The term has both appropriate and inappropriate usage.
This is a mirror of my guest post at Prof Curry’s ‘Climate Etc’ blog last week:
(See bottom of last page for a link to the Footnotes file here, which is common to ‘The Catastrophe Narrative’ companion post below).
- Introduction
Rational Wiki says: ‘“CAGW”, for “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming”, is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming denialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate.’10
Where in turn the link for ‘snarl word’ says: ‘A snarl word is a derogatory label that can be attached to something (or even to people), in order to dismiss their importance or worth, without guilt. When used as snarl words, these words are essentially meaningless; most of them can be used with meaning, but that seldom happens.’
So setting aside the snarl implications of the word ‘denialist’11 above, is all the usage of the ‘CAGW’ acronym meaningless, i.e. it is essentially a snarl word only? Or is there significant meaning associated with some usage? i.e. does it have legitimate, ‘non-snarl’ currency also, associated with real meaning?
In typical usage ‘CAGW’ may be followed by words such as narrative, message, story, line, debate, controversy, mantra, meme, myth, scare, hysteria, hoax, scam, religion, cult, cause, movement, believers, faithful, crowd, advocates, promoters, proponents, consensus, theory, hypothesis, premise, claim, case, conjecture and various others. Or it may appear in sentences without any direct descriptors such as those above, for example: ‘Proof positive that CAGW is about power, politics and greed is the fact that…’, ‘Without this strong feedback there is no real basis for CAGW since…’, ‘I have been waiting for someone, anyone, to enunciate a unique, broadly accepted goal for a program to “dodge” the CAGW “bullet”…’, ‘Cost / benefit analysis is apparently against the rules when it comes to CAGW…’, ‘The alarm is not about a warming of the globe, nor particularly AGW. It is about CAGW’.12
These demonstrate a much wider application than for just the ‘established science’, which I take to mean mainstream science, as expressed in the Working Group Chapters13 of the IPCC’s latest full report (AR5), so hereafter AR5WGC. Whether or not any such usages of ‘CAGW’ are justified, they are broadly categorized (albeit with overlaps, especially meme and consensus at the boundaries) as follows:
- expressing a communication aspect, applicable not only to climate scientists but to any parties communicating or exchanging on climate change, such as social authority sources, policy makers, NGOs, businesses, other scientists, whoever, and reflected by the words above starting narrative, message and similar.
- expressing a social phenomenon aspect, whether assumed to have deliberate causation or emergent causation, and reflected by the words starting, myth, scare and similar.
- expressing the aspect of adherents of the phenomena in b), as reflected by the words starting believers, faithful and similar, OR of subscribers to the science per d), OR both.
- expressing the science aspect, as reflected by the words starting theory, hypothesis and similar.
- expressing the aspect of actual physical climate change, sarcastically or not, as being potentially catastrophic (usually without extra descriptors in this context).
Usage without descriptors per the example sentences, are generally contextualized by one of these same categories.
Next page (2) for more…
We Are Narrative 
Andy, the CAGW term was first used by the warming protagonists in the 1980s, it remained in use until the warmistas found that it no longer resonated with the massesand switched to the more friendly and understandable but meaningless “Climate Change.” So Rational Wiki is totally wrong here. I just saw your post on JC’s post-testimony blog and replied to it, you address the crux of the matter, the main impediment to rational policy. [I’ve been engaged with the issue since the 1980s.]
Thanks, Faustino. I couldn’t find usage of ‘CAGW’ before the early noughties, though my searching skills are limited. But not much before then, the internet wasn’t so widespread / dominant as now anyhow and so a lot of things aren’t recorded. Very interesting that the term goes back so far. But notwithstanding its own serious snarl-word issue, I think Rational Wiki is right in terms of modern parlance, say 10 years at least, *when* the term is applied inappropriately, e.g. to mainstream science. But not when it’s applied appropriately, e.g. ‘CAGW narrative’ for the high certainty of imminent global catastrophe that political leaders constantly spout, per the post. Thanks too for the nice comment at Climate Etc 🙂 I replied briefly there.