denialists to suggest that scientists changed their mind and they are two distinct concepts.
It’s a terminology change not worth arguing about. Global warming causes local climate change, and climate change is just the local effect of global warming.
We should absolutely use whichever term communicates best with the audience we are trying to reach, but mocking someone for the terminology they use is counterproductive and reinforces the fallacy that the ideas are meaningfully different.
The main benefit of rhetorically talking about “climate change” instead of “global warning” is that “climate change” sounds fairly innocuous to the layperson, and can be easily misconstrued as “natural”.
How many conservatives have you heard say something like “of course the climate changes, it happens every day!”
There’s a reason the bush administration pushed the “climate change” narrative so hard.