Climate is the average over the last 30 years. Climate change happens as the new year is added, and the now 31st year dropped off. Thus the drought of the 1950’s no longer has any effect on the climate of Texas. This is the usual climate change, and not what is discussed here. Here we are talking climate change as an effect of continued, fairly rapid, global warming. The question about a particular weather event is how was it affected by increased global temperature. It is generally a matter of rate and frequency change, which is difficult for many folks to understand.

I did see the chart, thanks.

Re right-wingers, what I observed (first-hand, extensively), but starting only maybe in the middle of the last decade, was a pretense that “alarmists” were shifting to use CC because GW had been discredited. Is that what you were referring to? Subsequent to that, I think there has been a tendency to shift more toward use of CC, not because of right-wing carping but because of a growing awareness of non-temperature-related effects that CC seems to encompass better, albeit far from ideally.

Anyway, Wally did coin the term Global Warming, in 1975, but yes, “climate change” was a right wing attempt at dogwhistling, but correct, they did not invent it.

Did you see this, I put it up yesterday: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/02/20/climate-change-vs-global-warming/

Also, Greg, you may be a little ahistorical in terms of the evolution of the use of the terms. GW had the early start thanks to Wally Broecker’s original coinage, and CC got a leg up ~1990 with the IPCC/UNFCCC, but AFAIK was never a term especially favored by the right wing. Environmentalists used GW predominantly until fairly recently.

So now you’ll hear “climate change” as the term used by all of the pro-environment activists. Or at least, they should be.

Gleick’s writeup is insightful and interesting and worth a read. But, our understanding of climate now compared to then is hugely more advanced. It also can lead people to think that we can’t understand climate, what with all those butterflies interfering with the process. At the time Gleick wrote that, there were huge unknowns in how climate worked and how it related to local weather. Glieck’s book came out in 1987. The idea of ENSO emerged during the 1980s and the understanding that it was actually one of the butterflies did not become clear until after 1990, for example.