Here's an interesting post from the Oxford English Dictionary blog about the OED's history of climate-related words. You might think that "climate change" is fairly recent usage, but it goes back to 1854. Other terms are also discussed in the article.
In 2021, the OED embarked on a project to broaden and review its coverage of vocabulary relating to climate change and sustainability. I’d been feeding my own eco-anxiety by learning more about these topics for some years before I proposed that the OED conduct a review of its coverage. I knew that our New Words team had, over the course of the last 30 years or so, researched and covered a lot of the best-known terms, such as global warming and carbon offsetting, but this is a rapidly changing area of vocabulary. With the world spotlight coming to rest on the UK later this year at the UN climate summit in Glasgow (COP26), it is important to continue to monitor developments in this epoch-defining nexus of problems.
When OED editors are investigating the way a word or sense has been used over time, we look for examples of contextual and dateable evidence in our internal files and databases, as well as in external databases, websites, libraries, and archives.
We tend to think of climate change and sustainability as very contemporary issues, but what was interesting about researching some of the terms in this year’s update (as well as revisiting those we had already covered) was being able to put them into a historical perspective and seeing just how far back some ideas could be traced though the vocabulary, as a few examples will show.
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