Chris Mooney, who’s writing a book on the politics of science, flags the newest development in the spin war over global warming. The New York Times reported last month on disagreement at a UN conference on the issue:

Those sharply different perceptions led to a clash even over what language should be used in discussing disaster relief. Bush administration emissaries opposed the use of the phrase “climate change,” employed since the days of the first Bush administration, in favor of “climate variability,” a much more nebulous term.

In Chapter 5 of All the President’s Spin, we discuss how the Bush administration consciously shifted from using the term “global warming” to “climate change”. This is just one more step down the road toward language-twisting euphemisms that obscure more than they reveal. As Chris writes, the term “climate variability” is “not just nebulous: It implies natural variability, which is not what scientists think they’re seeing out there in the real world.”