ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a look at the sociological issues of climate change and explores several of the current key aspects, such as the public reactions to environmental issues in general and the reasons for those reactionswhy 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, the shift in emphasis from the name 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. Because of that, for areas that were experiencing cooler temperatures or ¤ooding, the public was not making the connection that it was part of the same phenomenon. Therefore, scientists began to transition to the term climate change to make it more understandable that there was more involved to the issue than rising temperatures.
