In the Economist, bulwark of smart and anonymous reporting, one finds a piece recently with one particularly brilliant, clarifying paragraph. Whoever wrote it should get a few pints bought him or her by mates at the pub for putting things this way.
The topic is the storms that are blowing through the political science of climate change science and whether said science is now discredited – or will go on pretty much as it has because of deep robustness and no matter what the skeptic bloggers and other opportunists say.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to phrase the issue myself. The simile I’d halfway developed is pretty awkward. It is that climate science isn’t like discovering that one’s neighbor, who does so many things so well and keeps the place tidy and watches your cat for you, is suddenly unfit for human society because he or she years ago, uh, lied about his military service record to get elected or something like that. Rather, climate science is a collective of great and merely mediocre individual scientists who interact and self correct, not perfectly, but well enough that if most of them say we are in deep trouble on the atmospheric carbon and GHG front generally then we would be smart to do something about it. But I could not boil it down.
This guy or gal did. Maybe it’s not original, but it sure works. The key is in graf 4 (no secret either, if you read the hed up there.) Tip of the hat to Seth B. at the AP for noticing the piece and sending a note.
Addendum: I just noticed that a “pieces of the puzzle” metaphor comes up today at Dot Earth in a post by Andy Revkin on the same topic. The post is quite an enterprising one on its own, with or without attention to specific turns of phrase.
– Charlie Petit
Leave a Reply