The Hidden History of Coined Words by Ralph Keyes

Author:Ralph Keyes [Keyes, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eco Words

In a 1907 article, English physicist John Henry Poynting noted one possible consequence of growing air pollution: “the ‘blanketing effect’ or, as I prefer to call it, the ‘greenhouse effect’ of the atmosphere.” A decade later Alexander Graham Bell took a prophetic interest in this danger. Burning fossil fuels would trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, Bell warned in 1917, leading to “a sort of greenhouse effect.” The phrase coined by Poynting and propagated by Bell would languish for several decades and loads of carbon emissions before it rejoined national discourse in 1957. That was when UCLA physicist Joseph Kaplan warned that unless we could limit our use fossil fuels, within fifty or sixty years a “greenhouse” effect could melt polar ice caps, raising sea levels by forty feet or more.

Global warming is a key consequence of the greenhouse effect, of course. Credit for creating that phrase is commonly given to Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker, who in 1975 published a paper in Science magazine titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” As a result of this article, Broecker was long thought to have coined global warming. Broecker himself hoped he hadn’t. In fact, the prolific author of papers and books was so dismayed by being known primarily for this phrase that in 2010 he offered $250 to whomever could find it being used before his Science article was published. A graduate student named David McGee won the prize by locating a 1957 editorial in Indiana’s Hammond Times that warned of possible “large scale global warming.”

“I was happy when David found it,” Broecker later told a reporter, “because people think that this is the only thing I did in my life.” (When the geochemist died in 2019, many of his obituaries had headlines such as “Scientist Who Coined ‘Global Warming’ Dies.”) Broecker apparently wasn’t aware that economists Clifford Russell and Hans Landsberg had referred to “global warming” in a Science magazine article that preceded his by four years. And, five years before the Hammond Times editorial included this phrase, a 1952 San Antonio Express article referred to “scientists who are studying global warming trends.”

The phrase “global warming” eventually gave way to “climate change,” thanks in part to Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Following George W. Bush’s election as president in 2000, Luntz urged members of his administration to use this phrase instead of “global warming” when discussing environmental issues. “ ‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming,’ ” Luntz wrote in a confidential memo to the White House. “At one focus group participants noted climate change ‘sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to that, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Although the ubiquity of the phrase climate change in political discourse is associated with Luntz, that expression had already been in play for several decades prior to Bush’s presidency, referring to changes in our climate caused by human activity. The 1957

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