The demand for apocalyptic climate brands is not near what it used to be.

Just because I was curious. Over the past twenty years, those trying to use AGW as a means to change political and economic systems away from traditional democratic capitalism towards centralized decision-making by statists have had to keep rebranding their proposition since the public remains unconvinced by every new forecast of "just ten years to save the world."

Think of it as a brand management issue. Demand is not near what you might desire. What branding works best?

Anthropogenic Global Warming?

Global Warming?

Climate Change?

or the most recent

Climate Crisis?

Hard to measure. One proxy might be the language of people's searches. If you accept that premise, we can use Google trends and see what language people are using to search and how that has changed over time.



Clearly AGW never took off and climate crisis has not caught on.

Global Warming seemed to work for the first decade of data but has given way to climate change since then. Probably owing to the lack of clear cut evidence that the forecasted warming has occurred in the fashion predicted. Climate change is much easier to defend than global warming because climate change has been the default condition over the entire histroy of the planet.

That tells us about the brand. But the same graph shows us the public concern about climate change peaked circa 2010 and is about 20% of what it was at its peak in April 2007.

OK, how does concern about climate change compare to more quotidian concerns? Healthcare, unemployment, stock market?



About 4% of attention in comparison of those practical concerns. So it remains on the cognitive radar screen, but pretty far behind more concrete and immediate concerns.

But now we have a category error, comparing near term, concrete issues to a distant, strategic issue. How about Family, International Relations, Religion, and Environment? Those seem suitably abstract and long term.



Obviously family swamps everything at 92% of searches. But environment swamps climate change even though it feels like the entire conversation is about climate change and not the environment.

Many claim that a belief in climate change is the secular equivalent for atheists of religion for everyone else. Even something as abstract as religion swamps climate change (5:2).

And yes, Americans are as insular as foreigners claim with international relations representing less than 1% of searches.

If I were a brand manager for the climate alarmists, I would lay off the feat tactics and focus on how I could link climate change to family.