The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. — George Orwell
Nature Climate Change is a monthly magazine that is devoted to supporting the idea that we face a man-caused climate disaster that will surface at some future date. The magazine presents itself as if it is a scientific journal. But scientific journals, real scientific journals, don’t fill their pages with advocacy for a single point of view.
The April 2017 issue of Nature Climate Change carries a commentary: The food-energy-water nexus and urban complexity. The title is an indication of things to come. “food-energy-water” is abbreviated as “FEW.” Obviously, people need food, energy and water. But, why are these grouped together? People need lots of other things, for example: police, transportation, housing, and education. Is water a more urgent problem than, say, education? Some people think so. When I lived in Chicago there were true believers wandering on Michigan Avenue, proselytizing for the supposed future global warming-caused water crisis. This a few blocks from one of the great fresh-water inland seas of the world. These true believers were, no doubt, less interested in the education crisis represented by the failing public schools of Chicago.
According to the article:
“The world’s FEW systems are significantly stressed and already experiencing shortfalls due to their interactions with global anthropogenic processes such as urbanization and climate change”
Okay — urbanization, the migration of poor rural people to cities, is an anthropogenic process. In fact, everything that people and societies do is an anthropogenic (man-caused) process. Urbanization in the U.S. was largely finished by the 50s and instead we had migration out of the cities to the suburbs. But, is “climate change” a man-caused process? Not unless you believe that carbon dioxide is the great controller of the Earth’s climate.
The authors explain some of their thinking with this quote:
“National and human security approaches illuminate contrasting aspects of FEW security and their epistemological and ontological differences lead to differing proposed response options, and can hinder communication and incorporation of insights and lessons across disciplines. These differences need to be carefully elicited to avoid the risk of theoretical and practical incompatibility of inconsistency.”
I have tried to translate this into plain English, but it defies a translation that makes sense.
When the authors occasionally descend into the real world, they appear to embrace conspiracy and be badly misinformed:
“While the energy security of consumers would benefit more from distributed [solar] installations, utilities and their investors have supported regulations, business plans, and technology designs that favor industrialized, large-scale plants managed by a few.”
