The problem is
that there aren't that many 'clever' people among newspaper readership. So if you presented the facts in a scientific manner, hardly anyone would understand it properly, and there would be complaints that scientists were using fancy language to hide the truth.

I'm a scientist myself, but climate science is not my field, and I'd struggle to understand all of the science behind global warming. It's a hellishly complex problem. One problem is that scientists can only work with the data they have, but they haven't got enough accurate temperature data over a long enough period to do proper extrapolation. Therefore the errors in the models are large (although becoming smaller) and so at either side of the mean there's going to be a big deviation.

Climate changer deniers will immediately latch onto a stray result which says the earth is going to cool by 2°C in the next 100 years, because in some circumstances a model will output such a result due to the errors in prediction.

Remember it's a statistical prediction. And statistics are bollocks if read incorrectly. Concorde was for many years the safest aircraft type in the sky. Then one day, one of them crashed. And immediately it became the most dangerous aircraft type.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Wed 2 Dec 2009, 8:33, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

And similarly, when the Telegraph reported
a "50% rise in the risk of heart conditions if you used ibuprofen," what they actually meant was that one year, 4 people in 100-or-so had suffered heart complications, and it was 6 people the following year. Twats.
(LongJohnBaldry, Wed 2 Dec 2009, 10:52, Reply)