Griftopedia: Climate Change (Formerly Known as Global Warming)
A Branding Error That Bought Exxon 30 Years of Denial
By Prof. Reeve Bellows, Ph.D. (Unverified),
with atmospheric commentary by Riggs D. Thermonucleon,
Chief Meteorologist of Bad Decisions
A Brief Backgrounder…
Let’s begin with the single most expensive marketing mistake in human history.
We called it global warming.
Which is a little like describing a collapsing building as “localized interior remodeling.”
The phrase sounds gentle. Cozy, even. It suggests a pleasant, evenly distributed increase in temperature, the kind of thing you might fix by opening a window or switching to linen sheets. It conjures a future where Michigan becomes Malibu, Canadians finally feel smugly vindicated, and everyone agrees the planet is basically just going through a hot flash.
It does not conjure images of infrastructure collapse, agricultural failure, mass migration, insurance market implosion, hospitals full of heatstroke patients, or Florida quietly becoming an aquarium.
Which is why the fossil fuel industry loved it.
Because if climate change were really happening, they reasoned, why did it snow last winter? (Chuckle chuckle.)
And if one snowstorm disproves climate change, then one salad disproves McDonald’s.
Cascading Effects and Feedback Loops
Here is the mental model everyone was accidentally taught.
The Earth functions as a system. Just because most of humanity understands that the Earth is basically round doesn’t mean we have complete understanding of this system.
Climate change equals someone turning up the Earth’s thermostat.
That model implies everything gets a little warmer, more or less evenly, in a predictable and manageable way. A slow, polite increase in global temperature that you could plan around, hedge against, and maybe fix later with some tasteful geoengineering.
That model is adorable.
It is also catastrophically wrong.
What we actually did was take a finely balanced planetary system and start loosening random bolts on the weather engine. We didn’t gently warm the Earth. We destabilized it.
A better metaphor is this: we didn’t turn up the heat in your house. We smashed your HVAC system with a shovel, and now it randomly blasts hot air, cold air, steam, smoke, biological mutation and occasionally screaming. Sometimes in July. Sometimes in February. Sometimes in the same week.
Move Fast, Break Things Is Not Good Environmental Policy
Here’s the part nobody explained in fourth grade.
Most of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases doesn’t stay in the air. It goes into the oceans.
Oh, goody. Problem solved, roll credits.
In reality, the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat generated by human emissions. Which means the planet didn’t just get warmer. It got loaded, like a spring being compressed for a century and a half or a bathtub filling quietly while everyone argues about whether the water level looks higher.
The oceans are now warmer, more energetic, and more chaotic. That extra energy has to go somewhere, which is why storms are getting stronger, wetter, slower, and vastly more expensive.
You didn’t get more hurricanes because God is mad.
You got more hurricanes because you microwaved the Gulf of Mexico.
The Jet Stream, What’s It’s Problem?!!
Then there’s the jet stream, which used to behave like a relatively stable, high-altitude river of air that politely moved weather systems along like a conveyor belt. April showers predictably brought May flowers.
Climate change weakened it.
Which means weather systems now stall. They park. They loiter. They bring three months of rain or three weeks of heat or an ice storm that just sits on your power grid like an overweight cat.
This is how you get so-called “hundred-year floods” every six years, heat domes that cook cities, and polar vortices that take unscheduled vacations in Texas.
The jet stream is no longer a river.
It’s a confused Uber driver.
Arctic Ice
The Arctic, meanwhile, is warming about four times faster than the rest of the planet, which is extremely bad because the Arctic is one of the main stabilizers of the global climate system. Think of it as the heavy flywheel that keeps the weather engine from vibrating itself apart.
We are currently melting the flywheel.
This is not “warming.”
This is mechanical failure.
This is the core misunderstanding that allowed denial to thrive.
Climate change does not mean everything gets warmer.
It means everything gets weirder.
Heat waves become hotter. Cold snaps become colder. Floods become wetter and “flood-ier.” Droughts become drier. Storms become stronger. Wildfires become smokier, hotter and more “Fire-Tornado-y.” Crops fail more often. Infrastructure breaks more frequently. Insurance companies begin to quietly sweat.
Climate change is not a temperature problem.
It is a volatility problem.
And it is an economics problem because volatility is what bankrupts insurance companies, power grids, hospitals, farms, and governments.
🌪️ MID-ARTICLE INTERRUPTION FROM THE WEATHER DESK
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New Look! Same Great Problem!
We eventually renamed it climate change, which helped a little, but even that still sounds too polite. It sounds like a gentle redecoration. What is actually happening is closer to climate system destabilization and atmospheric violence escalation. It’s as if the weather has joined a fight club.
But honestly, those options tested poorly with focus groups.
Climate denial didn’t succeed because people are evil.
It succeeded because the disaster doesn’t look like a disaster…yet.
It looks like weird weather. It looks like annoying insurance hikes. It looks like canceled flights, higher grocery bills, asthma, mold, heat advisories, and one more “once-in-a-generation” storm this year.
It looks like noise.
Until the noise becomes the soundtrack of your life.
Here is the final, inconvenient truth.
Climate change isn’t “things getting warmer.”
It’s things getting wilder, weirder, and more expensive, in terms of dollars, structures and lives.
It’s physics collecting a debt humanity ran up and then securitized.
Tomorrow:
This Isn’t a Storm Story. It’s a Systems Failure Story.
Why disasters aren’t natural anymore — and why we optimized civilization for quarterly earnings instead of physics.
Learn Why Markets Can’t Outrun Thermodynamics
Riggs University teaches business and economics as human systems, not magic spells.
Business 101: Business and Economics for the Bold and Brazen
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