[lukateake]

I feel that the usage of terms like “heat dome” and “polar vortex” obscure or distract from the human-centric causes of climate change. Lazy reasoning stops at these boogeyman terms. Welcome someone more familiar with linguistics to opine.

[drewcoo]

Those terms describe weather phenomena, not causes of those phenomena.

The terms are used by folks like NOAA, not just news trying to get ad eyeballs, so I think the accusation of "boogeyman terms" seems unfounded. They have no reason to mint scary terms.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/heat-dome.html

[jryb]

I don’t see that people will follow that line of thinking. i’ve never heard these terms until recently, and my instinct was to assume that they’re new phenomena (clearly naive, but that’s just the immediate gut reaction). and given that weather shouldn’t really have new concepts at this point, i just automatically linked them to climate change.