CC: Climate Change
CC: Climate Change

Summary/Abstract: Climate change (CC) is not exactly a new phenomenon: the climate has been “changing” for four and a half billion years, “change” being what climate does. However it was officially discovered as an imminent threat to the planet and humanity on 3 February 2005 at a conference in Exeter (UK) coordinated by the Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre. “The Exeter meeting had two main aims”, writes the palaeoclimatologist Professor Robert Carter: “First, replacing the term global warming (which was no longer happening) with climate change (which always would be); and, second, adopting, for entirely political reasons, a fanciful 2°C target as the ‘dangerous’ amount of warming that politicians should be advised that they were to prevent.” Actually “climate change” had already crept into the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (1994) where it was defined as the purely man-made (anthropogenic) part of it, thus skilfully leaving out the majority of climate change that has natural causes.

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