During one of my first visits to the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA), I was immediately corrected by ProfessorNiro Higuchi, a leading national reference in the Amazon rainforest, when I used the expression "climate change". "Don't use the plural. The correct term is 'climate change'," he taught. My first reaction was to think that it was all just unnecessary fuss. An excessive academic concern, certainly. But then I learned that this subtle difference carries an important message that makes all the difference.
The article by the geochemist Wallace Broecker, published in 1975 in the journal Science, entitledClimatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?, drew attention to a change in the Earth's system. The use of the expressionclimate changeIt uniquely reflected the thermodynamic and physical view of a transition from one climate equilibrium to another.
Wallace Smith Broecker(1931–2019) was one of the most influential geoquímicos and paleoclimatologists of the 20th century. Professor at Columbia University and researcher at the renowned.Lamont-Doherty Earth ObservatoryBroecker dedicated his career to unraveling the role of oceans in climate regulation, pioneering the concept of the Global Thermohaline Circulation (deep ocean currents) and demonstrating that the Earth's climate can undergo abrupt and nonlinear changes.
The 1975 article emerged during a period of intense debate and apparent scientific contradiction. Between the 1940s and the early 1970s, global meteorological records indicated a slight cooling of average surface temperatures. This temporary decline fueled speculation in the press and among some scientists about the imminence of a new glacial era, overshadowing concerns about carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.
Broecker demonstrated in the article that the observed cooling in the previous decades did not negate global warming but resulted from a combination of aerosol pollution and natural multidecadal cooling cycles, identified from Greenland ice core samples (Camp Century).
In the article, he argued that this natural cooling phase was masking the warming caused by the exponential increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂). Once this natural cycle reversed to a warming phase, the anthropogenic greenhouse effect would dominate the planet's thermal balance.
With remarkable accuracy, Broecker predicted that in the first decades after the turn of the 21st century, the planet would enter a trajectory of pronounced warming. In addition to his calculations, the article entered history for popularizing the termglobal warming(global warming), shifting the attention of the international community to the risks of human intervention in the global thermodynamic balance.
Conceptually, the term emerged in the singular.
When the issue gained prominence in the diplomatic arena in the late 1980s, the singular remained the norm in official documents. In 1988, the General Assembly of the UN approved Resolution 43/53, which had the title "Protection of the global climate for present and future generations." The resolution emphasized that the conservation of climate should be understood as an important legacy for future generations.Resolution 43/53, which had the title "Protection of the global climate for present and future generations." The resolution called attention to the fact that the conservation of climate should be understood as an important legacy for future generations.
Here, it is worth highlighting the difference betweentime and climateBoth Broecker's work and the UN resolution place climate as a central element. In a way, for most people, the daily experience expressed by the weather is much more relevant than the long-term understanding determined by climate…
While weather (weather) refers to the short-term atmospheric conditions and events that occur each day (such as rain, wind, and daily temperature fluctuations). Climate (climatedescribes the pattern and average behavior of these conditions in a specific region over a long period of time. Traditionally, climate is analyzed through 30-year averages (known as Climatological Normals). This long-term concept shapes the idea of a climate change pattern.
Following Resolution 43/53, the multilateral treaties of the Rio-92 consolidated the expression in the singular. As can be seen in the creation of theUnited Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC, in Portuguese: Convention-Quadro das Nações Unidas sobre a Mudança do Clima).
In English, the wordchangeof the expressionclimate changeis treated as an uncountable noun. The form in the plural,climate changes, sounds strange, non-idiomatic, and is rarely used in technical literature or in English-language media. On the other hand, in Romance languages, particularly Portuguese, the use of the plural has gained strength since the 1990s, driven by the dissemination of reports from theIPCC(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988).
This divergence between languages is fundamentally due to the grammatical and semantic characteristics of the Latin tradition. In Portuguese (climate change), Spanish (climate changesand French (climate changes, the derived noun from Latin is eminently countable. These languages have a natural tendency to pluralize abstract concepts in order to describe their practical, dynamic, and empirical manifestations.
Popularization of the plural
When UN and IPCC reports and documents began to be translated from English into Latin languages in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, translators and scientists naturally adopted the plural to signal that the phenomenon was not just a single temperature change, but rather a broad and interconnected set of disturbances (rainfall regimes, winds, extreme events, sea level).
Interestingly, strict diplomacy and international law opted to mirror the singular English form literally: for example, in the translation of the IPCC: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. However, outside this legal niche, the plural has become popular.
In Brazil, the transition and popularization of the plural "climate change" occurred significantly during the 2000s. Throughout the 1990s, public and governmental debate in the country was strongly conditioned by the diplomatic vocabulary inherited from Rio-92.
During this initial period, government circles, the Ministry of the Environment, and the Itamaraty diplomacy almost exclusively used the singular, mirroring the text of the UN Framework Convention. The topic still circulated within multilateral forums and specialized groups, where the focus was on the global radiative balance as a unique thermodynamic process.
The situation began to change when the debate spilled out of diplomatic offices and entered the editorial pages of major newspapers, socio-environmental NGOs, and multidisciplinary postgraduate programs. Major climatic events of the time, such as Hurricane Catarina in 2004 and the historic drought in the Amazon in 2005, combined with the impact of the release of the 4th IPCC Report (AR4) and the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2007, generated a media explosion. The Brazilian press and scientific dissemination adopted the plural "climate change" to translate the diversity of perceptible impacts in the daily lives of the population, such as droughts, floods, heat waves, and agricultural losses.
The institutionalization of the plural in the Brazilian scientific community became evident in the creation of major funding and research networks at the end of that decade. In 2007, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation structured theCLIMA Network(formalized as Brazilian Network of Research on Global Climate Change), and in 2008, FAPESP launched itsGlobal Climate Change Research Program.
From this point forward, the division that persists to this day in the country was established. The strictly legal and legal sphere maintained its singularity by tradition, as in Federal Law 12.187/2009, which established theNational Climate Change Policy (PNMC)The academic community (in general), the press, civil organizations, and the general public have consolidated "plural" as the spontaneous form of communication.
Why the expression in the singular is scientifically more correct
Here, I would like to defend the use of the term in the singular: climate change or climate change. It is essential to present the phenomenon as an integrated, systemic, and thermodynamically unified process, overcoming the perceptual fragmentation that the plural often induces.
From the perspective of the Earth system physics, what humanity faces is not a disconnected multiplicity of isolated climatic phenomena. But rather a global alteration of the planet's energy balance state. By using the singular, the structural and matrix nature of the problem is reinforced: the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere alters the infrared radiation retention, generating a continuous radiative imbalance.
The use of the plural (climate changes) tends to direct the cognitive and communicative focus to local and episodic consequences, such as droughts in a watershed, floods in another region, sea level rise, or seasonal temperature variations.
Although vital for risk assessment and loss mitigation, these events are empirical manifestations and symptoms of a single underlying cause. Addressing the macroprocess as a singular entity restores the primary causality and prevents public discourse from treating hydrological, meteorological, and thermal changes as parallel or disjointed crises.
The discussion between singular or plural, as I initially thought, is not merely academic rigor. Adopting the singular, therefore, confers rigor and clarity to the discourse. It establishes that we are observing a profound and singular transformation in the thermodynamics that sustains the Earth's biosphere.
Eric Bastos Gorgens is a CNPq Productivity Scholarship holder, coordinating and participating in research projects in the forestry area funded by CNPq and FAPEMIG.