I don't think anyone doubts that the term 'climate change' has been around for a long time. The point the author was making was that it seems to have become used more often in the past decade than before. But that's only a perception. It can't be proven one way or t'other although I think my link to Google Trends, in the absence of other data, carries some weight at least vis a vis Oz. The interesting question is why there was change from GW to CC around 2008 and my guess is that that was around the time when the general public started to become aware that world temps weren't doing what they were supposed to do.

Re Tol. I guess its pretty easy to go off and find some derogatory comments about this person or that and then present those as definitive. That is especially so as regards non-alarmists since making derogatory comments about them is the main form of argument used by alarmists.
But Tol can't be all bad. After all, we've now found out that one of the leading lights of the we're-all-gunna-die brigade has been passing Tol's work off as his own in order to gain kudos and taxpayer funding:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3863462/Exposed-university-helped-secure-9million-money-passing-rivals-research-bankroll-climate-change-agenda.html#ixzz4NtxXsjTi

Don, your confusion comes from your assumption that GW and CC are two names for the same thing. In fact, they are two nodes in a chain of causation.
Burning fossil fuels -> More GHGs -> GW -> CC -> economic disruption.
So it's not one or the other, it's both. Which term should be used depends on the focus of the discussion.

(It is further confused by GW not being quite the right term anyway; it should perhaps be Global Heating. E.g. if a block of ice warms by 1 degree, so slips into the sea and melts, the total heat content has gone up, but the average temperature has gone down.)

GW is predicted by the observation of increased GHGs and the known physics thereof.
GW as fact can be inferred from satellite observations that show more radiation coming in than going out.
Direct measure of GW is trickier, largely because of the huge heat buffer of the oceans, and the difficulty of monitoring extensively there and at high latitudes.

A small increase in global average temperatures can have dramatic effects on climate. Small ocean temperature changes cause El Ninos and La Ninas. A small increase in the global average will make some places quite a bit hotter, some cooler, some wetter, some drier. It will certainly increase the water content of the atmosphere, which is likely to cause more powerful cyclones.

Understanding these distinctions is crucial. In an Alaskan cold snap, Sarah Palin's confusion between GW and CC led to her anatomically ironic remark "Global Warming my gluteus maximus".

Actually mhaze, I don;t think Google Trends carries much weight at all. The Google Books ngram at least has what terms were used in texts by authors, so can track change and usage in popular media and literature.

However, Google Trends only looks at search term usage, so the higher the value, the more people were actually searching for that term at that time. The major peak you will see at March 2007 for global warming coincides with the release of the film The Great Global Warming Swindle. So one piece of popular media can have an immense effect that drowns out any actual popular usage of the term by scientists or politicians. And the USA introduces a very large bias when looking at world stats. Australian stats and usage don't really rate much, and both are pretty close to each other for most of the time. When you look at the trends for global warming as a film subject compared to climate change, worldwide, global warming has always outranked climate change and is only after 2008 has the gap really narrowed. But then again, it's searches for those terms as a film subject, so again biased by the films that are out there.

I prefer the book results myself, they look more consistent with writers attitudes and subjects in literature media forms rather than just public perceptions and interest on the internet. Climate change has always been the preferred term in print, so that also does not support the perception that things somehow changed after 2003 either way.

Perceptions are always just that and exceptionally biased in people who wan to believe them, data shows us that things are often different to your perceptions. Scientists are trained to look at data.

Jardine K,
you've got that backward. The deniers stick their fingers in their ears and SHOUT 'findings' from their favourite denialist echo-chambers, and the 'warmists' listen to the latest peer-reviewed science. Sometimes I might reply a little tersely to people like Peter Lang, but it's just because I'm tired of the childish attention seeking antics of denialist trolls. Some mornings I wake up and just can't handle thinking about the sheer stubbornness of denialist trolls ignoring science, every day and night. It must be exhausting!

I just didn't have the energy to explore his paper, and go ask the peer-reviewed community, and have them point out XYZ which has been dealt with 1000 times before, only to have Peter Lang turn around and change the subject without so much as blinking that he had quoted something completely rubbish and debunkable by REAL science... IF Peter had been bothered to look! He's a smart guy, and can google with the best of them. Why he doesn't bother to check what the peer-review circuit says is anyone's guess. Why you don't is anyone's guess. I don't know how one's personal politics trumps what peer-reviewed, empirical, testable, demonstrable physics says, but there's a LOT of TRUMPING going on in the world lately, even in American politics. (LOL!) So who knows WHY you choose to side with the anti-science? But you do. And sometimes I just decide I've got a life, and don't want to waste it researching the tired old cliche's of internet trolls.

Thanks, Don, for your comprehensive survey of the use of the terminology.

An important factor, which you do not mention, is that the IPCC defined “climate change” as being a change caused by human activity, the fraudulent intent being that the use of the term carried the implication that the change was human caused.
“n the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where climate change refers to a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/mains1.html
This was a big factor in adoption of the term “climate change”, because the IPCC have no science to support their baseless assertion that global warming is human caused.
The IPCC rely on scurrilous tricks like this to back up their blatant lies about human emissions affecting climate.

There is no science to show that human emissions have a measurable effect on climate.

"This was a big factor in adoption of the term “climate change”, because the IPCC have no science to support their baseless assertion that global warming is human caused."

No, no evidence at all.
That is, unless one is looking at the science. Then there's all the evidence in the world. But if you're a denialist, and you shout into the echo-chamber a few times a day, you might just convince yourself. Just shout "There's no place like home" 3 times and click your Ruby Slippers together, then just maybe, the big bad climate monster will stay away another day. You'll find comfort in your delusions one more night.

But those of us who respect science actually watch demonstrations like the following:

CO2's heat trapping ability:-
Mythbusters: 3 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRd5GT0v0I

Watch the candle at 90 seconds in! The candle heat demonstration only goes for a minute.
(The rest of the video is great, and demonstrates the accuracy of today's climate models).
http://climatecrocks.com/2009/07/25/this-years-model/