Andrew Revkin

But those papers don't get any attention in the media because- They're not scary.

They're not scary and they're sort of after the fact.

Just this past year, there's been this cycle around collapse, the word collapse, and Antarctic ice.

It started actually several years ago with the idea that the West Antarctic ice sheet is particularly vulnerable.

And some paper, everyone, the science community, like the birds, we were talking about flocks to it, and some high-profile papers are written.

And then a deeper inquiry reveals, you know, it's more complicated than that.

And we, the journalists, the media, pundits, don't pay attention to that stuff.

And actually...

which is why I started to develop kind of a dictionary.

I call it watch words, like words to, if you're out there, you're just a public person, you wanna know what's really going on.

You hear these words like collapse in the context of ice.

What do you do with that?

And so I've created conversations around these words.

Geologists and ice scientists use the word collapse.

They're talking about a centuries long process.

They're not talking about the World Trade Center.

Scientists would do well to be more careful with words like that.

Unless your focus is what we were saying earlier, your idea that alarming people will spur them to act, then you use that word carelessly.

And there's a young scientist at Carnegie Mellon, Destiny Nock.

She just was the lead author on a study.