Late 80s early 90s had research meetings with climatologists, yes they had PhDs. What they were saying then is that we had just gone through a relative low variability period regarding climate etc and were now entering back into more normal (higher) variability. Now if you understand statistics, estimating models, time series etc and you are using data to estimate future events where older data is lower variability new is higher variability then you know the estimate trend can be biased by the direction of the first high variability observations. Hence not long after the new thing was global warming. Now if you understand Fed funding RFP etc they like to put out their new year RFPs in a new focused area. Hence a lot of money to study Global Warming. Well what do all the researchers do ... they write proposals to research Global Warming. Then when we find out its more of a new variability issue everyone is changing to Climate Change and hence new RFPs and new research on CC.