No, the changes to the climate are the results of industrialization, overpopulation, and pollution.
“Global warming” merely describes a change in an abstract number, which number you get by taking temperature readings from all over the planet, averaging them, correcting for insolation and many other variables, and comparing them to similarly averaged and corrected readings from previous years. You are measuring the difference in the Earth’s ability to reflect the Sun’s energy using a derived and aproximate number - which corresponds to no single actual place on the Earth, and also does not accurately (or even aproximately) measure the total thermal energy of the planet.
And although global average temperature models are a valid way for climatologists to track change, within their field, the buzzphrase is misleading to people outside that field. I think it’s unwise to use highfalutin’ technical jargon when the issues of pollution and climate change need to be understood by everyone, not just intellectuals and climatologists. And I think we need to address the pollution issue, attack the cause, rather than harping on only one of the major symptoms.
Sure. That doesn’t change that one class of pollution has particularly widespread effects through interfering with radiative loss and so increasing the total thermal energy of the planet. It hardly advanced sounds like advanced jargon to call such an increase “warming”; you are noting more or less technical proxies people use to measure that, but really it refers to this one mechanism that changes climate.
I really don’t get why you think it’s so awful to distinguish this mechanism from the ways various other pollutants and human activities can affect the environment, especially since it is one of the least local in impact. There are still lots of people who will claim that carbon dioxide isn’t even pollution, it’s just a natural and harmless gas. They get away with that because it doesn’t work the same way as most others.
I don’t think recognizing this precludes treating pollution that impacts city areas, watersheds, and so on seriously too, just that this can require different approaches. For many of those you can concentrate efforts to eliminate pollution in more vulnerable areas first, for instance; that doesn’t work when the changes come from warming.
I don’t think it’s awful, I think it’s useless and contrived.
Edit: I’ve already heard two people today say the current cold snap proves “global warming isn’t real.” Neither of them would say that about pollution.
