Electroverse has a piece which is well worth a look. The core of it comes from two impressively blatant Center for Biological Diversity headlines.
“Now, climate scientists say the Arctic could be completely ice free in the summer by 2012.”
– Center for Biological Diversity 2009
“Now climate scientists say the Arctic could be completely ice free in the summer by the 2030s.”
“Now climate scientists say the Arctic could be completely ice free in the summer by the 2030s.”
– Center for Biological Diversity 2023
4 comments:
Now he's revealed this, someone somewhere will be working on a bot that can supervise and coordinate the work of the other bots, so they don't give the game away.
Sam - sounds more than plausible to me, although the coordinating bot could go into permanent stall mode because it can't tell the other bots to risk any predictions at all. They could end up leaving it to the usual suspects.
My spidey senses are now alerted by the inclusion of words like 'could', 'may', and 'forecast'. Strangely there is rarely any quantifier of risk or probability included in articles available for the public, even if there was a credible one in the original scientific research.
How many times have you read about forecast bad weather (snow blanketing Britain, floods halting transport) to find that there is only a chance of bad weather and only snow in bits of Scotland and floods only in specific low lying flood plains?
I know we like certainty, I know journalists write to catch our attention, but an endless litany of catastrophe which doesn't deliver worries us without proper cause. It's readership abuse.
DJ - I'm alerted by 'could', 'may', and 'forecast' too, especially 'could'. I have a post about it ready to go, but it is easy to see why the media use it so often. So useful for churning out stories which aren't untrue but need a boost to make them interesting.
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