ROBIN WEBSTER: I am as guilty as any, having worked as a sort of techie professional in this for a long time of writing those sentences that go "By 2050, the trajectory of the curve will be movement this and carbon capture and storage," these paragraphs that just mean nothing to nobody. And they are about things which are far away in time, far away in place. We were using these words like ‘sustainability’ and ‘trajectory’ and ‘parts per million’. And I was like, what on earth is this language? It doesn't say anything.
HZ: ‘Parts per million’: that's the stuff to get people up and ready for action.
ROBIN WEBSTER: 450 parts per million, let's go!
Allusionist 80. Warm Front - transcript
NATE BYRNE: One of the things I find really strange when it comes to the weather is that we're all experts and all idiots at the same time.
HZ: You’re supposed to be the expert though.
NATE BYRNE: Right. Yeah! But I mean, we all live in it every day and we all feel like we understand the weather really well and we hear weather reports every single day. Now, if you are practicing a skill every day, on average you're generally excellent at it; that’s a real strength of yours. But it turns out that meteorologists typically haven't been very good at telling people what it is they're trying to tell them. So showers, just for example, means the rain's going to start and stop and start and stop; it doesn't tell you anything about the volume. Rain means it's just going to be continuous, and again doesn't tell you anything about the volume; but we have built, somehow, cultural expectations and understandings that go with those words that the scientists don't actually mean when they're using those words and it makes a really tricky job.
