If you’re harping on a distinction between “global warming” and “climate change,” you probably haven’t kept up with the science

Climate change includes global warming and changing weather in general. It can even include an ice age. The term climate change is used because dumb people say cold weather disproves global warming and some on the other side blame bad weather on mankind without waiting to the analysis to back it up as if weather proves global warming.

As I understand it, “climate change” a messaging thing, promoted with good intentions by the scientific community to help broaden the concept of global warming, but which was then twisted by the skeptics to imply a confusion on the part of climate scientists that does not truly exist.

At least: not in the data we are actually seeing today. If we ever do have an ice age, then that would be different story: climate change and global warming would mean something very different. But we are just not seeing that.

We are seeing warming darn near everywhere.

And more than once, I have had the tiny pocket of cooling around a part of Antarctica shown in this map actually thrown in my face by global warming skeptics as allegedly persuasive contrary evidence.

Just because global warming is not tidy, uniform, or consistent does not mean it is any less real.

The sharper skeptics will acknowledge this data but then ask: well, what’s *causing* that warming?

I believe with the majority of climate scientists that it’s been pretty conclusively established that it’s caused by man-made greenhouse gases. In theory, all sorts of things could be causing it, just as climate changes have been caused many times in the past by factors other than humans.

That’s when persuading the skeptics gets really tough.

The sun might be entering a low activity period that could cause colder winters and a decrease in global temperatures compared to what they would be otherwise. Confounding factors like that make the science very difficult to sort out.