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smitty1e | 11 days ago

"Climate Change" implies that some sort of "constant climate" is even attainable, irrespective of desirable.

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mithr|11 days ago

It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.

Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."

alt227|11 days ago

Your analogy doesnt work, becaue the earth has been warmer than it is now several times in the past. so the increased temperature is within the range of normal temperatures.

The problem is not that the earth is warming, it is that it is warming at an artificially increased rate.

wat10000|11 days ago

Only with an excessively literal interpretation.

If I pick up your house and drop it two streets over, that could be accurately described as a "location change" of your house. This is still true despite the fact that your house naturally moves some centimeters per year due to tectonic plates shifting around.

Similarly, when global average temperatures saw long term trends of a fraction of a degree of change per millennium, then suddenly started changing at multiple degrees per century, it's pretty reasonable to call that "climate change" despite the fact that it was not completely constant before.

triceratops|11 days ago

It implies change over a couple human lifetimes. Change faster than has ever occurred before, and due to human activity.

alt227|10 days ago

It doesnt really imply that though does it. It just means the climate is changing. IMO this is why there was a big pushback against it for a long time, the term used to describe it does not infer anything wrong.

ChrisClark|11 days ago

And you're just like the deniers who pick apart irrelevant things, and then smugly smile.