The phrase "climate change" was recommended by Frank Luntz as an alternative to "global warming". But it deliberately downplays the impact of global warming.
It is time to stop using "climate change". EVER. Jump below the orange F5 tornado....
We need to use the term "climate destruction". I initially was thinking of "climate disruption" but disruption implies a short term phenomenon. Destruction is more appropriate, because the damage done will be, on the human scale, permanent.
Students of archeology can point to hundreds, if not thousands, of cases where changes in weather eliminated the bases on which civilizations were built. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" provides a nice overview.
Let's take a look at the state of the U.S. and extrapolate (linear extrapolations are almost always wrong, but it's the best we, with our limited minds, can do). California, the source of huge amounts of our agricultural produce, is drying to a crisp. Food prices are going to soar this summer and fall, while eventually agribusiness will move on. How long before cities run dry of water?
Southern Florida is already flooding. As we watch Greenland and Antarctica melt, how long will it be before Miami is only visible below the waves? We still have not fully recovered from Hurricane Sandy -- largely due to Republican corruption and incompetence -- but another two or three of those Cat 1 storms could raze huge stocks of the northeastern housing stock, which was never build to withstand such things. A Cat 3 hitting NYC would be a blow a thousand times worse than 9/11.
One could go on and on, but the net is, we are destroying the environmental conditions on which are civilization was built. And it is time we stopped pulling rhetorical punches and called it for what it is.
By the same token, we are destroying the economic and political bases on which our American society was built. It is also time we stop pulling rhetorical punches about that. Thank goodness for Warren, Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Martin O'Malley and others who are fighting the good fight on that front.