Although many Americans confuse the terms "climate change" and "global warming," a poll has found more people are worried about warming than change.
Scientists have been careful in defining the two terms, preferring "climate change" as an umbrella term that includes not only warming but the increase in extreme weather events like droughts, storms and damaging high winds.
Americans aren't so sure which refers to which, a report from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication says.
Many people link "climate change" with general weather configurations and natural and expected fluctuations observed in temperature and rainfall, reserving "global warming" in their perception as suggesting extreme weather.
Because of this they temd tp react more to the "warming" term than to "climate change," the Yale researchers found.
"We found that the term 'global warming' is associated with greater public understanding, emotional engagement, and support for personal and national action than the term 'climate change,'" the report authors wrote.
In the study poll, 63 percent of Americans reported they thought climate change was bad, while a full 76 percent said the same thing about global warming.
The choice of terms often differs from one setting to another, the researchers admitted.
Anthony Leiserowitz, the Yale Project director, said the term global warming is going to continue to be used in his group's research and polls, in the belief more Americans are familiar with it.
However, climate change shows up more often in academic and researcher literature than it does in public or political debate, experts say.
Still, there's evidence of that changing, researchers say. Global warming, the more common term when the Yale Project started in 2008, is slowly being gained on by climate change.
Americans say they are four times as likely to hear the global warming term used in public discussion, the project found, yet they say they're equally familiar with the use of both terms.
That change is reflected in the media as well. For example, in 2013 one newspaper ran 950 articles using the term "climate change" as compared to 463 stories that spoke of global warming. That's a turnaround from 2006 when global warming scored 750 mentions in articles against 341 for climate change in the same publication.
It is possible the two phrases could eventually become synonymous as the public, scientists and media continue to be willing to use both, said the researchers.
"In the meantime, however, the results of these studies strongly suggest that the two terms continue to mean different things to many Americans," they concluded.
