Decoding the Climate: Between Science and Sensationalism

Climate change is among the most contested subjects of our time, and yet the terms in which it is publicly debated frequently bear little resemblance to the actual state of scientific knowledge. A penetrating new study by atmospheric physicist D. Alastair Fenwick sets out to map the full (17) .......... of this debate with a rigour that popular commentary has consistently failed to supply. Fenwick is particularly alarmed by the extent to which ordinary citizens have been (18) .......... , nudged by the rhetoric of (19) .......... and by a media culture that privileges alarm over nuance. His central ambition is to establish that climate change is an (20) .......... complex phenomenon, and that reductive (21) .......... — however well-intentioned — will ultimately (22) .......... rather than sharpen collective understanding. To this end, he (23) .......... returns to the limitations of the meteorological record: its brevity, its incompleteness, and the methodological difficulties involved in comparing data across different eras and instruments. What distinguishes contemporary observations from everything that preceded them, he argues, is not their magnitude but the (24) .......... detail with which they have been captured.