I meant that the terms are pretty much interchangeable . luckily layman ' s terms don ' t mean anything in science . That would be ridiculous from a scientific viewpoint , and if it were true climate change would have been debunked decades ago . it ' s still pretty controversial . An average global temperature rise over the last century has been recorded by many independent groups with many different measurements of many different thingsyeah , ' particularly , the United States , southern Canada , Europe and Japan ', and barely in ' South American and African continents and over Antarctica ' so all you can really say is that the temperature in the US , southern canada , some parts of Europe and Japan have gone up , all of which are heavily influenced by the sea , which is pretty random , it cools down and warms up constantly . and even if the average temperature had gone up , that doesn ' t mean much since ' climate change ' isn ' t a recent event , the climate is always changing , it ' s not something that ' s constant anyway .