I love a good cynical take as much as the next HN reader, but as a researcher working in the environmental/climate space many of us are using these words because the are true. Sure there are some folks I consider full of buzzwords and light on substance but I think it's warranted for scientists to make "inflated" claims to get their research noticed. Yes, there are structural problems in academia and research funding that do need to be fixed, but I'm not sure this shift in language is completely a symptom of it. People are actually dying out there and we are pleading to get funding to try to help.
> but I think it's warranted for scientists to make "inflated" claims to get their research noticed.
Researchers are scientists, not marketing-people. If you really want to impact policy, go into politics. Otherwise it's an authoritarian twist on what democracy is
What you are doing by makign a random list of events is even a travesty of science. How do these events compare to the past.
How do you attribute causality in each of these cases? Just because you know there is a "force" doesn't mean you know the extent to which that force influenced these outcomes, as there have always been extreme weather events.
In prior years I heard a big emphasis on climate vs weather, to inform the public that just because they had a cold winter, doesn't mean that the earth itself is cooling. It's a longer term trend, and it's hard to attribute individual events to it. I think that's the correct and nuanced view.
The view I have seen most recently in the media is "every extreme weather event that supports is evidence of long term climate change, every one that does not is short term weather". Are you promoting that view?
I am a colleague, and IMHO in our community people uses "transformation" very often without any real transformational substance. It would be nice to connect! (mail in about)
Researchers are scientists, not marketing-people. If you really want to impact policy, go into politics. Otherwise it's an authoritarian twist on what democracy is
What you are doing by makign a random list of events is even a travesty of science. How do these events compare to the past.