The NYT chats with Drew Shindell, physicist and climatologist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He doesn't like the phrase "global warming." He'd prefer "climate meltdown."
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled. ...
There are now several bills floating around Congress that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Is one better than the others? They are useful first steps. But they are just baby steps. In the long term, we have to reduce emissions much more than any of these bills envision. At the state level, California is a great example of what the rest of the country should be doing. They require that energy be used efficiently, and as a result their per capita energy use has stayed level for decades, despite the growth in their economy. ...
The president acknowledged the problem of “global climate change” in his State of the Union address last month. What do you think of the phrase? I’m mostly O.K. with it. It’s a phrase scientists use all the time.
And “global warming”? A bad name. Global warming sounds cozy and comfortable.
So perhaps you should try a new coinage. “Climate meltdown” sounds a little more ominous.