Mea Culpa: The imprecise science of the melting Antarctic ice-cap

Plus an alarming – even shocking – trend in The Independent’s usage this week

The Totten Glacier in eastern Antarctica PA

“Unstable Antarctic glacier could cause seas to rise by three metres,” we reported on Wednesday. It was a report supplied by the Press Association, an agency whose reporters are trained to be precise. But we should have simplified some of the information to make things easier for the reader.

We did not need to say, in brackets, in the first paragraph, that three metres is 9.8ft. One, because 9.8ft is 9ft 10in. Two, because the study estimated a sea-level rise of “up to” 2.9 metres. Which is 9ft 6in (or 9.5ft if you do not know how many inches there are in a foot, in which case we are wasting our time converting this stuff anyway). Three, because most people know what a metre is. And four, because, as the “up to” suggests, the figure is a rough estimate. The headline got it right: “Three metres.”

Nor did we need, in saying how far the Totten Glacier might retreat, to translate “up to 300 kilometres” as “186.4 miles”. Again, it is an approximate figure, so the conversion does not need to be to one decimal place: “190 miles” would have been enough.

Fortunately, the report did also say “the whole process might take several hundred years”.

Early Eighties fashion: In a review of a film called Everybody Wants Some!! on Tuesday we said that Richard Linklater, the director, had recreated the world of the early Eighties in “loving detail” (a cliché, but let it pass): “He pays exhaustive attention to everything from the haircuts to the cars, from the t-shirts to the sideburns, from the discos to the old computer games.”

That should have been T-shirts. They are so-called because they are in the shape of a capital T. The lower-case letter introduces a sideways tail that would be an interesting fashion statement but I can confirm that it was unknown in the early Eighties.

Logic chopping: “And/or” is an ungainly usage that I think it is worth trying to avoid. It looks a bit like a programming term in a line of computer code. We used it on Wednesday in a comment about the employment figures: “It may turn out this is a pause, with hiring slowing because of the introduction of the living wage and/or fears about Brexit.” It would have been easy to rewrite this as “...the introduction of the living wage, or fears about Brexit, or both.”

Alarming trend: Here is a concerning problem concerning “concerning”. The spread of the word as a synonym for “worrying” has reached The Independent. On Wednesday, in a report that Queensland, Australia, is to scrap the “gay panic” law that allows a lesser sentence if a murderer claims to have been propositioned, we said: “Father Kelly said the ‘leisurely pace’ of authorities to abolish the law was concerning.” (We meant, incidentally, “in abolishing...”)

And on Thursday, in a report on using classical music to help students revise for exams, we said: “New figures released by ChildLine showed a concerning rise in the number of young people seeking help for stress.”

One problem is ambiguity, in that the reader has to think if “concerning” means “about”. But the other is that it is a euphemism, which seems designed to diminish the anxiety, a bit like downgrading a “problem” to an “issue”. I know journalists are sometimes mocked for their tendency to dramatise, but if something really is worrying, let us say so, or that it is alarming or even shocking.