[Vision2020] Bad Science

[Phil Nisbet]

Ted

I agree that I failed to completely clarify which was the source of the bad 
science in my first response on the subject, but I did correct that in my 
second one replying to John D.

You mention that Science is a well written and edited Journal of Science and 
for the most part you are correct.  But look at where the New York Times 
writer went wrong and you can see that the Science article was indeed 
wanting.

"Today's level of 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide is 27% above its 
previous peaks of about 300 ppm, according to the team led by Thomas Stocker 
of the University of Bern in Switzerland."

This does not make clear that the 300 ppm level is confined to data 
developed from the ice cores and only goes for the 650,000 years involved in 
that data set.  The writer of the Science piece would rightly assume that 
fellow scientist would know that that was the case, but should have thought 
that more than just scientists read Science in this day and age.  Adding in 
the core after about 300 ppm would have made the sentence clearer and 
probably made sure that the NYT reporter got it right.

How many of those in science ever take a tech writing class, let alone 
creative writing classes?  Those are skills we do need to communicate 
outside our fields, but they are really not required of us.  All I suggest 
is that we should consider the need.

Phil Nisbet

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