February 01, 2007

We accept cash


Breaking news: apparently an Exxon Mobil-funded thinktank has been offering $10,000 cash incentives for scientists to (as the Guardian puts it) ``emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)''. Hah! Thinktank guys, if you're reading this now, you came to the right place. We're not going to emphasize the shortcomings of the new report until we see the color of your money. But to show you the services that we at Language Log can offer, I randomly selected a previous report, Climate Change 2001: Working Group I: The Scientific Basis (eds. Houghton, J. T. et al., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001). I needed to read only as far as the end of the first paragraph of section 1.1.1 before I found a major shortcoming. Here's the offending sentence:

If one wishes to understand, detect and eventually predict the human influence on climate, one needs to understand the system that determines the climate of the Earth and of the processes that lead to climate change.

You see the problem. If the final conjunction is expanded, it becomes clear that the report is claiming one needs to understand the system that determines the climate [...] of the processes that lead to climate change. Complete nonsense. The rhetorical impact of the 2001 report is undermined by the presence of an extra preposition in its first paragraph. And we obviously can't trust the IPCC to prepare a balanced report on climate change when they can't even correctly balance a conjunction, right? As a consequence, we at Language Log feel the evidence for human induced climate change is not, in its current state, acceptable, and will continue to burn copies of Strunk and White, the ultimate fossil fuel, late into the night. Now send us the money.

Posted by David Beaver at February 1, 2007 09:42 PM