Fox News has often claimed that “liberals” stopped using the term “global warming” in favor of the term “climate change” because the planet is no longer warming. Fox News' The Five, for instance, celebrated Earth Day 2013 by trotting out this talking point to deny global warming - even though 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record and each of the 12 hottest years on record have come in the last 15 years. In reality, it was Republican consultant Frank Luntz -- now a Fox News contributor -- who advised Republicans in a 2002 memo to use the term “climate change” because "'climate change' is less frightening than 'global warming.'"

The term “climate change” was used long before Luntz's memo, particularly in the scientific literature. For instance, a 1970 paper published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was titled “Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change” and discussed how emissions of carbon dioxide warm the atmosphere.

Scientists use “global warming” when speaking about the increase in average global surface temperatures. They use “climate change” to refer to all the other disruptions that greenhouse gas emissions are causing -- from rising sea levels, to abruptly changing precipitation patterns that increase the likelihood of droughts and wildfires in certain areas and extreme flooding in others, to acidifying oceans that disturb the marine food web.

John Kerr created the video in this report.