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As
I never tire of telling the reporters at the newspaper where I work,
stay away from adverbs. They are the weakest type of word, but with the
power to alter meaning—often toward the inexact, if not the inaccurate.
Ditto for adjectives: they shade the words they modify, often in fun
ways, if you’re writing poetry or fiction. But unless you are a real
craftsman of the English tongue, they can often end up contributing to
misperceptions.
Unless, of course, it’s misperceptions you want.
Look at Andrew Revkin’s report
in Wednesday’s New York Times headlined “Bush Aide Edited Climate
Reports.” It reveals how Philip A. Cooney, the chief of staff for the
White House Council on Environmental Quality, took a red pen to
government scientific climate change reports in ways that played down
the links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
Mr.
Cooney, who formerly led the oil industry’s fight against the Kyoto
Treaty as a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute before joining
the administration, is no scientist, Revkin reported. But he did have
the authority to make dozens of changes to scientific reports, often
inserting adverbs and adjectives that shaded the reports to cast as
much doubt as possible on the link between GHGs and climate change. In
one report, for example, Cooney inserted the words “significant and
fundamental” before the word “uncertainties” surrounding the scientific
evidence of global warming. In another, Revkin reported, Cooney
“amplified the sense of uncertainty by adding the word ‘extremely’ to
this sentence: ‘The attribution of the causes of biological and
ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely
difficult.’”
The American Petroleum Institute has long promoted
the idea that the “significant and fundamental” uncertainties in
proving that humans are contributing to climate change justify not
taking action to curb carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions. But
apparently the Institute and the Bush administration both endorse the
pollution of climate change science by adverbial/adjectival emissions.
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