global warming

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English

Etymology

First attested in the 1950s. Came into common use in the mid-1970s with Wallace Smith Broecker's paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”[1] and Mikhail Budyko's statement in 1976 that “a global warming up has started”.

Noun

global warming (uncountable)

  1. A sustained increase in the average temperature of the Earth, sufficient to cause climate change.
    Synonym: global heating
    Antonym: global cooling
    • 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, →ISBN, page 150:
      In the popular imagination, global warming is mostly seen as a threat to cold-loving species, and there are good reasons for this. […] But global warming is going to have just as great an impact—indeed, according to Silman, an even greater impact—in the tropics.

Usage notes

  • May be treated as a synonym of climate change in informal contexts, particularly in regions where climate science is contested by political actors. This conflation is not widespread in scientific contexts, where it may be regarded as incorrect.
  • Some scientists and journalists prefer the term global heating.[2][3][4]

Translations

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Wallace S. Broecker (1975 August 8) “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, in Science, volume 189, number 4201, →DOI
  2. ^ Brigitte Nerlich (2014 February 4) “Global warming is dead, long live global heating?”, in University of Nottingham‎[1]
  3. ^ Jonathan Watts (2018 December 13) “Global warming should be called global heating, says key scientist”, in The Guardian‎[2]
  4. ^ Damian Carrington (2019 May 17) “Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment”, in The Guardian‎[3]
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