Religion
As a child growing up in the early 1990s, I remember learning in school about the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels traps heat near the Earth’s surface, like the glass of a greenhouse. I imagined myself on the playground, roasting inside a humid hothouse. Fast forward 30 years, and the terms have changed. For a while, “global warming” was the go-to expression for talking about rising global temperatures and the role of human activities, particularly the use of fossil fuels. It had a spike in internet searches in 2007, probably due to former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning,” which hit theaters in 2006. Near the end of the Obama administration, “climate change” became the most common term. It’s now trending in Google searches more than global warming. Both terms make the same point: Rising global temperatures have major consequences on local weather...