Sometimes the way a question is phrased can lead the respondent in a certain direction. Lawyers and journalists know this art well.
Across the world, the issue of climate change is sometimes referred to as ‘climate change’, and other times ‘global warming’. There is a difference between the two terminologies:
Global warming is the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature.
Climate change is a long-term change in the Earth’s climate.
So you could say that one is the cause, the other the effect.
In the US, a savvy survey has revealed that conservatives prefer to use the term ‘global warming’ whereas liberals prefer ‘climate change’.
A question wording experiment illustrates the power of these frames: Republicans were less likely to endorse that the phenomenon is real when it was referred to as ‘global warming’ (44%) rather than ‘climate change’ (60%), whereas Democrats were unaffected by question wording (86.9% vs. 86.4%).
As a result, the partisan divide on the issue dropped from 42.9% under a ‘global warming’ frame to 26.2% under a ‘climate change’ frame.
Just like Shakespeare said, ‘That which we call climate change, by any other name, would smell as sour’.
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