When my son began to play baseball, the coach told him to “take the first pitch.” He promptly hit the first pitch and was confused as to why the coach was upset. It turns out the phrase “take the first pitch” means exactly the opposite of what he thought. It means don’t swing at the first pitch. Lesson learned. But this illustrates the point that understanding terminology makes a difference.
This is especially so in controversial issues like Darwinism and global warming. Since the agenda behind these issues is one of power and control rather than truth, there is much at stake in who controls the definitions of the terms used.
Law professor Phillip E. Johnson points out that whoever controls the definition of the terms can simply define away the opposition, as has been done by defining evolution as science and creation/design as religion.1
You may have noticed the term global warming has recently been supplanted by the more generic term climate change. This is deliberate since global temperature has not risen for over 15 years. In fact, a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature uses the new terms “hiatus” and “pause” in regard to worldwide temperature remaining flat for the last 15 years. The first sentence is telling: “Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century.”2 The paper goes on to suggest that this “hiatus is part of natural climate variability.” It has been asserted that this “pause” in worldwide temperature change does not invalidate the claim that human activity drives temperature increases. But one could reasonably conclude that a link between human-generated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and global temperature does not exist or that, at the very least, “the climate may not be as sensitive to greenhouse gases as was previously thought.”3
This semantically backs away from the alarmist term of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, which appears to be a favorite of those of the persuasion to never let a good crisis go to waste when it comes to promoting political, rather than scientific, agendas.4
One would also think, after more than 15 years of stable temperature in the face of record CO2 levels, that there might be some hiatus in the hype found in the popular press on this issue, but this is not the case. National Geographic, in the September 2013 issue, speculates on how high the seas will rise when all—not some!—all of the world’s ice melts, and claims that rising seas due to human activity are inevitable.
Terminology matters but so do facts. In 2007, the BBC reported the prediction that the Arctic would be ice-free by the summer of 2013. But the fact is, more than one million square miles of ocean are covered with ice today. This is 60% more than in 2012, with the ice sheet stretching from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.5
Perhaps we should demand terminology that is at least in accord with the facts.
Endnotes
1 Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
2 Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie, Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling. Nature http://bit.ly/He4fDg 2013.
3 Nature Editorial. Hidden Heat. 28 August 2013; http://bit.ly/1aF7FpL
4 E. Calvin Beisner, Science Standards: Political or Pure? DVD Lecture. www.CornwallAlliance.org
5 David Rose. And now its global Cooling! Record return of Actic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year. UK Daily Mail, 7 September 2013;
http://dailym.ai/179WxDR