ABSTRACT
This chapter first takes a look at the sociological issues of climate change and explores several of the current key aspects, such as the publics’ reactions to environmental issues in general and the reasons for those reactions—why some people seem to care so deeply about the environment around them and its future, yet others seem to give it no thought at all. It also looks at the public’s slow shift in recent years toward understanding the basic concepts of climate change. In fact, part of the reason for changing the name from global warming to climate change was partly for sociological reasons: the label global warming implied to the public that rising temperatures were the only characteristic of the phenomenon. For this reason, for areas that were experiencing cooler temperatures or flooding, the public was not making the connection that it was part of the same phenomenon. Therefore, scientists began to transition to the more accurate term climate change to make it more understandable—that there was more involved to the issue than rising temperatures and that those changes were dangerous to the environment and future life on the planet.
