There's an appallingly bad article (h/t ATTP) from Bloomberg entitled Inspiring Terms Are Simple. ‘Climate Change’ Isn’t; subtitled The doubters and believers aren’t even talking about the same thing; by Flim Flam. This is kinda kicked off by the recent rather confusing PR about Empirical evidence for stability of the 405-kiloyear Jupiter–Venus eccentricity cycle over hundreds of millions of years in PNAS. Which is a paper of almost no interest to the GW debate, as far as I can tell, because it's just about Milankovitch cycles over a longer timer period than usual. And yet because of the goldfish-like memories and knowledge of most writers in the meeja (the article doesn't even mention the M-word, so ignorant is it), it seems like news. Wooo! Jupiter influences the climate, who knew?And then, after all this confusion, the article complains about communication problems. Idiots. And I don't think that describing the Earth's orbit as more or less "oblong" is terribly helpful either.
The basic problem with GW-as-news is that there isn't really any news. It is the same problem this year as it was last year as the year before that as it will be next year. So journalistic efforts to spice it up inevitably lead to confusion.
Refs
* A Comparative Analysis of Data Derived from Orbiting MSU/AMSU Instruments, by R. Eric Swanson (remember him?).
No news is the same old blues again, as J.J. Cale might have said.
ReplyDeleteIn a conversation piece, Big Oil gets some stick for allegedly distorting climate change reality with tweaks in language
https://theconversation.com/how-big-oil-distorts-climate-change-reality-with-tweaks-in-language-95812
Seems plausible, and may explain the conundrum that FF companies both acknowledged climate science and spread denial of it at the same time, giving themselves plausible deniability. In line with modern morality.
There's some value to that kind of linguistic analysis, but it is slight. Dancing around the words doesn't touch the core problem.
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