Okay. Time for a thread derail:
"Greenhouse Effect" was a term coined back in the late 1960's/early 1970's to describe the increase of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. This buildup causes TWO things to happen:
FIRST) The increased CO2 causes a shifting of the complex mixture of which types of solar rays do and do not get permitted to penetrate all the way down to ground level -- this is a "solar interaction problem."
And then:
SECOND) The overall climate of the planet subsequently gets a tad bit warmer --this is a "temperature problem."
However, it has recently been realized that after 40 years of the terms "Greenhouse Effect" and "Global Warming" being used, most laymen kept getting hung up on the word "warming" and the word "greenhouse," and were mistakenly only fosusing on the problem of the heat (temperature problem) and ignoring the problem of CO2 buildup (solar interaction problem). But the truth is that BOTH problems are really really bad, and when left unchecked they eventually rammify each other exponentially.
So by changing the NAME of the entire issue from "global warming" to "climate change," the new term more properly includes the "solar interaction problem" of the gaseous shift, and it also very wisely umbrella's the OTHER (and still-not-yet-fully-realized-by-most-laymen) temperature phenomenon in which IF the escalating global temperatures are allowed to continue unchecked, the buildup --while causing an initial heating phenomenon-- can eventually trigger a series of atmospheric and geologic events that can lead to the very sudden onset of a full blown planet wide ice age. (Not as "sudden" as we saw in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but more like over a 10 or 15 year period.)
The preference to change the name wasn't a form of back-peddling or back-to-the-drawing-board rethinking of the math. The math is fine as-is. Instead, the name change was an effort to refine the language to more fully and more precisely encapsulate ALLLLLL of the eco-system-altering consequences of runaway CO2 buildup.
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