[Emphasis added]  University of Florida Linguist M.J. Hardman tells us (“Language and War”, 2002) that “Language is inseparable from humanity and follows us in all our works. Language is the instrument with which we form thought and feeling, mood, aspiration, will and act[ion], the instrument by whose means we influence and are influenced…”

It is not surprising then that language has always been a crucially important weapon of war. Delivered with convincing rhetorical flare, language has driven ordinary citizens to heroic acts of self-sacrifice in defense of their countries, while pushing others to unspeakable acts of barbarism.

And now, language tricks are being used to justify the unjustifiable in the increasingly intensive war of words over global warming. ‘Climate change is real’, ‘global warming pollution must be reduced’, ‘we must stop climate change’, are phrases used by environmental alarmists, politicians and industrialists to scare the public into supporting multi-billion dollar schemes that enrich the few at the cost of the many.

But even non-scientists are starting to recognize that some of these assertions are meaningless. Climate change has been ‘real’ on Earth and other planets for billions of years, for example - so has sunrise and gravity, but that doesn’t mean humans are causing them. And carbon dioxide, the ‘infrared absorbing gas’ blamed by climate campaigners for most of the past century’s modest warming, is no more a pollutant than is the major ‘greenhouse gas’ in the atmosphere, water vapour. Even the terms ‘greenhouse gases’ and the ‘greenhouse effect’ are misnomers since the Earth’s atmosphere behaves very differently to a greenhouse. Greenhouses use a solid barrier (the glass roof) to prevent heat loss by convection yet, lacking such a barrier, convection accounts for about half of the heat loss from the surface of the Earth.

Even as the impact of these phrases gradually diminishes among educated people, other equally misleading phraseology is coming to dominate the debate. One in particular has become so entrenched that even those who oppose fashionable thinking on climate change use it without thinking twice.