I've been waiting for the new term, now we have it! Yeah!
As you note, whenever a term "loses traction" with the sheeple the fascists have to move on to something else, preferably something scarier.
I do think you missed a couple though. By my count we had:
- Global Warming. However, the computer models and predictions were all talking time frames of 100 years out or so. Hard to get anyone too excited or spur action with that. Sooo....
- Anthropomorphic Global Warming. Add a big scientific-sounding word to it to lend some credibility to your claims. Blame it on us, it is man-caused. Go for the guilt. This was actually getting traction until someone started to notice that there hadn't been any warming for over a decade. Gosh, shouldn't have let that un-altered data leak out. Soo...
- Climate Change. Since mother nature wasn't cooperating and warming, just go with climate change. That way anything that happens unusually warm, cool, calm, violent - we can blame it all on climate change.
- Rapid Climate Change. Well, since that didn't scare people enough to get traction let's add rapid to it and get some fringe scientists to abuse some computer models and come up with all kinds of ridiculously dire predictions. Sure, this smacks of a high-pressure used car salesman, but that's basically what they are so ...
- Climate Change. Unfortunately rapid climate change lost traction, well, rapidly when people started laughing at us. Too many people pointing out that "rapid climate change" is just "seasons" and "weather events." Let's coast back to climate change for now...
- Climate Disruption. And here we have it, the latest moniker. A rose by any other name still stinks like a scam but... Disruption is a nice scary word, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.
Fun stuff. This term may hang in there for a couple of years. That is until studies/data leak out that show the incidence rates of extreme weather are within historical statistical norms - in other words weather and climate are cruising along within measurement confidence intervals. That may take a year or two to sink in, but I'll bet they stick with "disruption" for a while just 'cause plain old climate change was so last-decade. They'd have never gone back to it if they hadn't gotten spanked so thoroughly over "rapid climate change."